By Dr. K. Javeed Nayeem, MD
The eighteenth century poet William Blake in his poem ‘The Tyger’ has extolled the terrifying but mesmerising majesty and power that a tiger exudes. He marvels over how God himself must have felt amazed and mesmerised by this majesty and grace after creating the king of beasts. This poem which has been considered as one the world’s most anthologised poems and also Blake’s most famous work was included in the poetry that we had to study in our PUC days and Prof. M.S. Krishna Rao, our English professor at the St. Philomena’s College made a very deep and lasting impression of his own prowess as a capable teacher on our young minds when he chose to annotate this poem in his very first class. This brief session made me a very devoted disciple and ardent admirer of this very humble and soft-spoken man, always clad in a dark suit, who however never hesitated to put his foot down when it came to standing for his principles and ideals. I have still preserved my class test papers that he has corrected wherein he has under-lined in red ink the word ‘coming’ which I had written with a double ‘m’. Since he knew from my father who was his college-mate and friend that I was aspiring to become a doctor he told me in his next class that the word ‘coming’ has just one ‘m’ in it irrespective of how fast I was coming and the word ‘vomiting’ had only one ‘m’ in it irrespective of how severe the problem was!
