Imagine a violinist moving his bow dexterously on the strings, as lightly as a feather levitating in the air, and producing a sonorous sound. Imagine, also, the violinist’s student receiving the cadence of his music with equal diligence. This harmony reflects a relationship between a teacher and a student. When this harmony is fractured, something is seriously wrong with culture at large.

A violinist once told me how a Western family that took lessons from him did not pay him, claiming that he had never taught them. His story hit home for me. We hear stories of unpaid Nepali labourers in West Asia. We hear stories of unpaid doctors in Nepali hospitals. And we hear stories of unpaid teachers in Nepali colleges. The violinist, once he had told me the story of failing to receive payment, laughed it off. But the story left me disturbed. Suddenly, a student invited me to a Teachers’ Day evening last week to honour us. I was unwilling to go for no reason in particular.

It doesn’t matter which country or culture the student’s family that denied payment to the violin teacher belonged to. Rather, it concerns how we behave with teachers in general. There are many such instances of considering teachers in hierarchical terms. What matters is now how the teachers are not paid but how they are demeaned.

There is a range of habitations where teachers are found. They are found in universities, with weather-beaten wisdom; in private professional spaces as they take tuitions; and on the road, speeding on their bikes as they hurry to their destinations. These teachers can be philosophers, artists, linguists, musicians and yoga trainers. The problem is that they are easily available in our part of the world and are affordable for locals and foreigners both. Call them at your will, and they are ready to teach you lessons in violin, language—anything.

This very availability of the teachers differentiates the teacher-student relationship from the parent-child relationship. Parents constantly see how children grow and prepare for the deeds of the future. The teacher arrives only at particular moments of the student’s growth, plucks the strings of the violin, fixes the instrument, gets angry, turns happy, and disappears in the service of another student. The teacher generally does not live long with the disciple as the parents do with the child. I am not talking about bad parents and teachers nor about the ideal parents and teachers either. I am simply talking about the teacher who tries to “dry the rain” on a student's “storm-beaten face”, borrowing from a Shakespearean sonnet.

Demeaning a teacher is a grave cultural disharmony. My violin teacher plays Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” with his brilliant bow movement and firm fingers on the strings. He plays to teach the students not to woo him or her. The students are the teacher’s audience; the children are the parents’ legacy. The ethics of the audience for a teacher is to give continuity to the desires of legacy. If the students do not know the ethics of the audience, the teacher leaves them. The teacher does not have the time to woo and court the students. Wooing and courting is the duty of the parents. When I was Professor Abhi Subedi’s student—I still am—he told me a teacher should not aim to please his students. He meant that the job of pleasing should be left to politicians in an electoral democracy.

Edward Said writes in Music at the Limits that the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould retired from live performances in the sixties because he found the “distorting effect of the audience on his playing”. Gould felt he had to keep wooing the audience with their taste irrespective of what the music demanded, according to Said. Without wooing the audience's taste, the musician or the teacher risks being “unpaid”. I am using the word “unpaid” in a wider sense, suggesting “unrewarded” or “not entertained”, hence “disrespected”.

There is another pop cultural problem with the audience. A five-year-old girl in an Indian television dance reality show performed a well-choreographed move on a sexually suggestive song and received a huge round of applause. A sensitive “judge” asked the parents why they had allowed this song to be played for the girl who did not understand its connotations. The parents nervously answered that this was what the audience demanded. Gould and the judge were performing the ideas of a teacher.

All these instances are about the audience in general. The nature of the audience is not bad per se. By turns, I am a teacher and student, a teacher and an audience. There are thousands of students who immensely respect and love me. My concern is about the parents—the kinds that cheated the violinist. Such parents snap the cord between the teacher and the student.

In many South Asian and Hollywood pop cultural films, a teacher is often presented as a funny, stupid character mocked by students. The students throw objects when he or she scribbles on the board. Such images may have been used to give comic relief to the audience, but they seep into our behavioural psyche, forcing us to think of a teacher as a stupid being. We internalise the teacher as a person to be made fun of. The best gratification that follows the fun is to leave the teacher unpaid.

There's also an economic dimension to paying less or not paying at all. In a country like Nepal, you get a teacher with minimal investment for one of the most significant creative jobs in society. The teacher falls prey to the minimal investment because you get the surplus value without involving in the labour. Whatever is reproduced is the student, who adds to the capital in the family. Your guilt has to be concealed by not paying the teacher and making fun of him. Yet the values of the teacher continue with reverence.

"Who's your hero?" Former Indian president APJ Abdul Kamal was asked during a lecture in Kathmandu a decade-and-a-half ago.

Kalam was pensive for a moment, and then his eyes illuminated. “My high school teacher,” he said.