Hyderabad, Sept. 5 -- It is Teachers' Day in India, and we are reminded of the big space teachers occupy in our lives; whether we acknowledge it or not is another matter. But the teachers we celebrate in real life are not quite the ones we have learnt to recognise in mainstream Hindi cinema. Bollywood, interestingly, has often turned them into outsized characters. They're either saints, saviours, eccentrics, or plain tyrants: all memorable in their own way, but rarely familiar. There have been exceptions, of course, and those exceptions are perhaps revealing precisely because of how unusual they feel. Actually, there are so few 'types' of teachers we see in Hindi movies that I have created broad categories for them:

The Eccentric & the B...