The morning began with a note on my desk: Happy Teacher’s Day. Beside it, a bar of chocolate.
Instinctively, I smirked—and if I’m being honest, I was pleased. A moment later, the familiar parasite of impostor syndrome climbed onto my shoulder. Teacher? Me?
What kind of self-branding had I done to deserve this?
There’s a chapter of my career I never put on a résumé. Long before strategy decks and film scripts, I was a tuition teacher wrangling restless 9th and 10th graders through math and science. Later, a programming instructor, trying to make Unix and web development sound less like ancient runes. Then a guide for writers and filmmakers, and occasionally, an off-the-grid coach whispering philosophy, poetry, and life’s crooked wisdom in the ears of anyone who asked.
But none of these roles ever felt permanent. They were costumes I wore because the scene demanded it. Necessary, but never the whole character.
Meanwhile, my own teachers never knew I existed. Kipling, Bukowski, Kubrick, Lynch, Dalí, Kaufman, Russell, Sartre, Camus, Krishnamurti. They were never in the same room, never gave me assignments, never handed me chocolates. And yet, they schooled me more brutally and more brilliantly than any classroom could.
That’s when it struck me. In the grand bazaar of learning, there are only two real forces: self-learning and the rare Master. Everything else is carnival noise.
The first thing worth stripping away is the noise. Take any trending topic out there—from passive income to content creation, to social hacks. There’s a Coach for that online. Then there’s the Life Coach: essentially a paid echo chamber, validating struggles without providing tools to transcend them. Just reassurance under the veil of coaching. And all of this comes with a price tag.
Today, anyone with inflated confidence calls themselves a “coach.” All one needs is a WiFi connection, Canva account, and most importantly, ring lights. They preach about productivity, positivity, prosperity. All the buzzwords doomscrollers are looking for.
And yes, it’s tempting. The booming economy of advice looks convincing enough to make you believe you need a shepherd at every crossroad. But it’s not wisdom—it’s packaging. Loud, repeatable, marketable packaging.
Real learning doesn’t arrive through someone else’s LinkedIn carousel. It arrives in silence, when you’re stuck alone with your hunger to know.
Think about it. Has the one you call Coach or Mentor spent a lifetime mastering the lessons they’re imparting, or is it just a couple years of experience? Then ask yourself this simple question: How many times in your lifetime have your views of life and the world changed?
Now imagine a coach who tells you not to sell yourself, just be yourself. And you follow it. Then after five years, the coach’s point of view changes. Now, the same coach tells you—if you’re getting into business, selling is part of the game. What do you do? Sway with the coach or acknowledge that what they’re imparting is just opinions packaged as lessons?
You can see these patterns everywhere around you. From social media hacks to new trends in branding, to what is marketing and so on. And if you’re observant enough, you’d know that while the coaches are different, the study material seems to be coming from the same printing house.
Then there are institutions that happily give away certificates as long as you’ve paid the fees. It doesn’t matter if you put in time to download and study the material. It doesn’t matter if you learned anything from it. A quiz can determine if you’ve cleared 50% marks and a certificate will be issued.
Somewhere in the chaos of making teaching a booming economy, I believe what got lost was that the product—or rather service—was to impart knowledge and wisdom.
The bond between the teacher and the student faded and in its place what was left was a transaction between a seller and buyer.
But let’s pause here and ask, how did this one-person business turn into an economy the market is taking notice of? Perhaps because there are so many learners and seekers out there.
I believe, irrespective of our ambitions, we are all seeking knowledge and wisdom. It’s the only way we know to live. To constantly evolve. It’s in our DNA.
So, yes, the market for learners is enormous. It’s as big as the population on the planet.
But not every market gets what it deserves. When it comes to knowledge and wisdom, the only effective, independent form of learning is self-learning.
There’s an old story that captures this perfectly. The story of Eklavya in the Mahabharata. I used to wonder why that character would have been introduced given the main storyline was about good vs evil and he plays a tiny part in the grand scheme.
But the Mahabharata wasn’t just a story about good vs evil. It was a reflection of life. And in any story attempting a reflection of life, learning couldn’t be ignored.
So, Eklavya could have been a tertiary character in the main story, but he served the theme of the grand story. That you do not need a master to become one.
In my opinion, until we find our Dronacharya and get an opportunity to become Arjuna, we should all aspire to be Eklavya.
Self-learning is the real engine of growth. No applause, no guidance, no shortcuts. Just you, the material, and the stubborn refusal to stop until the fog clears. You don’t wait for validation; you create your own exam, you set your own syllabus.
When you’re on that path, the dependency is zero. The act of chasing, failing, retrying—that becomes your tutor. That freedom makes you dangerous, because nobody can dictate when your education ends.
And history is full of such dangerous independents.
Srinivasa Ramanujan, during colonial India, filled notebook after notebook with mathematical theorems, with no formal training. Just pure hunger to understand numbers.
Michael Faraday was a bookbinder’s assistant when he devoured the very books he was supposed to bind, teaching himself the science that would make him one of history’s greatest experimental physicists.
Van Gogh never saw the inside of an art school. He taught himself by copying prints and relentless experimentation. Frida Kahlo, after her bus accident, taught herself to paint during recovery, often using a mirror above her bed, forging a surreal-folk style entirely her own.
Basquiat emerged from graffiti culture, self-educating himself in art history by haunting libraries and museums, cracking open the high-art world without following its formal pipelines.
Jimi Hendrix couldn’t read music. He taught himself guitar by listening and playing obsessively, reinventing technique from pure instinct. Prince played 27 instruments, nearly all self-taught, layering sound upon sound in his studio recordings without formal training.
Stanley Kubrick never went to film school. He started as a photographer, then obsessively studied cameras and lenses through pure experimentation. Quentin Tarantino’s film education happened at a video store, watching movies maniacally until he absorbed the language of cinema.
None of them waited for a coach. They were their own syllabus.
And there’s no limit to the knowledge and wisdom you can gain, once you convince yourself that you need no teacher to show you the path. You are enough.
You can explore the depth of the ocean, traverse through the forests, and soar beyond the clouds all at your pace and if you refuse to give up, eventually, before you even realize, you become the one you have been seeking—the Master.
That’s what a master is. One who has spent a lifetime learning what they’re preaching. Life is so volatile, anyone with a few years of experience cannot possibly claim that’s what life is all about.
Teaching isn’t a talent one is born with. Teaching is a product of hard-earned life experiences. That’s the only reason why, while the world is full of learners, there are just a handful of Masters.
Simply, because a Master by definition cannot be a teenager who started early in life and got success with one Instagram account or YouTube channel. Or an entrepreneur who after a couple failed ventures managed to turn a couple ventures into successes.
A Master is always a reluctant one. For only they understand that all their teaching are just pointers and guidelines, not commandments. A master never claims their knowledge is definite. They always claim their ignorance and the possibility of things being entirely different and beyond what they know.
Perhaps that’s why a Master is never good at self-branding. They’re not seeking monthly subscriptions or a soaring YoY growth of their coaching classes.
A real sign of a Master would be one who refuses the student, until the student’s persistence wins them over.
And history has shown what happens when such rare bonds form.
When G.H. Hardy found Ramanujan, Hardy didn’t teach Ramanujan mathematics—Ramanujan already had the genius. Instead, Hardy gave him the formal language to communicate his brilliance to the world. That’s initiation, not instruction.
When Beethoven took on students, they weren’t just learning scales—they were absorbing his way of hearing music, something no sheet music could convey.
Bruce Lee’s students didn’t just learn fighting techniques; they were inducted into his philosophy of fluidity and adaptability.
Richard Feynman didn’t just teach physics equations. Those who studied under him say he taught them how to think in physics—a mental framework that textbooks couldn’t provide. When Ferran Adrià took on apprentices, they weren’t just learning recipes; they were being initiated into a complete worldview of taste and experimentation.
Wittgenstein didn’t just teach his Cambridge students about language and logic—he initiated them into a radical method of dismantling assumptions about how we think. Students like Norman Malcolm described it not as learning theories, but as having their entire framework of thought reconstructed. What Wittgenstein transmitted was a way of questioning that could be applied to any philosophical problem, not just answers to specific questions.
Socrates wrote nothing, owned nothing, yet founded an entire tradition. What he passed to Plato wasn’t a doctrine but a method—the art of questioning that could expose the emptiness of false certainty. Through Plato’s dialogues, that same initiation continues today.
When the Master takes on the student as a prodigy, knowledge is imparted with wisdom. And this is not knowledge that can be contained in books, videos or social media posts. This is knowledge that can only be passed on through initiation. Like the spark of a candle, being passed on to another. The same flame the master had burned in, becomes the guiding light for the student in the dark.
Sometimes you run alone in the dark, setting your own course like Eklavya or Van Gogh. Other times, if you’re lucky, someone hands you a torch—a Hardy, a Socrates, a Feynman—and for a brief stretch, you run in their light.
But the torch is never the point. The running is. The hunger is. Because whether you stumble into a Master or spend your life self-teaching, the responsibility is the same: to keep learning until your own flame is strong enough that someone else might steal a little light from it.
In a world drowning in coaches and courses, maybe the most honest thing we can offer each other is this: the admission that we’re all still learning. That wisdom isn’t a product to be packaged and sold, but a flame that passes naturally between those genuinely seeking it.
The real teachers—whether they’re long-dead authors whose books line our shelves, or the rare living Masters who reluctantly accept students—they all point to the same truth: the answers you’re looking for can’t be bought. They have to be lived.
Maybe that’s all “being a teacher” ever means. Not branding, not a certificate, not a title. Just the quiet transfer of fire, one stubborn learner to another.
And if you never find your Master, remember this—you’ve been studying under the greatest teacher of all your entire life.
Life itself doesn’t charge subscription fees. It doesn’t promise quick fixes or guarantee results. It just presents you with problems, heartbreaks, and mysteries, and then waits to see what you’ll do with them.
Every sunrise is a new lesson. Every mistake, a curriculum. Every triumph and tragedy, a chapter in your education.
So, do not dwell on who’s going to teach you. Instead ask yourself: are you willing to be taught?