Akbar Kakkattil. File photoIn the history of Malayalam literature, Akbar Kakkattil's place will be right next to Karoor Neelakanda Pillai, for whom the life of teacher was a fount of creativity.
Like Karoor, Akbar Kakkattil considered teaching as a means of self expression. Though there are many who are into teaching and writing at the same time, Akbar was a rare kind. For him, the boundary between both was blurred, if not nonexistent.
Read: Malayalam author Akbar Kakkattil passes away
No one would have written as much on schools, teachers and children as Akbar did in Malayalam. His profession was his key to creativity. Unlike many who consider the profession as a fallback career, teaching was a vocation to Akbar. He looked at it from all angles, mainly from the perspective of the kids who fall victims to today's mechanised style of learning. For him, school was not a mere building, but an emotional being.
Even as he worked as a teacher, Akbar never believed in the so-called hierarchy in schools. With satire laced in irony, he would call teachers vaarppinte panikkar - construction workers - since they were 'constructing' a generation. Fiction was not his lone medium. He very well knew that the life at a school was sometimes more entertaining than fiction. So he noted down his experiences in all its rawness and humour. His 'School Diary' is a treasure of such memories.
Perhaps because he was mostly dealing with the innocence of kids, the innocence of language was also important to him. He never went for any 'literary' language that was different from the one used by the commoners. His works were full of the people of Malabar and hence, they were predominantly in their language.
Akbar belonged to that group of writers who firmly believed that writing should be a reflection of the space and times one lives in. Hence he told the Keralite diaspora in the Gulf that they should be writing on their life in the Arab nations than ruminating on the nostalgia.
When he leaves it forever, Malayalam must be feeling a vacuum - one which could only be filled by a writer-teacher or teacher-writer that Akbar ultimately was.
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