Courtesy: Wikipedia
One most important thing that is inherently Indian, is the respect given to Gurus in India. The first question as a graduate student the first week in Amrika was do I stand up when the professor walks in? I mean, logically I would follow what the rest of the class does, assuming there were non-Indians in the class 
. And from what I understand this is not the normal practice in American schools. But as a kid growing up (and fully grown up), students in schools were expected to stand up in silence when a teacher walked in and out of the class every hour. And add to that there are Sanskrit verses like Guru strotram -
Gurur Brahma gurur Vishnu gurur devo Maheswarah
Gurur sakshat parambrahmah tasmi sri gurave namah”
Teacher’s day is special in India because of many reasons. Depending on the type of school you went to – you may have been accustomed to different traditions. My school, would follow teacher’s day every year with a speech or two about Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, first vice president and second president of independent India, Oxford fellow and knighted by the british empire and a Bharat Ratna awardee (just in case you missed the point, his birth anniversary is celebrated as teacher’s day every year in India on September 5), and then an usually long speech about why teachers deserved respect and what they do for us, which regretfully I remember yawning about and trying to focus hard on staying awake (while standing). The worst nightmare of course was, in middle school when on that day, seniors one grade higher would enact the role of teachers and come to your class (doesn’t help if you have two elder sisters who might turn up as fake-teachers for your class ).
What’s also interesting about Sarvepalli Radhakrishan was he was one of the early philosophers who made a deep effort to bridge the eastern and western cultural concepts that we still discuss about, to this day. What we can appreciate is the idea that cultures can be bridged and his work on objectivity and theology. Looking for online books on his philosophy I found the following paragraph on Google books (Radhakrishnan: his life and ideas – By K. Satchidananda Murty, Ashok Vohra), page 192 where the authors talk about Radhakrishnan’s views on infidelity, the provision for divorce under Hindu marriage act and his disagreement with Mahatma Gandhi’s views on self-restraint as the ‘moral way of birth control’ (pretty sure they didn’t teach this in my middle school).
And here’s a quote attributed to Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan -
It is not God that is worshipped but the group or authority that claims to speak in His name. Sin becomes disobedience to authority not violation of integrity. link
– Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
Hope you learned something new today. Happy Teacher’s day!
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