Life is Work in Progress — Part 1: The Small-Town Boy

A few days ago, my wife told me, “You should write about how you were this small-town boy and how you became who you are now.”

I laughed, not because the idea was bad, but because I immediately knew I had enough material to write a book.

I was born in Kanchipuram, in a very traditional family. My LKG was in Mylapore, Chennai, though I remember very little from that period. One memory is of me and a friend being punished for talking too much in class. My mother was waiting outside with my lunch and became anxious because I had not come out. When she finally came looking for me, she found me kneeling down next to another boy. She was shocked because, at home, I was apparently this quiet child who hardly spoke. Maybe that was the first time she discovered that I had two versions. That split personality has survived very well into adulthood. I am a Gemini, after all. I have to blame something.

There was also a classmate named Sridevi. Apparently, one of my favourite pastimes was pulling the ribbon or rubber band from her hair. My mother still remembers it. What is worse is that even today I sometimes do exactly the same thing to my daughters. Some habits have remarkable longevity.

Then my father's job took us to Trichy. My dad worked in a bank, and in our family we sometimes joked that the bank was probably his first wife. I joined another kindergarten there, and what I remember most about that school is that they occasionally screened movies. Those were the days when I suddenly became very interested in attending school.

Our headmaster also used to listen to cricket commentary on the radio. A bunch of us, probably UKG or first-standard kids, would stand around him and listen with great seriousness. I had absolutely no idea what cricket was. I probably did not even properly understand what a radio was. But everyone was listening, so I listened. When I think about it now, that curiosity was there very early. I did not need to understand something before getting interested in it; I just wanted to know what was happening.

They soon moved me to another school in Trichy, this one run by the Periyar Maniammai Trust. So at a very young age, I was being taught why many Hindu practices were meaningless, misleading and should be questioned. Nothing much went into my head. The school had gardens, fields and borewells, and they were far more interesting to me than whatever was being taught in class. We would pump water from the borewells, drink until our stomachs were full, get into the fields, eat gooseberries and whatever else we could find, and occasionally get chased by gardeners. That was the reality of my education at that stage.

I was also far more interested in comic books than textbooks. I used to pester my mother every week to buy me comics, and Irumbu Kai Maayavi was one of my favourites. On television, Giant Robot had me completely hooked. Many years later, I became a huge Iron Man fan. Looking back now, I think I know where all of that started.

Before I could settle down there, my dad got transferred again. By the time I finished school, I had studied in eight different schools between LKG and 12th standard. That may not be a national record, but it is probably a family record.

The next move was to Chengalpattu, and that was probably the happiest part of my childhood. Until then, I had been the only child and had enjoyed the full attention of my parents. Then competition arrived in the form of my younger brother. Surprisingly, his arrival gave me freedom because my parents were suddenly busy with him, and I used that freedom very efficiently.

I was only around fifth standard, but I would roam around Chengalpattu with a bat and ball in hand, looking for somewhere to play. If there was a ground, I wanted to be on it. By then, cricket had completely entered my head. Gavaskar, Vengsarkar, Srikkanth and Kirmani were names that mattered greatly to me. Studies did not. There simply was no time for them.

My mama and I could play cricket with almost anything that could be made to behave vaguely like a ball — paper rolled up and tied with rubber bands, erasers, tennis balls, rubber balls, cork balls, anything. Yes, erasers too. Naturally, we were also responsible for a reasonable amount of property damage. Window glasses, shop windows, pictures at home, porcelain jars — if it could break, there was a fair chance that cricket would eventually find it.

Around 1983, my dad bought a Solidaire television. I vaguely remember watching cricket during that period, and whatever I watched on TV had to be immediately recreated on the road outside. Injuries were routine. I would scrape myself against iron fences, fall down, come home bleeding, apply Ponds powder on the wound, sit quietly for a while, and then go back out and play. I did not know anything about antiseptic lotions or tetanus injections. My parents would probably have taken me to a doctor if they had known half the things I was doing outside. For me, Ponds powder was enough and play was compulsory.

There was a karate class opposite our house. I was fascinated by the uniform, the movements and the whole atmosphere, and I pestered my mother until she finally agreed to enrol me. She was reluctant because she knew me well, and she was right. I lasted about three days.

Around the same period, I was constantly dancing at home. Kamal Haasan was a big influence, while I would style my hair like Rajinikanth and attempt Kamal-style performances. One afternoon, I was dancing to “Ennadi Meenakshi, Sonnadhu Ennachu,” jumped or flipped onto the bed and sprained my neck. I started crying, while my mother and my aunt started laughing. I became furious. Much later, I discovered that they had apparently been discussing when exactly I would injure myself. I proved them right. Very predictable.

By then, my younger brother had started crawling and walking, which created a new problem. Whenever I tried to play cricket in the front porch, he would crawl down the steps and sit right in the middle of the playing area. I would carry him back inside, and before we could restart, he would crawl back again. Eventually, because of him, I started going to the larger grounds around Chengalpattu. So I suppose I owe some part of my cricketing freedom to my brother.

Then came a strange period. Indira Gandhi was assassinated, the Sri Lankan conflict was in the news, and there was also a massive teachers' strike in Tamil Nadu. My sixth standard more or less disappeared. I honestly do not remember attending school for more than a month or two. For me, this was fantastic news because more holidays meant more cricket. Around this time, one of my dad's friends brought me a full cricket kit from Jalandhar, which could not have been timed better.

Then my dad was transferred again, this time to a small village where there were no proper schools. So I was sent to Kanchipuram to stay with my grandmother. Unfortunately for anyone interested in my education, my mama was also there, so the playing continued.

The school I joined there was hardly a school in the way I understand schools today. There would sometimes be only two classes in the whole day, teachers would be absent, and nobody seemed particularly worried. We played everything — cricket, football, gilli-danda, seven stones and kho-kho.

During lunch, we would sometimes get onto bullock carts, go to distant fields, get muddy, eat sugarcane, cucumber, raw mangoes and whatever else was available. Those were simple pleasures, and I still miss them.

Sometimes I would spend my bus fare on kulfi and then walk all the way home. My grandmother would ask why I was late, and I would confidently say, “Special class.” Poor soul believed me until one of my classmates who lived on the same street casually informed her that I had actually been playing in the school ground.

At no point during all this did studies occupy any serious part of my mind. Nobody seemed particularly worried about it either.

And then Chennai happened.

My parents decided to move to Chennai and put me into a proper school for eighth standard. We tried in several schools before finally landing in one in K.K. Nagar. There was an entrance test, and that test remains one of the great reality checks of my childhood.

I genuinely did not know what to write. The school I had attended in seventh standard had hardly taught me anything, so I gave back what was essentially a folded blank paper. Much to my surprise, after all the running around and that glorious blank-paper performance, I finally got admission into the school in K.K. Nagar.

That may have been the first proper jolt in my journey from small-town boy to city kid.

The next six months were terrible. One challenge was adjusting to Chennai. The bigger challenge was adjusting to something even more unfamiliar: full-time school. I had not really attended a proper full year of school since around fifth standard, so sitting in class continuously and actually paying attention was exhausting.

I hated going to school. Until then, life had meant fields, cricket grounds, streets and freedom. Now I was in an unfamiliar city, in a structured classroom, expected to know things that everyone else seemed to know already.

I somehow scraped through eighth and ninth standard. And, naturally, I found another cricket gang. We would go from sector to sector in K.K. Nagar looking for games, and at the smallest opportunity I would run out of the house.

Home, meanwhile, was never short of activity. There were relatives, visitors, family discussions, debates, arguments and one story or another unfolding almost every day. Looking back now, I sometimes think some of the television serials that came much later could easily have borrowed their scripts from our house. There was certainly no shortage of drama.

My parents had a lot to manage, my brother was still very young, and I was somewhere in the middle trying to make sense of school, cricket and growing up. So, without anyone consciously planning it that way, I started learning to manage quite a few things on my own.

Then tenth standard arrived.

I had absolutely no idea what a board exam meant. I did not understand how important it was or how the marks could affect what I could study later. I look back now and find that almost unbelievable.

This was also adolescence. Mine was a co-education school. There were boys and girls in class who were far more confident, socially comfortable and city-bred than I was. I had very poor English-speaking skills. I did not know how to start conversations, and I was shy enough to avoid people rather than talk to them. I was still very much a small-town boy trying to understand city life.

Then, about a month before my board exams, my mother found a mathematics tuition teacher, and that changed everything.

For the first time, someone made mathematics make sense to me. Around the same time, I also went to my English teacher for tuition. He was a wonderful teacher. His classes introduced me properly to English literature, and I remember being fascinated by his lessons on Arthur Conan Doyle. That influence stayed. During college, I would later go to the British Council Library and watch Sherlock Holmes episodes regularly. Even today, Sherlock Holmes remains one of my favourite fictional characters.

Slowly, studies started making sense. The social side was still a work in progress, but academically something had started moving.

My father, meanwhile, decided to actively show some interest in me. This was not exactly what I had been asking for, because by then I had become very comfortable with my freedom.

At one point in eleventh standard, he took me to meet relatives whose children were preparing for IIT. I still find this hilarious. Here was a boy who had barely established a working relationship with the Tamil Nadu State Board syllabus, and my father apparently felt exposure to IIT preparation would be inspirational.

Then he made me write IIT-JEE, and my experience was remarkably similar to my eighth-standard entrance test. Another blank paper.

But that was also my dad in his own way. He may not always have been closely involved in the day-to-day details, but he kept trying to push me towards opportunities he believed could help me. Some were wildly optimistic, like IIT, but others became crucial.

By twelfth standard, something had changed in me. Thanks largely to my mathematics teacher, I had finally understood that this was a make-or-break period. I became serious. I would study until midnight or one in the morning, wake up early and go to tuition at five, write tests at odd hours and repeat the cycle.

Mathematics suddenly became natural to me. I began competing for the first rank in maths and consistently did very well. Maybe some of it came from my grandfather, who was excellent at mathematics, but there was also a lot of hard work because I knew I was compensating for years of weak foundations.

I used to drink four glasses of coffee at night to stay awake, and my mother would make fresh coffee and leave it for me.

We were living in a single-bedroom house, and our house was always full — full of people, full of conversations, full of opinions and, as I said earlier, full of drama. Finding a quiet place to study required some creativity. My favourite spot became the terrace, sitting between two water tanks. It was relatively cool, relatively quiet and, most importantly, nobody wanted that particular piece of real estate.

At that time, some of the chaos around me probably affected me more than I realised. Looking back now, though, I see it differently. It taught me how to find my own space, create my own routine and get on with what I needed to do even when the conditions were far from perfect.

Then, just before my maths board examination, I developed a fever of around 104. I was completely down. That day gave me a childhood memory I still carry very clearly — my father quietly sitting beside me, placing a cold wet towel on my forehead and taking care of me.

I went to the examination with the fever and scored 100% in mathematics. That was probably my first real claim to fame.

My tuition teacher was incredibly proud. Even years later, whenever I met him, he would introduce me as his first centum student. Thinking about that still makes me emotional.

My other subjects were not spectacular, and I ended up with around 83% overall. For where I had come from, I thought it was a massive achievement. It was not enough to get the engineering seat I wanted through the normal route, but my father found a way to get me into a good college in Chennai.

That was one of those moments where his support changed the direction of my life. When I look back now, I know that even though he was not always actively present in the way I might have wanted as a child, many of the opportunities that shaped me would simply not have happened without him.

College was fun. I had friends and had started becoming a little more city-bred, but once again I discovered how large the gaps were between me and some of the people around me. There were students who seemed to understand subjects much more deeply. Some spoke English effortlessly. Some were confident in situations where I was still hesitant.

I continued doing very well in mathematics and was the topper in maths for several semesters. That gave me confidence, and then I would meet some genuinely brilliant classmate and the confidence would get adjusted again. It was useful calibration. I was academically strong in certain areas, but still raw.

The real break came in final year. One of our lecturers was arranging project opportunities at LRDE in Bangalore, which was associated with DRDO, and I raised my hand immediately.

When I think about it now, maybe that was the same curious boy who had once stood around a radio in UKG without understanding a word of cricket commentary. I had heard so much about Bangalore by then and desperately wanted to see the place for myself. The LRDE project sounded technically interesting, but just as importantly, it was in Bangalore. That was enough for the Curious George in me. I wanted to go, explore, see what the city was like and find out what this opportunity would lead to.

That curiosity has stayed with me all my life.

Bangalore became my first serious taste of independence. I stayed at a friend's aunt's house and, to my own surprise, adapted very well. I was disciplined, kept my things organised, maintained routines and handled myself responsibly.

Some of those habits came from home. My father, in particular, was extremely disciplined about how he presented himself. I never once saw him go to office looking shabby. He did not have the luxury of expensive clothes, but he always dressed impeccably and carried himself with a certain neatness and dignity. I picked up more of that from him than I probably realised at the time.

I also did extremely well in the project. My confidence shot up, and maybe I thought I was finally becoming sophisticated.

Life corrected that assumption quite quickly.

After college, I joined a company as a trainee. They had a three-month training programme and would absorb people based on performance. Technically, I did reasonably well. Personally, I was still me. I spoke whatever came to my mind and had not yet learnt that being correct and being effective are not the same thing.

I was not absorbed.

That was a huge blow. Suddenly, I had no job. Most of my friends were placed, while I remained unemployed for nearly a year after that stint. I was distraught, but by then I also knew I had made mistakes. I had to learn not only technically, but also how to behave, communicate and operate in a professional environment.

Then my next opportunity came, and it took me to Bombay.

I did not know it then, but that city would become the first real turning point in the way I worked, lived and saw myself.

That is where the next part of this story begins.

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