I grew up in a very picturesque village called Devapur, in Adilabad District of Andhra Pradesh, India which is surrounded by hills on every side. During the reason season with clouds touching the peaks of the hills, it will be just amazing. Just around our colony, if we walk for some distance we will go in to the hills and the picture below is one of the entry into those forests on the hill. I and some friends of mine used to just around in the hills in the evenings of summers.
One of the routes into the forests
I love being in nature. We had a big vegetable garden behind our house. Every year before the start of rainy season, I would gather seeds of bottle gourd, ridge gourd, bitter gourd, beans,tindora, spinach etc and wait for the first rains to plant them. I used to have an amazing feeling seeing them germinate, grow. After some days we used to build supports for the creepers to grow and wait for them to bear fruits. Then I used to pluck them with pride after they grow sufficiently. To stop from cows or pigs from eating all these, I, my brother, my father and mother worked hard before the start of rainy season to build a fence around our house. To this day I remember the memories of those days. It used to be hard work and we had a lemon tree in the backyard, sometimes we got pricked by the thorns but at the end of the day it felt so satisfactory. Also, we had a very big playground in our village and I used to enjoy a lot sitting on the grass in the big ground with wind blowing on my face. Everyone would have had memories of playing the ground, but I was very bad at games - that is another story though. We had all sorts of fruit trees in our house. Guava, Pomegranate, custard-apple, mango, berries, banana trees around our house. I used to be very proud of our garden and I loved being in nature. When I learned of photosynthesis, plant propogation etc, i was naturally interested. Botany interested me. So I kind of decided that I would be mostly studying botany later.
A view from my backyard
But all of this changed after seventh standard. We got one teacher named Shailaja, for mathematics. I was a not up to the mark in mathematics. In the sixth standard, I didn't understand half of the syllabus especially geometry and got just 60% marks in the annual exams. So I was not that interested in mathematics. But Shailaja madam was very passionate about maths.More than what she taught, how she taught was very much instrumental in making me lose my fear of mathematics. She used to tell us about Shakuntala Devi. That year we had equations and in-equations in our syllabus. So she used to give us puzzles on solving equations which were very much fun to solve. She also told me to solve all the example problems in the text book. All these went a long way in increasing my interest in mathematics. We again had the same teacher again in our X standard. By this time, I was very much confident in my ability in mathematics.
One day, madam told us her own story of how she always wanted to be an engineer and told the story of Ramanujam and his mathematical prowess. We were floored at the story. She increased the profile of maths over other subjects and she romanticized engineering which in turn increased my interest in mathematics more
And I ended up getting 99% in mathematics.!!!
So now I was equally open to going mpc way or bipc way. After coming to know that medical education takes a lot of time, I finally ended up taking MPC and going on to become an engineer.
So thank you Shailaja mam if I have successfully completed my engineering and working here in the US, it is because of you..
Of all my school teachers, my English teacher and Maths teacher have influenced my life very much. Though I couldn't know the importance then, I can appreciate them better now. I always wanted to thank them personally but due to various reasons I couldn't express that. So here are my thanks to them. My thanks to my English teacher is here.
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