My father feared that I would end up doing nothing. I wasn’t ambitious either.
At the beginning of my teenage, I developed an interest in electronic devices. Screwdrivers and fluke testers replaced my toys. I preferred unscrewing and screwing the electronic devices, stripping the wires with teeth, replacing the fuses, connecting two wires and taping the connection points rather than watching cartoons. These tasks, to me, were challenging, and as a curious teenager, I had no one to look up to but to explore videos to learn more.
On the verge of self destruction
When I was in the sixth grade, I was intrigued by my friend’s electric car that his engineer father made for him. This fascination sparked a desire in me. I was so desperate that I started collecting the required equipments. But alas, I ended up with the big band sound -- loud enough to wake my parents from their sleep. When my father found out about my project, he was infuriated and gave me a good beating. The long rashes on my thigh imprinted the knowledge of electric fusion in my mind. The desire to explore and experiment taught me the thing which my course book would only teach me after four more years.
Even after a decade, my curious and innovative traits remain. However, I also went on to learn many other skills -- playing instruments, and sports, computer programming, public speaking, and poultry farming. A kid who would fear holding the knife in the kitchen now serves the best mutton curry in his family.
I continued learning and thriving in my high school. All the new topics that were introduced to us – derivatives, anti-derivatives, electric fields, organic chemistry – satisfied my zeal for learning. Moreover, the intriguing and challenging problems of the vector space, matrix, and rotation of rigid bodies made me think even while eating and walking. As a result, I developed an interest in Mathematics like never before. I started spending most of my free time solving the complex problems of mathematics even when I came home during vacations. My father’s fear, that I would end up doing nothing, alleviated when he saw me sitting all day in front of a set of questions with a calculator in one hand and pen on the other hand. Now, what my father can say for sure is that even if his son may not solve Millennium Prize Problems, he will never regret learning mathematics.
