Experiences make the person…

I've seen a lot more reaction to my previous post than I ever expected. In purely monetary terms, without accounting for depreciation, I must have lost about 1.5 lakh rupees worth of equipment. Many of you have wondered about (and appreciated) how I was able to take things as I did. I believe there are two aspects about my reaction to the situation: maintaining composure during the situation and taking the material loss.

I'm not worried much about the material loss, for a good reason reason : I am no stranger to adversity, and have seen prosperity in some measure as well. We were well off when I was a kid. My father used to run a government-funded research project. He had a home-office, and two computers (286 machines, I think. Very expensive in those days). I use to play games on the computers, and started programming in BASIC when I was barely in class 5! Unfortunately, by high school, both my parents were no longer around to support me. For four years, I was an 'inmate' of Bapuji Balaniketana, an orphanage in a village called 'Alike', in Dakshina Kannada district (Alike is well known for its schools run by the Satya Sai Baba Trust, and has a reputation for churning out top-10 ranked CET students). Being in an orphanage has its ups and downs. The good things: you learn to be self reliant and pick up some skills. I have done manual labour, book binding, all sorts of chores. We learnt other skills too, for instance, creating umbrellas from close to scratch. Necessity is the mother of invention. And 80 kids managing a whole year on a budget of 4 low quality footballs is necessity. To keep the show running, I 'invented' a method to flawlessly stitch a football; that's something I'm still proud of. After my Pre-University education, I did Engineering at B.D.T College of Engineering in Davangere. Again, with a lot of help from my sponsors: Dr Nagaraj Rao sponsored half my mess bill, the other half was borne by a gentleman fondly called 'Paddu' (he used to run a tea shop and perhaps a hotel), as also an annual grant from the Sri Krishna Hostel committee, plus fees by my uncle Seetharama (lives in Sunticoppa, Coorg Dist). Towards the end of Engineering, I landed a well-paying campus recruitment job in ProcSys, effectively improving my finances. From all these, I must have learnt that one's financial position can change quite fast. Loss of equipment isn't that much of a setback.

Exposure to adversity leads to development of skills related to crisis management, and that helps people cope with difficult situations. You will be surprised to know that the previous incident wasn't the first time I had very less money, and with a need to travel some distance. The first such incident happened when I was in class 10.