Borrowing Belief
Sometimes, someone else believes in you before you learn to believe in yourself. Many years ago, we were in Belgaum, Karnataka. I had just completed kindergarten. And we learnt that my father was being transferred to a village near Hazaribagh (in what was then Bihar). However, when we moved there, I had to repeat kindergarten because it wasn't taught in Belgaum. My mother, who coincidentally was a Hindi teacher, took it upon herself to teach me the language at home. And while I learnt Hindi that year, I lost a year repeating the same grade. Meanwhile, my mother came up with an idea. She wanted me to get admission into a higher grade in Kendriya Vidyalaya (KV) (a school that had branches nationally so that the curriculum would remain the same and movement would be easier) so that I could make up for the lost year. There was only one KV close to where we lived in Hazaribagh. The school was inside a defense forces campus, some 20+ kilometres away from home, with another two-...
