I'm going to write this as a blog, an entry on the life of Prabakaran, the life of PraCha. I'll be writing two notes like this. This first one comes out of my reading. For the past few months I've been reading and writing very actively, and it has been helping me think well, and behave well with myself, and reduce the distrust, in the whole journey of realizing who I am and what I've been doing. Reading Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott, I found myself recollecting my childhood memories. And it might help other people connect too, or find some clarity. There may not even be a reason to write. Writing is an expression of thoughts, of how we live, and it has many purposes.

So in this one, I want to talk about how I stayed uninfluenced by anything, and just kept dreaming. Not at all, not any influence of sorts. Because these days, when I look at the small village I come from, or a similar background, I see the brain rot, the psychosis, how even educated people are not exploring or searching for meaningful things. This is not a complaint against anybody. It's more that, as a data scientist, as someone who always reflects and perceives things, I want to put forth the life, and what was happening around it over time.

I want to divide this into two or three major parts: my elementary school life, my high school, and my higher secondary. I won't include college here, because the school years alone can go across multiple blogs.

Why these are good memories

As I've mentioned somewhere before, I studied at the Government Panchayat Union Elementary School, Singalandapuram, from my first standard to my fifth. And to be honest, people usually refrain from saying "I always got first rank," or "I was the teacher's favorite, I was pampered and nurtured by the teachers." If you look around, most people are far more excited to write about their mischief, or whatever terrible things happened in their childhood. The common perception is even tuned that way: if you're going to write about your school days, it has to be about dislike, disappointment, something with a wound in it.

But when I remember my school life, there is no trauma, there are no tragedies. Things were so good, even though I was from a village. Every year was shaped by a dream, by a kind of wanting, you could call it FOMO, but it was more a want: why are we not doing this, when will we get to do that? There may be one or two incidents that left a small scar, but I wouldn't call them trauma, and they never ruined or collapsed me. A village has its own order, its peace, its harmony, so those were the rarest of moments. I've come to feel that people often hold themselves back from expressing the good memories. So here we go, from the first standard onward.

Before school: tuition, slates, and stories

I seem to have joined school a bit early. Many people born in 1998 are a year behind me in their careers, my current juniors are the same age or a few months younger or older, and my own batchmates who finished with me were born in 1997 or early 1998, a few even in 1996. That's because I got admitted very early. By the age of five, my mother and my grandfather took me to the Panchayat Union Elementary School and had me sit with the first-standard students. So I studied first standard twice, at five and again at six.

And from the age of four or five, I started going to tuition. Now, when I say "tuition centre," don't take it the wrong way, it's not what it sounds like. In the villages, tuition centres were good, sophisticated little environments to nudge children to learn. Because at home there could be a lot of noise, or no space to focus. In my house, till my third standard, the floor was made of mud and cow dung. Once every two weeks, before the day of Amavasya, the no-moon day, we would clean the house with cow dung and let it dry. Many houses in the village in the early 2000s were like that. So a tuition centre was where you got a bit of quiet and focus.

That's where I was taught to write the alphabet on a slate, very early, at three and a half or four. My mother still remembers that from about two and a half I was playing with vessels and scribbling on walls, the typical thing any child does, then and now, and many of you might have similar memories. The tuition centres were usually run by educated young women in their early twenties, who had just finished college or their twelfth standard, for twenty or twenty-five rupees a month. (Later, around eighth or ninth standard, tuition was two hundred rupees a month.)

And even then I used to tell stories, a monkey who likes ice cream, a bear who likes laddus, I'd just spin them up. Even now, if I go back to my village, one or two people who were four or five years older than me will say, "hey, I remember, at four or five you used to tell all these different stories about animals." I also used to draw, animals, plants, natural sceneries. Those elder girls used to call me "baby," and three or four of them, whom I call Akka, still call me baby, because I had chubby cheeks, curly hair, rosy lips. Even now people ask if I'm using lipstick, that a guy of twenty-six, twenty-seven has such rosy lips. That's how I was in those preschool days.

There was also the Anganwadi, the child-care centre. I was there only a short time before I moved on to first standard. We used to go there and collect the nutrition powder, made of cereals and pulses, mixed with brown sugar and rolled into little balls, and it was so good. Around my second and third standard I still went and collected the powder, and we made biscuits with it, you'd make a dough and roast it on the dosa pan, and it came out like a very good cookie. My sister now does baking, and when I recollect it, what I did wasn't baking exactly, but something like it, making biscuits, dosas, small cookies, sometimes adding coconut kernels.

First rank, and a class leader's small crimes

So I joined first standard with my cousins at five, and then I became the teacher's favorite student. Even now, seventeen to twenty years later, before coming here I visited my Panchayat Union Elementary School and the high school I studied at. My teachers, the ones from whom I learned to write ABCD, to learn the fundamentals of numbers and mathematics, from whom I first heard the word "science," the word "vitamins," are still there, and we share the same regard, the same respect and love from both sides.

I can't remember much of the first standard, you can't quite visualize what you did that young. But from the third standard I have better memory, because that's when I became aware I was taking first rank. I got the awareness that "oh, there's something special about us," or maybe it wasn't even awareness, just a want, a curiosity to be at the center of things. So in third standard I became class leader. The role was simple: collect the attendance and take it from the classroom to the HM's room, and if the teacher was late, keep the class silent, we used to write the noisy ones' names on the board. Sometimes I had my own bias, so I'd write certain names, a very typical thing.

One scene I remember clearly. A couple of girls had "line dates," dates in their pockets, kept in matchboxes, three matchboxes, two dates each. I snatched them, saying you shouldn't eat snacks inside the classroom, and put them in the table drawer, and then I ate them myself. I was supposed to return them after class, but I ate them and gave some silly reason. Since I was the class leader, they couldn't do anything. I still feel how funny that is.

The Sardarji turban, and a taste for the stage

From third to fifth standard, those three years, I performed on the annual days. My first performance was on Republic Day. There was a Sivaji Ganesan film called Bharat Vilas, very nationalist and patriotic, and the climax song, Indian, Indian, where people from different religions, states, and cultures live together in the same apartment complex, and I was given the role of a Sardarji, a Sikh. So I had to wear a Sikh turban. We didn't have that length of cloth other than my mother's saree, so I borrowed it from a girl who went to a private school. Because at that time, around 2006, only in the private schools did the girls wear churidar or salwar, in our village school, till the tenth standard, the girls wore a shirt and a skirt, not the churidar and dupatta.

When I wore that turban, I felt like Manmohan Singh, because Manmohan Singh always wore that pale-blue turban, he never chose other colors, I'd noticed. I say Manmohan Singh because that was when my political awareness began, around 2004. I still remember watching the news, Vajpayee addressing the nation, and only later did I learn that was around the "India Shining" campaign. That was my first performance.

After that, every Republic Day, Independence Day, and Kamaraj's birthday. July 15th used to be celebrated as Kalvi Valarchi Naal, Education Development Day, announced after M. Karunanidhi became Chief Minister in 2006. Every July 15th there were competitions on Kamaraj's birthday, and those were the initial days when I took part in three or four of them, drawing, essay writing, and oratory. I won in all three. I drew Kamaraj, he's the first person I ever drew, then Gandhi, Nehru, and Vivekananda, and at most I reached Netaji and Dr. Radhakrishnan. My fourth or fifth standard social book had Lala Lajpat Rai's picture, so I drew Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak too, but only once or twice, not for any competition. From then on I was participating, drawing, writing, the first-rank student doing all this, and my teachers supporting it.

The computer centre

In the fourth standard I got introduced to computers. In my village there was one person running a computer centre, helping people get access to computers, Paint, MS Word, small bits of MS-DOS, Excel. So from around fourth standard, and every summer after, we went to that centre for computer training, and there were events, drawing competitions and the like. So from third standard onward I was the bright student, recognized as one, doing multiple things.

The games I played, and the bicycle I learned late

I never played many games, but I played seven stones very well, seven stones stacked as a pyramid, and you hit them and then rebuild them as a team. And there was a game called "monkey," where you throw a stick and, as a team, keep it away from the circle, and the one who's "it" has to stay up on a tree. But I never knew how to climb a tree, I managed with others' help.

I learned to ride a bicycle very late, between fifth and sixth standard. Usually kids learn at three and do all the tricks, no hands, all the adventures, but I never did. I got a lot of wounds on my legs learning. And I learned it properly only around seventh or eighth standard, and not to roam around the village, but so that I could carry the cans and collect water from two or three kilometers away. That's how things pushed you along.

Fifth standard: the superstar year

From fifth standard onward the competition became very personal, I always wanted to be first rank, first mark, first position, whatever was possible. Fifth is the last stage in that particular school, after fifth you move to the other school. So in fifth standard you become a kind of superstar of the school, because there's nobody above you, it's just you. I was in the fifth standard, B section. My teacher's name was Jayamala. She still remembers me, and I say the teachers remember me because, over the years, people forget most and end up remembering only a few. I'm one of those few.

In fifth standard we stayed in the same classroom, and all the subjects were taught by the same teacher, or at most two, one for maths and science, another for Tamil, English, and social science, five subjects in all. In the teacher's table drawer she kept a lot of things, personal care, a comb, powder, a mirror, and a Herbalife or Nutrilife powder that she'd mix and drink at every break. It was around 2007 that we bought a protein powder for my mother at home, and I started drinking it too, so when I saw that container it looked so good, that was a kind of sophistication. Every day at 9:30 or 10:30 she'd open her flask, and as a kid I had the privilege of sneaking into her handbag to see what she had.

The teachers' tiffin, and my mother's cooking

I somehow never ate the midday meals. I didn't like them. It's a very good scheme, and it has helped a lot of people, no complaint there. It's just that my mother cooks so well, and she made lunch every single day, so I never had to carry a plate to the school meal. In the village, people would go to the fields for farming work in the morning with no time to cook, which is exactly why the midday meal exists, and now the government has extended it to a morning breakfast scheme too, which is really good. But I've always been picky about food. I don't even like eating at others' houses, I'm that biased toward my mother's cooking, and later I became a better cook myself.

The teachers would bring multiple tiffin boxes, one for sambar, one for rasam, one for vegetables. We, in our lunch box, would just have lemon rice or vegetable rice. There were a couple of men running morning and evening tiffin centres, and they'd bring whatever their shop was cooking, and their sambar and curry were so tasty that sometimes I'd just ask, "hey, can you give me a little?" There were only two times I ate the school midday meal: before Diwali or Independence Day they'd make chakkarai pongal, the sweet pongal, which I loved, and on other occasions they made puliyodarai, tamarind rice. Only later did I realize the food is good, and these days they make a lot of variety. I just didn't like the mulangi sambar, the radish and moringa and other vegetables, I didn't really like those vegetables, and at home we never cooked radish sambar, so I stuck with my mother's food.

Near my school there were two old ladies selling mango, one fresh, one dried, and a lot of chocolates, candies, and savories. If I had fifty paise I'd buy something, but I later settled on one small shop, a four-by-four little place, because I figured out I didn't like the others and they weren't clean. That awareness was there, nobody taught it to me, it wasn't that such things shouldn't be eaten at all, I just didn't like that setup. So I stuck with that one small shop right up to my tenth standard.

Fifty paise, and my grandfathers

Where did the fifty paise, the one rupee, come from? Fifty paise, one rupee, at most one rupee then. The two to five rupees came after I moved to sixth or seventh standard, and ten to twenty rupees only when I was in the tenth. And who gave me these pennies? My grandfathers. My maternal grandfather and my paternal grandfather. In the early days, till sixth standard, my maternal grandfather lived in another village near Trichy, so I always went to my paternal grandfather. We call him Pata, or Patan, which means grandfather in Tamil, and the maternal grandfather we called Tata. My Pata didn't go to work, he was in his sixties, and after my father started working he stopped working entirely.

My family and my childhood are filled with all of this, from the age of three or four, which is why I can still remember Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh from 2004. My grandfather belonged to the party called the DMK, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, I've seen his membership card from 1967, or even before. His routine was that after ten in the morning he'd go and sit with his friends at the nearby temple. So if I needed money, I'd go and ask him, and he'd scold me, not with any hate, just the typical grandfather thing, always a little strict with me while he pampered my sister, but he'd still end up giving me fifty paise or a rupee. Sometimes I'd save it up to two rupees and buy some chocolate.

Sixth standard: a rival, and a new way of learning

From sixth onward, I kept myself away from certain things, and there were many personal, subjective experiences. Till fifth standard, I can honestly say I didn't use bad words, and I still don't. Especially in Tamil, I never scolded anyone with bad words. Whenever someone spoke them, I used to close my ears, a reflex I had all through school. And my mother and father never got into fights, the kind that usually break out in a village over water or some small thing, they never got involved. So the kindness, the patience, the sense of "let's just do our own work, we have a lot to do, let's not worry about others' issues," was there in my family, and it still continues. That's a big reason I never turned out to be a rogue, I was always a nice person.

Sometimes, from the outside, people would judge and dislike me, "he's the first rank, he never got beaten or scolded by the teachers." With thirty-five or thirty-seven people in a class, obviously five or ten might dislike you, and that's fine.

That's how I joined sixth standard, A section. That was when the other boy I never got along with was put in the same class as me. All through the Panchayat Union Elementary School I'd been in B section and he in A. He was sometimes first rank, sometimes slipping to second, but I always had first rank till my tenth. Now we were in the same class, three of us who were all first-rank material. This one boy and I never got along, always like the North Pole and the South Pole, fighting and complaining about each other. But I never cried and ran to my parents saying I couldn't handle it. It wasn't about beating anyone or disturbing them from studying, it was just about being smart. Most of the time, when the exam papers were corrected, I'd argue: why did you give him full marks? I wrote all these things, I got five marks, but he didn't even use this diagram, so why full marks for him?

From sixth standard there was a pedagogical method, Activity Based Method, ABM, or Active Learning Method, ALM, the name kept changing. Every lesson had to be perceived and turned into a set of actions by the student. Take everything except maths, because maths you do step by step, the example problem, the exercise problem, that's it, it's built that way. For Tamil, English, science, and social science, every chapter, every poem or prose, once the teacher taught it, we had to note it down step by step. First you read all the pages. Then you noted the hard words, the new words, if you came across a scientific term like "potassium," or a new name like Oscar Wilde, you noted the different categories of words and their meanings, what you understood. Then a mind map: the entire unit represented visually, pictorially, so everyone showed their own understanding.

I used to draw very well. In sixth standard there was a poem or a conversation about the Chera, Chola, and Pandya kings, a king and a poet in discussion, and I drew the king, because from the third or fourth standard I drew things illustratively, not exact realism but illustrations. Usually a mind map is simple, just circles and squares, but many of us attempted more. After the mind map you wrote the summary as ten or fifteen bullet points, the important points of the unit. Then a section called question-answering, where you first wrote the questions in your mind, then answered the exercise questions. Every unit had this.

And I should mention the learning pattern from first to fifth standard, especially what I remember of third, fourth, fifth, which was different, very well gamified, so much fun. It wasn't "okay, today I'm at this level of learning, I have to finish it." Till fifth standard it was two paths at once: the teacher teaching, and the students doing activities, like moving through the levels of a board game. You'd be at one level, do what that level asked, read and write something, and once it was done you were marked and allowed to move to the next. The classroom was filled with learning materials, trays full of cards and toys, walls full of things. Now people say Montessori learning, this learning, that learning, but twenty years ago it was already like that, it wasn't just sitting and staring at the teacher's face. Sixth, seventh, and eighth were fully on that active learning method. Ninth and tenth were a mix, because the school was starting to prepare us for the tenth, building the learning capability rather than just dumping and memorizing. Till eighth there was no need to worry too much about exams, no study hours, you did what was needed and kept playing or roaming around, with two PT periods a week.

The first-rank boy who wanted no clerical role

I was class leader, and then I realized being class leader is sick. Being class leader is not a good thing. So after sixth standard I voluntarily avoided the class-leader position, it had become too much. Class leaders and such people got attention at the morning prayers, but I used to stand at the very back, because I was so tall then, in the sixth and seventh standard, far taller than the other students. There were badges for the rank-one students, and I always wore my rank badge. There was newspaper reading every morning at prayers, and I tried it a few times, but I didn't really like reading the daily news on the mic, I preferred to read the Tirukkural and some poems. Another boy, my junior, was very good at reading the English newspaper, reading comprehension in English being a hard thing for us in Tamil medium, so he did that every day. There were many positions, class leader, group leader, newspaper reader, school pupil leader, but I avoided all of them. I just wanted to be very free from this: do my work, take part in competitions, be the first-rank boy who isn't disturbed by any clerical role.

And that's still continuing. I don't want to do clerical things, mundane tasks, operations, moving things here and there. I want to be on the design side, the intellectual side, the architecting side, leading things by thought rather than by managing people or apps. It all started there. I'm not saying this is right or wrong, it's just how my interest and curiosity turned.

And around the eighth standard I got a scholarship of five or three thousand rupees from the Central government, to build scientific experiments for a district-level science exhibition. With a college student, we built two things, a solar panel with an automatic switch. Simple, but at that time it was real exposure. Till eighth, it was mostly just competing and competing, inside the class and outside, and getting better. There was a lot of exposure gap too, if I'd had a nudge, some support, I could have competed at other levels, but that was the situation.

The drawing master

After I joined sixth standard, my drawing master taught me how to handle a brush, sketching, all of it. Till fifth I'd only used pencils and sketch pens, but after sixth he'd lend us watercolor or poster color, poster color being safer and easier to play with. Sixth, seventh, eighth, every year there were competitions at the school, taluk, and district levels, and at most I reached the district level. I used to fear at some other school boys, they did very good shading and color mixing, but I never quite learned that much, at most I got it to look good. All the drawing themes were three categories only: the national leaders, village sceneries, a boy going to school, women at the market, and flowers or animals. Only three things. That still stuck with me, I'm still drawing and sketching every day, and though I'm an amateur, not a pro artist, I can still express what I want to sketch. That's really good, I guess. Each of these little things I did was nurtured somewhere, triggered somewhere.

Shorts, a wire bag, and the shoes I longed for

Till my tenth standard we wore only shorts, half-trousers, and being very tall, a lean, skinny boy in half-trousers looked funny, though now it looks fine. From only the eleventh standard did I start using a proper backpack. Till the tenth I carried a plastic wire bag, the common kind. And there were no shoes. Whenever I saw the nearby private-school boys with their school belts, ties, and shoes, I used to wonder, when are we going to wear all these things? We were just in a red shirt and brown trousers. You'd long for certain things.

Then I joined St. Joseph's College of Engineering, where every day you had to tuck in, wear shoes, full sleeves, tie. I really liked that. I never folded my sleeves, I never missed wearing the tie and shoes, every day I felt, this is how I want to be, because all the way till my twelfth, even at SRV Boys Higher Secondary School, there was no compulsion to wear shoes. My first shoes came only when I joined St. Joseph's.

What it all shaped

Now that I'm reading a lot of books, I can see it all coming together. It was never just going in and finishing classes, class after class. It was an inherent test bed, an inherent shaping of a life. And as we keep getting that self-realization, of what is with us and what isn't, both on the material side and the mindful side, it all makes sense. Mindfulness matured much later, but even on the material side, this is how we dress, this is how we want to look, this is what we like and don't. And none of it came from the standard of the house I belonged to, or the standard of the community. It was all about how, as an individual, those likes and dislikes, that interest and curiosity, kept growing. Because in my house, nobody read books, at most a newspaper.

It's not aristocracy, or plutocracy, or anything like that. I say this because yesterday I learned a new word, epistocracy, the intersection of politics and the people who know things, who develop themselves on their knowledge and their intellectualism. So I guess I belong there. That's where the world is taking me. I started in a small village, Singalandapuram, and right now I'm in the San Francisco Bay Area. And never, in my early school days, did I know that America existed. I got to know America around the eighth standard, when there was a history unit on Amerigo Vespucci and Columbus and different things. So thirteen years of early life, not knowing a country, not exposed to geography or many things. And that's fine. But if you compare different stages, or compare with others, oh, okay, my uncle was in the US, or my dad was in the US, even in the early 2000s itself. That was the situation for others. For me, this is how I've seen it. And this is quite a good journey.

The mechanism of a life

And things have that mechanism, right? The life's mechanism, right? Something very constant, something very invariant across twenty, twenty-five years, is observing and perceiving, where are we? What do we like? Even now, after shifting three or four places in the last forty days, I could realize what my embodied awareness is, where I want to be surrounded. It's not about people, but what kind of things, what kind of places, what kind of buildings I want to be surrounded by. Maybe this was triggered from my early life, because we still don't have our own house. Not the typical multi-story building, or a three-bedroom flat, or a duplex or simplex apartment, or anything. Nothing. We don't have, we just have land.

Our old house is still there, abandoned now. It's twenty by twenty feet, or thirty by thirty, at most five hundred square feet, a small mud-tiled house. I lived there on a daily basis till my age of eighteen, and then my family lived there till my age of twenty-three, amidst all the rainwater leaks, and too much heat during COVID, because I was there for one and a half years continuously during COVID. Half of my hair fell out because of that heat and dust inside that house. Right now I prefer bright lights, attached bathrooms and toilets, a New York building. In Bangalore, the house my close friend and I lived in, we named it the Theatre of Dreams. Everything has a very good back story, and that invariant mechanism of life kept on recording the good and the bad, the wants and the curiosity of childhood. Maybe I'm just assuming, okay, there was no big emotional trauma or exploitation or anything. Maybe life let me struggle, it's not even struggle, it let me observe and perceive all these materialistic and mindful things.

From wanting to meaning

Then, as it absorbed more and more, as it has absorbed more and more, the mechanism understood things and kept them as a checklist, and it pushed me. For example, my first pizza was after my first salary. Likewise, things keep running. Right now my mind, my life, is observing condos, Tesla, going on vacation, having multiple phones, all the materialistic things. And now the mind is also observing a lot of mindful things: this is how we need to live, this is how we need to perceive, this is how we need to think about this life, about opportunities, about world problems.

So the mechanism evolved. It's not just chasing mere materialistic things, it's chasing meaningful things now. That has evolved. And now the meaningful part has dominated the materialistic machine and made it a subsystem of itself. And if the life's mechanism is running toward meaning, the materialistic things automatically get sorted, they become the byproduct. That's what it is right now, as someone who has developed systems thinking, and the different behavioral bits and pieces of humans and the world, and how intelligence, and how power and exploitation and so many things happen as a system of things. Now, maybe life has evolved from wandering, from the state of wanting, toward the state of meaning, of creating the meaning, creating the values, and many things. So it's an evolution.

For the next one: my grandfathers

And I'm on with my tears now, because in my next one I'm trying to write about my grandfather. Not a big incident, it's not going to be a big one, it's not even an incident, it's a memory with him, an information that, whenever I thought about it, I started crying. It goes back to my mother's words: on that day he struggled, he was in that worry, and because of his suffering and his worry and his prayers, he lost, and he gave his life to you. That's her belief too. Whenever I think about it, I'm full of tears. My grandfather could have been with me. They both could have stayed a bit longer and watched all my growth, all my journey, and become so confident and energized, and got all my stories to tell with their friends and people.

I miss him. If I had to say whom I miss, I would say I miss my grandfathers, because even though at those ages it was just fifty paise, one rupee, two rupees, they were all so proud about my existence. And my maternal grandfather, he died three to six months after I recovered from my pancreatitis. And that's where my mom believed, not in a bad way, but there is a belief between me and my mom, especially from my mom, that he went to our temple, our family temple. He just rolled in front of that God: somehow, you just take my life and give the life back to my grandchild. My mom used to always remember that, his affection for me. He could have stayed, he could have stayed with us. He could have lived a little more and watched all this, this guy's survival and growth and everything.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. As I was recording this, I couldn't write further. I'll write it in a later one, with my high school experience, and my college, and many other things. And also whatever I watched and observed from my own egocentric point of view: the disagreements, the conflicts, the problems, and the joyful moments.