Smooth sail after a turmoil

“I come from Sirsi, a small town in Karnataka where people had limited ideas on how to design a career path in basic sciences after school. Opting for science stream was only about engineering and securing a good job in the city. My interest in science wasn’t immediate. In early school, I was mostly interested in history and Kannada literature and science for me was a subject to grind away mere facts. I started appreciating it in high school when I began reading novels written by the Kannada writer Poornachandra Tejaswi. It introduced me to the application of science in day-to-day life and taught me to appreciate the things around me. Thereafter, I developed a strong desire to pursue it that helped me break free from the set mindset of doing engineering to doing research in Physics.

As was the system in Karnataka, I went to a residential college near Mangalore after school where there was no access to phones or the internet, neither did the teachers encourage us to do anything outside the box. I had to sneak out to cyber cafes, learn about IIT-JEE and other such exams which could get me admission to research institutes focused on basic sciences. But it took me a lot of time to figure all these out by myself and eventually I couldn’t secure a good rank in these exams.

The turning point in my life came when I went for a Bachelor’s degree in Yuvaraja’s College, Mysore…