The Wills and The Ways

If you are born to illiterate parents, and spent your early childhood in a village riding buffaloes, and the latter part a wheelchair and were an object of curiosity to the villagers who wanted to see how a boy without legs looked, would you ever think of cracking the IIT-JEE? And then bagging one of the most prestigious campus jobs, at Google four years later?

This story might seem straight out of an Amitabh Bachchan starrer rising from rags to riches against all odds, but that is what Naga Naresh Karuturi just did.

Born in Teeparru, a small village in Andhra Pradesh, Naga was a normal child till that fateful day in 1993, when the lorry-driver father took his family to a nearby village for a family function. Our seven-year-old hero was fiddling with the door latch and it opened wide throwing him out, scratching his legs in the process. The government hospital he was taken to conducted a surgery as his small intestine had gotten twisted, and bandaged his legs. A week later, they realized gangrene had developed in his legs upto the knees. He was referred to the district hospital where both of his legs were amputated upto the hips.

It requires amazing levels of optimism, courage, zeal, and determination for a seven-year old kid to recover from the shock of losing both his legs, not being a normal child anymore, but still continuing his studies to reach one of the top institutions in the country. The credit also goes to supportive parents and sister. His parents did not know anything about the residential school he later went or about IIT, but they always saw to it that he was encouraged in whatever he wanted to do. If the results were good, they would praise him to the skies and if bad, they would try to see something good in that. They did not just want him to feel bad. Wonderful supportive parents.

His sister Sirisha's contribution to his success was even more. She had to sacrifice two years of her studies to be in the same class as Naga, so that she could take care of him. She never complained. She was always there by his side.

Naga has an unflinching faith in God, and believes He plans everything for you. "If not for the accident, I may not have studied after the 10th, and may have started working as a farmer or something like that. I am sure God had other plans for me.", told Naga Naresh in an interview to rediff.

He also believes in destiny and that the world if full of good people. From MFMS missionary school that gave him and his sister free education upto 10th, Gowtham Junior College that waived the school fees of 50K a year, IIT-Madras where lifts and ramps were installed for him in the Computer Science department and an attached bathroom in his hostel room, to that stranger in the train who took care of his hostel fees from then on, he has been helped by everyone. He says, "I feel if you are motivated and show some initiative, people around you will always help you.", echoing the famous quote from The Alchemist: When a person really desires something, the entire universe conspires to help that person realize his dream..

Visit his orkut profile and you'll see floods of scraps from people congratulating him, asking for interviews and all. I am not sure whether I should contact him. Now that he is in Google Bangalore, I would even like to meet him, but do not know if that would be warranted. But I can get inspired by him and explore and use up my potential rather than procrastinating and leading a laid-back life.