Rajiv faintly remembers his first train journey. He was just two or three years old. What is etched in his mind very clearly was the train journey from Nagpur to Palakkad when he was eight.

The train was several hours late and he remembers how he pestered his mother for food. "I told my mother I was hungry and my poor mother did not know from where to get food as there was no food available anywhere. I still feel bad about it."

The next journey he remembers was from Mettuppalayam to Chennai to visit Vidyasagar. He was 13 then. "As my father worked in the ordinance factory, we always lived in remote places. It was my first visit to a big city also, to an unknown place like Vidyasagar. Why I remember this journey is because it is a turning point in my life. I was nervous throughout the journey and I didn't know what to expect. I had been to a hospital but not to a place like this before that."

But he admits that the first impression was not very pleasant.

"I shouldn't be saying this today but what I felt then was, 'Oh God! What a place! Where have they brought me?' But if I am earning, independent and travelling today, it is all because of this organisation."

Rajiv and his parents stayed at Vidyasagar for a week. But it took another year for his father to get a transfer to Chennai and Rajiv to join Vidyasagar. Till then, it was his mother who was Rajiv's tutor, teaching him numbers. He also could speak "broken English, Hindi and of course my mother tongue, Malayalam."

However, Rajiv longed to go to a school, play with children and make friends with them.

"There is a school near my grandmother's house at Palakkad and whenever I was there I used to be near the gate to look at children going to school. But they used to stare at me. When they stared at me, I used to turn away and hide from them."

In Chennai they chose a house that was near Vidyasagar and because of that, his father had to travel a lot to Avadi, where the ordinance factory was situated, everyday.

"It affected his health very badly. And, it is one of the regrets in my life. After his retirement in 1993 he had a neurological disorder, which makes him forget everything. So, he can't travel alone now."

But life at Vidyasagar was great!

"Till then I had no friends; either they were small children who used to come home just because I had toys, or adults. For the first time, I had a group of friends who were my age." One of the visiting doctors at Vidyasagar, Dr Kurien felt Rajiv was intelligent enough to attend regular school. But he was 15, and had had no formal education till then.

"I couldn't go and sit with five year olds. So I was given private tuition." Rajiv became the first disabled student from Vidyasagar and also one with cerebral palsy in Tamil Nadu to write the 10th standard board exam in private. Rajiv still cannot forget the day the results were out. To his horror, he found that his number was not there in the newspaper.

"I was shattered. I couldn't believe that I had failed. I came to Vidyasagar and told the director, it cannot be true. Soon, we found that results of private students would not come in the papers." He passed the exam with 74.2 percent marks.

He then joined Vanavani, a school inside the IIT campus, and those two years were the best years, the most cherished years of his life, he says.

"I enjoyed those two years tremendously. On the first day, I went to school with an escort but after the first period itself, I told her I didn't need any escort. It took only 40 minutes for me to say so. All my classmates were very understanding and they accepted me as I am. Nobody stared at me. Another bonus was inside the IIT campus, I saw many birds, deer, etc. One day I saw a huge snake on the road. I am a lover nature. Nature helps me think."

Incidentally, he passed the Class 12th exam also with 74.2 pc. By then, his father had retired and fallen ill and Rajiv felt it was his duty to take care of the house. He asked Usha Ramakrishnan of Vidyasagar whether he could work there, and she asked him to talk to Poonam Natarajan, the director. She immediately agreed.

"If I have any problem, I turn to Usha Akka (elder sister). Even today, it is to her that I turn to if I need any help. And to Poonam, I am like her son, and she never lets me down. For that matter, Vidyasagar never lets anyone down!" So, during daytime, Rajiv worked at Vidyasagar as the co-ordinator of the recreation club and in the evening, attended BCom classes at Loyola College.

"My days were very long; it started at 6.30 in the morning and it would invariably not end before 9 at night. But it affected my studies. I didn't do that well in my degree exams."

With his first salary, he bought two mundu and veshti for his maternal and paternal grandmothers. "I wanted to give them gifts because I loved them and they also loved me a lot. They were so happy to have the mundu and veshti from me because they never expected me to work and earn."

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