Suparna Chattarji (Ex-Principal, Ankur)

January, 2023

Once there was a little boy who came from a village.  He had his parents and grandparents, his aunts and uncles, it was a large family.  Even though he was very little his father had big dreams for him.  Therefore, he decided to move him to a large city.  This city was Bangalore and his new home was ‘Ankur’. The little boy felt lost in the beginning but with love and care from his teachers Ankur, became his favourite place.  

This boy had great abilities to understand math and started to develop many skills through tinkering.  But doing well in math was not enough to do well in school and soon he started to lose interest in studies.   A time came when he could not keep up and experienced huge learning gaps. Therefore, he went to a new school.

In this new school he was surprised to find a lot of children who were struggling like him.  He befriended some of them and realized early on that he can overcome all learning challenges with some hard work.  He also learnt that rote learning could help to remember things which are boring but essential such as names of kings and queens or dates and formulae for math and physics.  After a year, he was admitted to a NIOS program.  The program was designed in such a way that this boy along with his peers could spend more time learning new things.  They learnt photography, painting and some of them started to take interest in computers.  The boy was so fascinated by computer programming that he taught himself the Python program.  Very soon, he completed the NIOS program with high scores and went back to the same great school where he struggled to get good grades.  There, he successfully completed his grade 12 exams.  

Then all the good karma started to pay back for him.  He wrote the entrance test for DATA Science at IIT Madras and secured a place for himself along with a 75% waiver in his tuition fees.  Around the same time, he also cleared the entrance exam for HCL TECHBEE program. This accomplishment led him to join HCL, a well-known IT company.  Now he will work at HCL and pursue his BCA degree at BITS Pilani.  It is also important to mention that he had cleared the KCET and secured 60,000 rank.  Clearly, he is spoiled for choices!

We are proud of his achievements.  This boy is none other than Satish Sundaram.  Bravo! Satish. When I talked to Satish and asked what his takeaway was from this educational journey. He said:

• ‘I never gave up, I tried to connect with my inner life-force and believed in my dreams.’ 
• ‘I discovered the magic of digital tutoring and self-taught the skills which were important for me to learn.’