Until the age of 15, you lived in Kannur (Kerala [ Images ]), how were those years spent?
Playing football! I come from a historic town. My town has the oldest mosque; it was built in the 8th century, much before Mahmud Gazni’s invasions. Vasco Da Gama landed there first. But yes, one day, I would like to create a football team and go win a big match. I am hoping that one day we do what we did with cricket in 1983. But you never considered becoming a doctor like your father… I found it boring. My father was a doctor; my grandparents were doctors. So I had seen that life. But two or three generations prior to my parents, we were poor peasants. Education had changed the course of our lives. So you see the only known way to progress in life is education. Is access to good education truly merit-based? Not completely. One of the things that really bug me is the IIM and IIT selection system that I am so intimately a part of now. The students that get to us now have been through some or the other tutorial college. They have paid a lakh of rupees on tuition before they made it to
