I am ironman
I was born with a lot of deformities, weighing only 2 kilos because of the bad care received for my mother from the hospital. My anus was not properly developed.so at the age of 1, almost three stages of surgeries were carried on me for correcting it, another for fixing the webbing in my neck and for straightening my folded ear,at 13.
At the age of 5, I started running on battery(yeah I am ironman !), my teachers found out that I was having trouble with hearing and I started wearing a hearing aid.
School was so boring to me, thanks to my mother and my grandfather I started reading a lot of books from an early age. While others were listening to photosynthesis in biology class, I was in my dream world, stranded in an island, building tree house and cultivating crops. My friends used to make fun of me when I was in lower classes and they used to avoid me from sports and other activities while I was in higher classes due to my deformities and poor health.
In class 9th I was introduced to basic computer programming ! It was fun drawing circles and triangles with computer codes. Well it was the only fun thing I found in the academics. I was fascinated and an ambition to learn computer science started growing in me. But I had the worst marks those days. One night my mother bursted in tears and talked about my poor marks, she was worried about my future. Next three months, I studied hard and secured 75% in my 10th board exams.
Even though the doctor examined and assured my eligibility to pursue computer science, the education board refused to give me my favourite subject. After a lot of struggle, they finally allowed me to pursue computer science. During higher secondary education I was very depressed because I couldn’t use the computer due to severe body pain and dryness in the eyes. Despite all these issues, I became my school topper and scored the highest mark in 'computer science' in the history of my school ! Yeah, the subject they said I can’t study ! Later I got admission in one of the best engineering colleges in Kerala, Govt Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Tech kottayam !
My marks started dropping again! Because I was focused on my passion, which is coding and doing personal projects. Now I wanted to be an entrepreneur. During the vacation before joining the college I used to watch ironman movies and got fascinated about Artificial Intelligence. Then I started learning machine learning during my third semester.It was a lot struggle to learn at first, due to the lack of resources and a mentor. I was so frustrated and even thought of dropping it.
Then came the turning point of my life, although I call it the tinkering point !
I met Sijo Kuruvilla, the founding CEO of Startup Village in an event in my college. He patiently heard my dreams and said that he is so happy to meet me. He introduced me to a machine learning expert, Psbots(Praveen Sridhar, my mentor) and to a great community, Tinkerhub
The vision of collaborative effort formed in my mind, with the help of tinkerhub community and the cool people my learning curve boosted.
In the end of fourth semester, I started a chapter of tinkerhub in my college, Tinkerhub-RIT with five friends, sharing the vision of the greater community ie, a collaborative platform for learning 21st century technology to make the world a better place.
Now I am building Rita, a virtual assistant for my college.
With my friends from College of Engineering, Trivandrum, whom I met through my community, I’m working on Sango, a project for women safety, harnessing machine learning and IoT.
I recently joined Sijo Kuruvilla’s RethinkFoundation, a knowledge project for sharing opportunities to people and I am currently building a cool chatbot for rethink.
The chapter which I started in my college now have 105 members and we all are building, learning and hunting opportunities together.
For this Diwali one of my peer Adarsh designed a poster and we shared it in FB, in the morning another friend informed me that a startup loved that poster and will ping Adarsh soon.
This made my day:)
I was born like Deadpool without a mask because of the bad care recieved for my mother. I believe it is not just me to whom school was a pain. I am not the only one who had a passion but frustrated by the lack of resources. Thus my life is to solve India’s problems, to become a servant leader, an entrepreneur. I am Ironman !
