Back To School Parent Letter 2012: Fill & Download for Free

SRIKANTH BOLLAWhen he was born, neighbors in the village suggested that his parents get rid of him as he was born blind. It was better than the pain they would have to go through their lifetime, some said.“He is a “useless” baby without eyes… being born blind is a sin”, others added.Being born blind was just one part of the story. He was also born poor. And you know what that means in our Indian Society.All his life, Srikanth faced several rejections. Right from his villagers to the school staffs. In school, he was pushed to the back bench and not allowed to play. After his matriculation, he wished to pursue science in his 10+2, but was not permitted to do so.“No one acknowledged my presence. I was put in the last bench. I could not participate in the PT class. That was the time in my life I thought I was the poorest child in the world. It was not because of lack of money but because of loneliness.”At the age of just 18, Bolla filed a case, fought with the system and after a six month wait, he was allowed to pursue science at his own risk. Bolla topped his class with a 98% on his XII board exams.Bolla was denied admission to coaching institutes for Indian Institue of Technology (IIT) where he wanted to study engineering, because he was blind.He applied for IIT, BITS Pilani, and other top engineering colleges, but did not get a hall ticket. Instead,"I got a letter saying ‘you are blind, hence you are not allowed to apply for competitive exams.’ If IIT did not want me, I did not want IIT either. How long can you fight?”He chose his battles carefully and did his homework searching the Internet to find the best engineering programme for someone like himself. He applied to schools in the US and got into the top four – MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon.He went to MIT (with a scholarship) as the first international blind student in the school’s history.After graduating from MIT in 2012, he left the golden opportunity in corporate America and came back to India.His persistence, compassion and vision paved his path to become an entrepreneur.He even embraced an opportunity to work with late President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam in the Lead India project.Srikanth is today the CEO of a Hyderabad based company worth Rs 50 crore.His company Bollant Industries, employs uneducated and physically challenged people to manufacture eco-friendly, disposable consumer packaging solutions out of natural leaf and recycled paper.Srikanth even impressed Ratan Tata who recently invested an undisclosed amount in the company.Today, Srikanth has four production plants, one each in Hubli (Karnataka) and Nizamabad (Telangana), and two in Hyderabad (Telangana). Another plant, which will be one hundred percent solar operated, is coming up in Sri City, an integrated business city in Andhra Pradesh, 55 kms from Chennai. He has employed more than 450 people as of now."Compassion," he says, "is not about giving a coin to a beggar at the traffic signal. It's showing somebody the way to live and giving them the opportunity to thrive."Source: https://yourstory.com/2015/12/srikanth-bolla-bollant-industries/

I am the result of my mother’s biggest heartbreak.When my mother was younger, my grandparents used to host exchange students from all over the world. My mother is the youngest sibling of four. My granma gave birth to her seven years after the last boy, making her a lot younger than the rest. Being the only girl, she was daddy’s little girl. She was spoiled rotten by both her brothers and her father, but because of the year gap she was also kept home a lot and not allowed as much as her brothers.Every summer a new exchange student came, and my mother was usually left behind at home when her other siblings took the exchange students out and about in town. I have no idea how many exchange students they’ve had through the years, but in the summer of 1990 a Danish gentleman moved into the house.This Dane (let’s call him G) was a good Christian, well-behaved and was sent to England as a part of his law studies. At the time of his exchange he was 21. He was from a rather wealthy family who apparently all were lawyers or jurists as far as I’ve been told.At that time my mother was seventeen, and the only child still living at home. She was still going to school, studying, going out with her friends and doing whatever a girl that age was doing. Even though G was a law student, he was humble and always helped out a lot at my granparents’ home. My mother also helped out my granmother a lot with housework which allowed her to get to know G well.(My granmother told me she always suspected my mother of fancying with him from the very beginning since she out of a sudden offered to clean the entire first floor - which is where G resided at the time.)As time went by, my mother and G became closer and closer and eventually developed a romantical relationship with each other. They were very close and spent all of their time off from their studies together. They’d go to the movies together, she introduced him as her boyfriend to her friends, and life was a fairytale for G and my mom. They’d spend every single evening together, and once the house had gone to rest, my mom would sneak into his room to spend even more time with him.Soon my grandparents discovered the relationship and its serious character. At first they weren’t too keen on the fact that my mother was falling for an exchange student as they were well aware he’d be leaving them soon. But G was a good man from a good family, he was able to provide for his future family, had good Christian values, and was seemingly full of love for their daugther. So when he asked for the daughter’s hand in marriage, they happily agreed. So after eight months of knowing each other, G proposed to my mother and she accepted.Spring came along, and G was set to return to Denmark. A few days before his departure, my mother fell ill with an apparent food poisoning, and he took care of her. They spent their last days together in her bed talking about their future together and planning every single detail of their beautiful future together.G would go back to Denmark to finish his exams and break the news to his parents that he was engaged to my mother. They would keep in touch through letters and vowed to be faithful and wait for each other. He was the love of her life, and she couldn’t wait to get married to this man and start a life of their own. So he left, and the waiting game began…Soon after his departure, it turned out it was not a food poisoning my mother had gotten - she was pregnant with me. I was told she was the happiest she’d ever been when she found out, and she wanted to surprise G with the news when she heard from him. She never did. She wrote an endless amounts of longing love letters for him that he never read.December 8th 1991 she gave birth to me, aged 18. I’m sure she loved me to the best of her abilities, but it was as if I was a constant reminder of what she had lost. My mother had bright green eyes and red hair, but my eyes are hazel and I’m darkhaired. She was a victim of a lot of gossip: my mom was a young uneducated daughter from a good Christian family who had fallen pregnant out of wedlock with a man who ran away and left her behind.My mom raised me with help from my grandparents who loved both me and my mom dearly. I did well in school, behaved nicely and had friends like every other kid. I went to high school, played soccer, chased girls, had friends and a pretty normal life after all. When I was fifteen, my grandpa died from heart arrhythmia, and a year later my grandma passed away in her sleep. It wasn’t until at this point it started going downhill for my mom.Eventually, life came crashing down. My mother started drinking, and the bottle got the best of her. She drank away all the bad memories and passed away from a heart attack in December of 2012, less than a week before my 21st birthday.My mother never remarried nor did I ever get any siblings, so I was left alone in this world aged 20. I won’t lie, it was tough, but I held onto the things my mother had taught me since I was a kid:Get an education. Never lose faith. Be good.Now I’m engaged to the most wonderful woman, and I am the step-father of a beautiful, smart little girl and I consider myself the luckiest man in the world. I thank God each and every day for bringing them into my life and for giving me the strength to carry on.—-To this day, I have no idea whether G knows about my existence. I have no idea what happened to him - if he was a dickhead taking advantage of a young girl, if he ever made it back to Denmark, if his parents didn’t approve of his decision… All I know for sure is he broke my mother’s heart, and that I refuse to actknowledge him as my father.

Meet Bitihotra Mohanty , known better as Bitti Mohanty, a computer engineer, son of a high-profile police officer and of course, a runaway rapist until getting caught[1]Under any days, a fellow like him is somebody one would expect seeing in a cubicle of an Indian IT sector building or working in some government office, and leading a more or less ordinary life.But then, this fellow decided to take up a nasty road for himself.Somewhere in 2006 while in Alwar, Rajasthan, Bitti went on to have an encounter with a certain German woman who was 26 years old back then. Both became friends, and later when the woman entered her room, Bitti forced himself in and raped the woman.The woman as expected, went to the police, and Bitti was arrested for the crime he committed, and a month later a fast-track court sentenced him to prison for about seven years in Alwar jail.However one day, Bitti claimed to suffer from anxiety, and further using alibi of his mother’s illness, his father, a DGP in Odisha, arranged a parole for the fellow, which the court gave. He was given a strict order to return within 15 days.He didn’t come back.Rather, he disappeared into thin air, and as it was to happen, father was declared complicit in his disappearance and was suspended from his post in police, only to be reinstated again and later retiring in 2010.However, no trace of Bitti was ever found. It was like he became a ghost and went missing in action, totally zero idea of where he could be.Somewhere in year 2012, a guy from Andhra Pradesh called Raghav Rajan, who was in desperate need of a job, approached State Bank of Travancore, a known public-sector bank of India. He was well-educated, and impressed the interviewers so much that they immediately allowed him in.Prior to joining the bank, Raghav was known for doing things ranging from completing engineering from a reputed private engineering college, followed by teaching in a school and later on doing MBA in another college and finishing with high aggregates.On a social level, Raghav was known to be a small-talker and someone who made few friends, and some knew the story that his parents are divorced. Somewhere Raghav even became friend with a woman in his workplace, but that didn’t end up that well and they broke up.Now here the interesting part begins.In wee hours of morning, at his home in Kannur which he shared with a colleague in the bank, Raghav opened the door after a few knocks, to get some interesting guests- the police.Following this, some rounds of question, and Raghav answered them as usual, and all was okay, until one of the police officer decided to take a photo of a fellow who went absconding in his parole, and showed him an anonymous letter which claimed to know a lot about him.That was where things went nasty for Raghav and he began to finally falter.The thing is, remember the woman I spoke of ? This woman Raghav was in love with , was someone whom he confided of his dark days . That woman, who still was ready to marry him, told the things to her parents, and the parents who were now alarmed beyond wits , decided to write two letters anonymously[2] , one to his bank and other to the Rajasthan police.Rest is self-explanatory. Raghav Rajan is Bitti MohantyFollowing this, Bitti was back to prison to serve rest of his jail term. Later on somewhere in 2017 he was released.One way or another, this case remained one of the toughest ones, not because of lack of evidence, rather because the criminal was a slimy one. Nonetheless, the police were finally able to get him.As they say, hands of law are indeed very long.Footnotes[1] The Rapist Who Nearly Got Away - Open The Magazine[2] Love affair led to Bitti Mohanty's arrest