Desire, belief, and expectation - these were the three mighty forces…

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Once I settled down at the Schwartz High School, Ramanathapuram, the enthusiastic fifteen-year-old within me re-emerged. My teacher, Iyadurai Solomon, was an ideal guide for an eager young mind that was yet uncertain of the possibilities and alternatives that lay before it. He made his students feel very comfortable in class with his warm and open minded attitude. He used to say that a good student could learn more from a bad teacher than a poor student from a skilled teacher. During my stay at Ramanathapuram, my relationship with him grew beyond that of teacher and pupil. In his company, I learnt that one could exercise enormous influence over the events of one's own life. Iyadurai Solomon used to say, "To succeed in life and achieve results, you must understand and master three mighty forces-desire, belief, and expectation." Iyadurai Solomon, who later became a Reverend, taught me that before anything I wanted could happen, I had to desire it intensely and be absolutely certain it would happen. To take an example from my own life, I had been fascinated by the mysteries of the sky and the flight of birds form early childhood. I used to watch cranes and seagulls soar into flight and longed to fly. I was, convinced that one day I too, would soar up into the skies. Indeed, I was the first child from Rameswaram to fly. Iyadurai Solomon was a great teacher because he instilled in all the children a sense of their own worth. Solomon raised my self-esteem to a high point and convinced me, the son of parents who had not had the benefits of education, that I too could aspire to become whatever I wished. "With faith, you can change your destiny," he would say. One day, when I was in the fourth form, my mathematics teacher, Ramakrishana Iyer, was teaching another class. Inadvertently, I wandered into that classroom and in the manner of an old-fashioned despot, Ramakrishna Iyer caught me by the neck and caned me in front of the whole class. Many months later, when I scored full marks in mathematics, he narrated the incident to the entire school in the morning assembly. "Whomsoever I cane becomes a great man! Take my word, this boy is going to bring glory to his school and to his teachers." His praise quite made up for the earlier humiliation!

Wings of Fire, Abdul Kalam.