The Prize That Shaped
My first encounter with this great personality came rather unexpectedly, sometime in the early 1970s.
A friend and I had won first prize in a design competition hosted by VITM. Among the things that came with the prize was a book: Memoirs of My Working Life.
I was still too young to really know what engineering meant, let alone what it took to become an innovator.
But I began reading.
And somewhere between those pages, I found an engineer to admire and a path worth following.
The prize may have brought the book into my hands, but the man behind it slowly entered my thinking. His influence only grew with the years.
Without quite realising it, I began walking the path he had illuminated: to imagine, question, design, build and solve.
Eventually, engineering stopped being just my profession.
It became a way of life.
It gave me the courage to become a hands-on entrepreneur, to create rather than merely consume, and to keep asking, “What else is possible?”
That little book from my childhood never really left me.
Over the years, Memoirs of My Working Life became more than a memoir. It became a guide, a philosophy and a quiet source of inspiration. Perhaps that is why I have so often gifted it to aspiring engineers and entrepreneurs.
Looking back today, I wonder whether that first prize was really the prize.
Perhaps the greater prize was the book that came with it, and the life it quietly helped shape.
If I am what I am today, a significant part of the credit belongs to the man whose footsteps I began following before I understood where they might lead.
Sir M. Visvesvaraya.
On his birth anniversary, I bow in gratitude to a man I came to know through his life and work, learnt from through the years, and whose blessings I still feel as I continue along this journey.
Engineering, after all, is not merely about what we build.
It is about what we make possible.
Happy Engineer’s Day to every engineer who continues to imagine, question, create and build.
~ mahe
