I grew up in a village of the Sahyadri mountain region and went to a government common school. My father who was a self-taught man knew Sanskrit and English and read Gandhi"s Harijan translating it to Kannada to his village friends. I knew my Mahabharata and Ramayana not reading them but seeing Yakshagana performances and itinerant Harikatha narrators. I came from an orthodox family but read Shivaram Karanth borrowing the books from a village library which got all the publications of the adult literacy council of the Mysore State. I walked with my school mates some five kilometers everyday bare footed on a stony cart track wearing a shirt and short pants to the school. When I cam back home I had to change into my orthodox clothes hanging the shirt and pants on a nail on the wall. I have written recently that I became a writer in my language for I wore shirt and pants to my school for in my orthodox dhoti and upper garment I belonged to a narrow world of my caste. The school opened up my world for I sat there with all boys and girls who belonged to all castes in the village. These days in expensive private schools the children of the rich don't have an opportunity to expand their experience by coming to know of the rich life and culture of the poor of this country. This will create two countries, the India of the rich and the Bharath of the Poor. I want common schools empowered again so that all the children of this country have an opportunity to share their joy of learning together and also learning from one another in a mixed school. They should learn in the medium of the language of the region and also learn to speak English for it brings about a sense of equality among the children of the rich and the poor. Our teachers in the High School were graduates from either Mysore or Bangalore and they brought new ideas to us. I remember I was ten years old in 1942 and I partook in the morning protest marches singing patriotic songs and listening to the stories of our leaders Gandhi, Nehru and Bose. The teachers talked to us of electricity and magnetism although I saw a burning electric bulb when I was fifteen and with great excitement saw a moving train just like the two children in Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali,. But our minds were full of curiosity to know the modern scientific world. We had also begun to question rigid orthodoxy and traditional beliefs. Gandhi had changed the countryside and I knew some rural friends of my father who were followers of Gandhi and went to jail and wore only Khadi. The town where I did my high school had received him before I was born and my elders talked about him and some even criticised him for he never went to a temple which did not allow entry to Harijans. I remember my head master in High School, a great scholar and composer of music and a Sanskrit scholar. His name was Shri Yoga Narasimhan and he was the father of Sri Sharada Prasad who was Press Secretary to both Nehru and Indira Gandhi, and a student hero of the Quit India movement. My head master taught us to chant the verses in the Geetha that was dear to Gandhiji. He even read to us famous scenes fro Shakespeare translating him into Kannada, our medium in the school. He never underrated his village students and talked to us of everything that engaged his interest. .The beautiful little town Tirthahalli where I had this education gave me all my characters for my future writing. They got transformed in my imagination. In our small village, an agrahara on the bank of the Tunga River where Brahmins lived in two rows of houses we began to publish a hand written magazine also. We circulated this in our village and I was surprised years later when I came across a battered copy that it had articles from us in three languages: Sanskrit, English and Kannada. Some of us who took Sanskrit lessons in a monastery of our village took pride in writing in Sanskrit on modern topics. An unforgettable experience for me was taking part in a literacy drive inspired by my head master. A boy who cooked in the temple learnt to read and write from me and went back to school and ended up a primary school teacher. An orthodox Zamindar once remarked to my father: 'Look your son thinks he is in the 21st century. Don't let him spoil other kids who work in our houses'. Luckily my father was proud of what I was growing into under the influence of the times. I was allowed to have a cropped head while the other boys of my caste had to hide their tuft of hair on a ritually shaved head. A cropped head for a long time symbolized that you were modern and it took courage to flaunt a cropped head. These days the reverse is true!