i was the kid who got called a liar.
third standard, i saw a computer for the first time. fifth standard, i told my friends some people in my family had gone abroad, out of india. they said i was making it up. even the teacher did not believe me. i was the one who saw things early and could not get a single person to stand where i was standing.
so i stopped opening my mouth in class.
what kept me alive was stories. animation series that showed me the world was bigger than my town. superhero comics. tamil novels. my mother's stories at night. school did not believe me. stories did.
years later i became a technical trainer, teaching students to write their first programs, html and css. i noticed the ones with good english got listened to. more vocabulary, more confidence, and the rest of us did not have the voice to question them. i was not from the context they studied in. so i went quiet again.
i know exactly what it costs a person to sit in a room and not be believed.
so i changed how i taught. i stopped handing them programs from the book, because they just copied what already existed. i asked them to find one problem in their own daily life. draw it on paper. then we built it up into code. suddenly they were not copying anymore. they were creating. their own problem, their own solution.
that is the thing i believe more than almost anything. a person's own context is where the learning lives. connect the tool to their real life and something switches on.
this year i learned it again, on myself.
at isdm, the school where i just finished 11 months of development management, i was in two peer groups. the first one understood me. sharp people, they got my thinking. but i could not be wrong in front of them. i kept the mask on, always prepared, always perfect, because if i slipped i thought something would break.
the second group did not let me hide. they kept pushing. what are you thinking, we cannot follow you, say it again. and one day i just put it down. i said, okay, i cannot say this perfectly, but here is what i am trying to do. i let myself be wrong out loud.
that was the whole difference. the first group understood me. the second group believed me enough that i could be wrong and still get built on, not dropped.
now that is the work i do. i help new student batches settle in. i design learning for other people. and i keep catching myself wanting to hand them the reason, the answer, the plan. but that is not the job.
the job is to make a room where a person can be wrong out loud, bring their own life in, and get built on instead of dropped.
next month i am presenting this idea at a conference, about building community inside smart cities. big room, formal words. but the whole argument is just this, learned the long way. a platform assumes you already have a voice. many people do not. you have to be believed first.
being believed is what switches a person on.
i know it from the inside. i was the kid nobody believed. i was the trainer silenced by better english. and the first time someone let me be wrong and stayed, i started creating from my own life instead of somebody else's.
you do not need to fix people. you need to believe them first. their context, their lens, their reason. that is where the potential is hiding.
who believed you before you believed yourself?
be kind, help people, trust muruga.
