Later on, in my college days, the struggle for a job haunted me. For a while, I took up a part-time job as a teacher in a private tuition centre, also called a “parallel college,” which turned out to be a great financial relief when I studied for my Master of Arts (M.A.) in Economics. The pay of Rs15 each per day for the Saturday-Sunday weekend classes was trifling. But, it did pay for my daily 40km commuting from Kilimanoor, where I stayed, to my post-graduate classes in SN College, Kollam. Despite all that struggle, I passed my MA with a second rank from the University of Kerala.
That was my earliest foray into the field of education, which was not to continue further, as somewhere along the way I was drawn to the banking sector. I started applying for banking jobs, posting job applications for likely vacancies, not knowing whether they existed or not. That was what helped me find my first proper job as a clerk with an Indian scheduled bank by name Dhanalaxmi Bank. The same modus operandi helped me land a job as an officer with the Karnataka Branch, headquartered in Mangalore, India.
However, I strongly desired to enter the education field. It was the absence of a father figure in my early growing up years and the resultant hard knocks that I took during my school and college years that ingrained in me a yearning to be involved in education. Hence, after the part-time job as a teacher in a parallel college, I cherised the desire for being in the field of education. I applied for a government college lecturer’s post and appeared for a test conducted by the Kerala Public Service Commission, the government recruiter. But alas, that was not to be, because of a silly reason – I failed to sign across my passport photo that was affixed on my test paper. Thus, that desire remained unfulfilled.
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