You can call it a quirk of fate. Given my Hindi-medium schooling background, I wasn’t conversant in English even till a few years back. Today I train students appearing for GRE, CAT, TOEFL , etc.
During my days at Regional Engineering College, Kurukshetra, I realised that the only way I could overcome my diffidence was to learn English words. And what better way than to learn all the words in Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary.
Around that time I came across Tony Buzan’s Master Your Memory. In 1997, I started by memorising 100- digit numbers and went on to learn nearly 80,000 words from the dictionary. After graduating in 1999, I worked for two years but my heart was not in it. I wanted to develop some motivational courses, turn memory trainer and branch out on my own. In 2001, I quit my job. My aim was to sell teaching modules based on the power of memory.
I overestimated the potential of my idea. There were hardly any students. I took classes in various colleges to meet my expenses. I had spare time to develop vocabulary building modules using mnemonics, movie and news clippings, animation, etc.
We needed an achiever’s face to sell the programme. That’s when I got the idea to try for the Limca Book of Records (LBR) for memorising the most number of words from the Oxford dictionary. In January 2002, I created a record and my name entered the LBR. That same year my book Vocabulary@100 Words per Hour was published. In both cases there was fame but not enough money.
I moved to Delhi and set up Mahavir Jain Academy in 2002. The response was overwhelming. I now run three more centres. In 2006-7 my turnover was Rs 1 crore. It’s been a long journey… from Palwal, a small town in Haryana, where after our father died, my siblings and I had to roll out agarbattis and bind books to make ends meet.
—As told to Rajshree Kukreti
