My Personal Hero: Priyamvada Natarajan on Martin Schwarzchild (and Mr. Carter)

I was an inquisitive child and my parents encouraged me and actively cultivated my curiosity. My first truly independent adventure, when I was 10, was to secretly take a public bus on my own to the Delhi Public Library. Given how quickly I was wolfing books down, I didn’t want to pester my parents to drive me there every other day. So I marched off, got on the bus, barely able to manage my bulging knapsack, to return books and check out new ones. A kind stranger, who later became a family friend, followed me home one day and admonished my parents for a letting a young child go unsupervised on a bus.

The person who fueled my reading,