Nagpur/Gadchiroli: There is a struggle in human life. He who overcomes the struggle and goes ahead, he gets success in life. An inspiring story that proves this has come out from Gadchiroli in Vidarbha. What a journey of a starving boy in a remote area like Gadchiroli in the nineties who is now working as a scientist in the United StatesS. The boy’s name is Bhaskar Halami, according to a report in the local Sakal newspaper.
Bhaskar Halami, who was born in a tribal community in Chirchadi village of Kurkheda taluka, had a rough childhood. Halami’s father somehow managed to provide two meals a day to the family. The first five years after his birth, his parents managed by working as labourers on seasonal government projects, and tilling their small ancestral farm in Kurkheda Tehsil.
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Today, Halami works in Washington DC as a senior scientist at a clinical-stage RNA therapeutics biopharmaceutical company. He is doing research to check the things that are harmful to the body in medicines.
Halami has been living in America for almost ten years. He has completed his PhD in Organic or Medicinal Chemistry there. Although Halami currently has a six-figure salary in the US, he has never forgotten his struggle.
To simplify his work profile, Halami explains, “Basically, the process of making a medicine begins with me. We work at the molecular level to design the vehicle which will be used to carry the drug and the structure of the medicine itself.”
“I can never forget those hunger pangs, even though I was so young,” recalls Halami, with a deep sense of humility. “My parents now tell me that every year there were two or three months when we basically had nothing to survive on. No work to be had as labourers, there was no yield from the farm. That’s when they would forage in the forest for mahua flowers and survive on its by-products,” said Halami.
Bhaskar’s life changed when his father got employment as a cook at a residential ashramshala in Maoist-infested Kasansur. “It was 1982-83 and my father rode his bicycle the entire 100km to reach Etapalli tehsil, when an acquaintance told him about a job opening,” said Halami.
A few months later, the entire family undertook the same journey partly on foot and bike. “I had a two-year-old sibling, who was carried on the shoulder by my father. I too was young to walk long distances, so got carried most of the way,” said Halami.
The ‘exodus’ changed Halami’s life forever. “By default, I got formal education as we lived on the school campus. I was attending balwadi early morning and by noon I was attending Std I classes,” laughs Halami recalling those times. “Since all staff and students stayed on campus only, we had become like family. So nobody objected to me sitting in higher classes and fortunately I was good at studies, which helped me cope,” said Halami.
“My father used to tell me ‘education is our only ticket out of poverty’, and strongly reinforced that belief in me and even paid a lot of attention that I did not waver from my path,” recalls Halami.
Bhaskar moved to Gadchiroli town to complete Std XII and BSc, following which he moved to Nagpur for post-graduation from the prestigious Institute of Science. In 2003, he was appointed assistant professor at Laxminarayan Institute of Technology, Nagpur, and exactly 10 years later, he moved to the US for his PhD, and now he is employed there.
“Everyday you have to keep pushing yourself and learning new skills. It’s this relentless pursuit to improve and upgrade yourself that will give you an edge in professional life,” says Halami.
