AJIT PRABHU CO-FOUNDER & CEO QUEST GLOBAL WRITES TO HIS PARENTS

I was going through a conversation with Ajit Prabhu, co-founder and CEO of Quest Global, in the Times of India of 12 August 2026.

I found  the letter he has written in it to his parents striking.

We had brought up our children providing them  a large number of comics. We knew reading alone would bring the best out of them. We furnished  the comics to get them cultivate extra reading. They did exactly that. A relative once recalled he had always been envious of them when he had seen them postured on top of  a mountain of comics.

They did not become engineers or doctors. But they learned how to negotiate life. They have struck out on their own individual paths. They still read. They manage themselves well.

I felt if they were going to write to us on how they had come up, they would certainly write  a similar letter like the one Ajit Prabhu wrote to his parents. It is  quoted.

"Dear Amma and Appa,

You wanted an engineer. I became one.But the engineer you see today wasn't shaped solely in classroom. He was made at home, nurtured by the two of you, long before I ever set foot in Karnataka University.

I carry my degrees with pride. But what I carry more deeply is something you gave me first, a love of learning and a sense of curiosity that was never asked to stay small.

I was the boy who paid 25 cents to read comics, he couldn't afford to buy and built a small business so I could read more of them. Those stories of Tintin crossing continents and heroes solving impossible problems gave a young boy from Hubbali the belief, anything was possible.

Here is what I have learned since then. The hardest problems in this world aren't solved by people who only know engineering. They're solved by Polymaths - people who have an interest in music, poetry, sports, history (and even comic books) and bring that passion into the lab with them. 

Curiosity is the engine. Discipline is the anchor.

As I think about the future generations, I know that the children who will solve the world's hardest problems are not the ones who will be asked to narrow themselves. They will be the ones who are allowed to dream big and have great aspirations. Just as you made space for the parts of me that did not fit neatly into a syllabus.

So when I think of the comics, cricket, the books that had nothing to do with my exams, I don't see wasted time. I see the making of a polymath engineer.

I see the two of you. 

Thank you for encouraging my curiosity and never making me feel my interests outside the classroom didn't matter. I am who I am, because of you. A proud creative polymath engineer.

With all my love, your son.

Sd/-

Ajit Prabhu
Co-founder &CEO, Quest Global Engineer
and everything that made him one"

How wonderful it is, when the children recognise and acknowledge the contribution of parents in their upbringing.