“The first 18 years, Bengaluru was a dream city for me. I remember when I was in my third grade, Mysore state had become Karnataka just then. If there was anything, I would go to Hubballi and my dad always told me that he would show me Bengaluru but the first time I came to this city was during my CET counseling.”

“No dream as such but I always wanted to study, be financially independent. As a girl, very few of them dreamt of something like that. My parents were encouraging that way and my mother would always tell me to learn how to lead a life for myself. During that period, the Emergency movement had started and some of the people I knew were fighting in the movement. I even remember my great grandmother telling how even women would ride horses back then. So, I had this general notion of wanting to do something for my country.”
.
“The first seven or eight years of Adamya Chetana, I felt I should stop this, every single year. I would tell this to everyone and ask them to continue if they wanted to. But one thing about my husband was that he spoke less but understood more. He would tell “Let’s see after March, call for a meeting”. I would call for a meeting and we would continue whatever we did with it. Maybe in the tenth year, I got that confidence that this would work but he had that confidence from the first year itself.”

“I had made conscious efforts to keep the political aspects away from what I did, from my kids and in the house generally. In the hindsight, I personally feel my husband and me, both could have been better parents if we gave a little more time to our kids but even, I got into working on Adamya Chetana. Maybe my kids might be thinking that if we had trained them, they would have gotten into politics but I realized it was not the ultimatum. I am Tejaswini Ananthkumar”