Disabled student all set to graduate from IIT-Madras

Naresh was born in Teeparru a small village in Andhra Pradesh, on the banks of the river Godavari. His father Prasad was a lorry driver and his mother Kumari, a housewife. Both of them are uneducated but wanted their children to climb great heights in life and they knew the importance of education. Naresh had a loving elder sister Sirisha who has played a great role in molding Naresh’s life to what it is today.

Naga Naresh Karuturi 

On January 11, 1993 at the age of eight everything changed. He was travelling in a Lorry to his grand mother’s house for the holidays and he was sitting next to the door. Naresh, always curious, was playing with the door latch when suddenly the door flew open and he fell out. His legs were cut by the iron rods of the lorry as he fell.

Then family moved to Tanuku where he was admitted to a missionary school called St. Franscis de Sales High School. In this School he studied up to 10^th grade.

After 10^th grade in missionary school he wanted to join Gowthan Junior College and started preparing for IIT_JEE

Despite the difficult initial year and the adjustment that took a toll on his grades - Naresh’s score was not that great overall - but he was 4^th in the disabled category. This propelled him to join IIT in Madras to study Computer Science. At college, he found another supportive friend and role model in Karthik. Karthik ensured that Naresh got a room with an attached bathroom and helped him navigate classes, school, and living.

Professor Pandurangan, under whose guidance Naresh works, says the latter never expects special care and is always pleasant. “He is the gem of our lab,” says the professor, who heads the theoretical science laboratory.

Naresh, who has always been interested in algorithms and graph theory, will join Google R&D in Bangalore as a software engineer on July 28. "It (the selection process) was an elaborate one, but I got through. I told you, I am always lucky," he sums up.