The rain came down in sheets over the corrugated roofs of Dharampur, a forgotten town where puddles grew faster than dreams. Ravi Sen squatted on a broken wooden crate outside his mother's tea stall, watching water snake through the mud like rivers desperate to escape. He was seventeen, with calloused hands and a mind that never stayed still.
Inside, his mother poured steaming chai for the few laborers who could afford it. Ravi knew what each coin meant—three rupees meant rice tomorrow, ten meant kerosene for the lamp, twenty meant maybe, just maybe, a new notebook for his younger sister.
Ravi wanted more than notebooks. He wanted the world.
But in Dharampur, wanting was dangerous. People learned to be small, to accept. Ravi was different. He had questions, endless ones—why some men drove shiny cars through muddy streets, why some families had food waste while others had none, why luck never knocked on their rusted doors.
One evening, as the last customer left, Ravi asked his mother:
"Ma, what if we could change everything? What if I don't want to live and die here?"
She looked at him long and hard. "Then you'll have to fight the whole world, beta. And the world doesn't fight fair."
Ravi smiled. "Then I won't fight fair either."
And so began the journey of a boy who had nothing—except fire in his chest, and a refusal to stay small.