I was born and brought up in Chennai, where I attended a school called Sishya. I studied there from kindergarten to Standard XII and so I have a lot of memories from my schooldays. But I didn’t like school too much as it meant staying away from the racing tracks. It was only towards the end of my schooldays that I began to love my alma mater.

Would you believe it if I said that I attended my first race when I was only six months old? I did. However, it was only during my early teens that I began frequenting the racetracks. Quite interestingly, the matches that I attended were the ones in which our team did well. Soon I became the lucky mascot for JK Tyres and so they began sponsoring my airfares too.

Even as a kid I was crazy about racing cars. Now when I look back, I remember getting cars as gifts. They were all racing cars. Till the age of seven, my birthday cake would invariably be in the shape of a racing car. Not happy with having car-shaped cakes, I even got a car-shaped bed designed for myself when I was five.

We are two brothers and my younger sibling was the naughtier of the two of us. I was the quiet and boring type. When I ask my mother what I was like as a kid, she tells me that I was born a 40-year-old. Apart from sports cars, I liked going out, reading Tintin comics and browsing through sports magazines. I got my first kart car on my sixth birthday and a motorcross bike when I was 13 years old.

I learnt driving in my neighbours’ backyard, where I actually got bumps constructed to emulate the racing tracks. I loved driving there till one day I decided to test drive my motorcross bike across the grounds of the Annamalai University. Initially I was not barred from driving in the campus. However, I chose to drive it across their field one day when an inter-college cricket match was going on. That was the last time I was allowed to do it. It remains the naughtiest thing I ever did.