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Education will end the caste system, says dalit IIT icon

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Caste conversions

NADIKUDE, Guntur: A small railway station on the Guntur-Secunderabad section, Nadikude, is bursting with commuters just before a superfast express makes a halt. A railway official calls out: "Oye, Spaceship, come here…" The bewildered passengers see a man running towards the official, and thereafter talking to him animatedly. It's just another day in the life of Spaceship, the man in question.Forty-three-year old Spaceship is the eldest son of late Communist leader Krosuri Veera Raghava Chary of Dachepalli area in the district. To bulldoze the caste system, Chary took an 'astronomical' route while naming his children. He named them Spaceship, Viking-II, Fusion, Space Shuttle and Shuttle Challenger — Viking-II being the name of his only daughter. "As a Communist leader, my father wanted that our names should not disclose our caste either in the school or in the society," said Spaceship, who is now a catering attendant with the local railway canteen.Spaceship was born a year after the erstwhile USSR launched its first unmanned spacecraft Soyuz in 1966. Chary, an admirer of the Soviet Union, named his son Spaceship (not Soyuz – just to make it more palatable and understandable for the locals).Chary was brought into politics by CPI leader and MLA Mandapati Nagireddy. He also managed to impress former Bengal chief minister Jyoti Basu by refusing to lend his voice to a Telugu patriotic song (Communist leaders should not be led by love for any place, region or country, Chary had said) at a party meeting held in Khammam district in the 1960s. He was also a regular at the residence of the then chief minister Kasu Bramhananda Reddy. At the insistence of Reddy, Chary joined ZP high school in Macherla (Guntur) as a science lab assistant. A zealous opponent of the rigid caste system in his native region, Chary married a dalit woman named Mariyamma and ensured that her surname, Bandla, is adopted by all their children. Chary retired as a junior assistant in 1994 and died in August, 2004.Ironically, all the children of Chary are spending their lives in hardship, struggling to make both ends meet, yet proud of their father. "The then chief minister Bramhananda Reddy was a frequent visitor to our thatched house, enroute to his home town Narasaraopet from Hyderabad. He used to visit us and have cup of tea with my father. But my father never sought a single favour from him," said another son, Space Shuttle Challenger. He is a tea vendor in trains.Chary's love for space and science, however, was not restricted by his ideology. The ardent communist did not hesitate to name his daughter Viking-II (a Nasa space craft to Mars in 1976). "Unlike many others of his ilk, Chary used to argue that a true Communist should think universal," said Anjaneyulu, an associate of Chary. The 37-year-old Viking-II is also a daily wage earner.Chary named his next son Fusion, perhaps keeping in mind that stars are powered by nuclear fusion in their cores. He named another boy Space Shuttle – after NASA's partially reusable low Earth orbital spacecraft system, the first test flight of which took place in 1981. Poverty forced Space Shuttle to suicide, but he left behind a trail – his six-year-old son named Space Shuttle Bulldozer.The youngest son of Chary is the 28-year old Space Shuttle Challenger. Chary did not hesitate to adopt this name even after this experiment of Nasa met with a disaster in 1986 (it broke apart seconds after launch).— How can I become a Patel?Interestingly, all Chary's children have valid ID cards with their 'space age' names. Their wives, however, got it easy, having to take Mariyamma's rather 'down-to-earth' surname Bandla.Chary had named two of his grandchildren too — Quasar and Sagan. "Teachers and friends used to pose many queries about my name and names of my family members when I was in school. Then I really did not know much. Now, I am enjoying my name," says Quasar, engineering student. He knows that Quasar is an object in the galaxy which is bright and full of "energy".