The Long Fall of Byju Raveendran: From Kerala Schoolteacher to Singapore Jail Sentence

In

a coastal village in north Kerala, somewhere between the mouth of the Valapattanam river and the Arabian Sea, a boy once skipped school to play football. His parents, both government-school teachers, did not always know where he was. Forty-six years later, the world does not know where he is either. Byju Raveendran, the man that boy became, was sentenced to six months in jail by a Singapore court this week. His whereabouts, according to the reports, are currently unclear. The journey between those two disappearances is the story of an Indian decade.Also Read: How An Indian Freedom Fighter Hiding In A Shinjuku Bakery Gave Japan Its Most Loved Curry

The Boy Who Loved Mathematics and Skipped Class

Azhikode is the kind of village that does not appear in profiles of famous founders until the founder makes it famous. Raveendran was born there on 5 January 1980, to a physics teacher and a mathematics teacher who taught at the same Malayalam-medium government school he attended. He sat in his mother's classes. He learned mathematics from his father at home. He played cricket, football, and badminton, often skipping class to do so. Friends from those years remember a boy who asked questions adults found difficult to answer, who could estimate the speed of a passing train by counting electric poles, who was quietly certain of things he had not yet proved.

The Engineer Who Did Not Want to Be One

The conventional path took him to mechanical engineering at the Government Engineering College in Kannur, and after that to a service engineer's job at a multinational shipping firm. The conventional path bored him. On a holiday from work in 2003, he helped some friends prepare for the CAT, the entrance examination for India's most prestigious management schools. He took the test himself, on a whim, and scored a perfect hundredth percentile. He did it again later. He never joined the IIMs. He quit the shipping company. Friends remember him standing on rooftops in Bengaluru in those early years, teaching small groups of students who had heard about the engineer who could explain mathematics in a way that finally made sense.

The Teacher Who Filled Stadiums

The rooftops became classrooms, the classrooms became halls, the halls became stadiums. By the late 2000s, Raveendran was teaching CAT preparation to crowds of more than a thousand students at a time, sometimes ten thousand. The Indian education industry had never seen anything like it. In Bengaluru, he met a student named Divya Gokulnath who had come to attend his classes. She stayed. They married. She became his co-founder when, in 2011, they built the company that would eventually carry his name into every English-speaking household in urban India. He had become, by then, what every middle-class Indian parent dreams a son might be. A teacher who had made a fortune by teaching.Also Read: Who Is Giampaolo Tomassetti, The Italian Painter Who Spent Twelve Years Painting The Mahabharata?

The Founder Who Lost His Way

Somewhere between the stadiums and the billion-dollar valuations, the teacher receded and the founder took over. Those who knew Raveendran in his early years describe a man who began to believe his own legend, who was surrounded by people who only told him what he wanted to hear, who confused his confidence with his judgment. The aggressive sales practices that fuelled the company's growth began to draw complaints. Parents who had taken loans to buy Byju's tablets for their children found they could not afford the instalments. Teachers who had once admired him began to leave. The press that had crowned him began to ask harder questions. The company's accounts grew late, then later, then alarming.

The Founder Who Will Not Come Home

The legal cases came in waves, then in floods, in Delhi and Bengaluru and Delaware and now Singapore. Raveendran has denied wrongdoing throughout, blamed lenders, blamed circumstance, and blamed everyone except himself. He has not been seen in public in months. His wife and co-founder, the woman who once sat in his Bengaluru classroom and changed his life, has stayed almost entirely silent. The Kannur school where he learned his mathematics still stands. His parents, who taught him to ask questions, are old now. The boy who once skipped class to play football has spent two decades running, in different ways, from different things. This week, a Singapore court told him to stop running. Whether he will is the only question that still matters.