Whenever he was asked for the secret of his professional success Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would say only one thing, "I am what I am because of my education." He has often thanked his family for ensuring that he went right up to college and then had opportunities to win many scholarships that finally helped him get a PhD from Oxford University.
Manmohan Singh was born into a family of modest means in the village of Gah in Pakistan. For the first 12 years of his life he lived there, a village which had no electricity, no school, no hospital, no piped drinking water. He walked for miles every day to school and studied at night in the dim light of a kerosene lamp. When asked once why he had poor eyesight he confessed that it was because he had spent hours reading books in that dim light.
