S. Sagarikka, the 16-year-old author of `My Unskooled Year’, has travelled a lot, is an avid reader and knows about the stock market and is also in social media marketing. She was a volunteer in relief operations during the recent Chennai floods.

It was only last week that Sagarikka’s book was released at the Fifth Kala Sambhrama at Bengaluru. It is all about the year she quit school after her Grade X. Back to school, Sagarikka, who is from Trichy, tells Covaipost about her learning and unlearning.

”When I quit school for a year, my relatives discouraged me, though my parents were all support,” says the budding author.

She did not waste the year but tried to understand how the stock market works. She learnt about digital media, organic farming, making compost and also tried her hand at documentary-making.

She has taken maths, physics and chemistry in Grade XI and is yet to decide the course of her career.

“When I went back to school, I was happy that I acquired so much knowledge and knew about things I read in books.

Some of my friends were trying to mug up lines from books, not practically knowing what it was all about.”

Widely-travelled, Sagarikka has seen Tower Bridge of London, Madame Tussauds, the Gondolas of Venice, Louvre and the Eiffel Tower, the Alps, Tulip garden in Holland, the Pagodas of Bangkok, beaches of Pattaya, resorts of Bintan, Sentosa, Universal Studio in Singapore, Twin towers of Malaysia and the elephant sanctuary in Sri Lanka. She also explored the beauty of East India and the misty mountains of Kailash and Leh and the metros in India.

“I think everybody should try to learn everything, so that in case you don’t excel in one field, there is always something else to try and excel in,” she says.

Complementing this, her father S Sivakumar says, “In India parents try to control their children’s life and make them part of vicious cycle of school-college-job-marriage-kids. This has to change.”

He says the one year Sagarikka stayed away from school did make a drastic change in her. She now earns around Rs20,000 a month, selling compost and is also into social media marketing alongside her studies. “Her dedication should see her succeed in life,” he says with pride.