There's a version of this story every Bihari household has, in one form or another: a plate of thekua on the table, and a parent using it as leverage. Ours is usually about a stubborn child and a stubborn exam. This one belongs to a boy in Darbhanga who grew up to teach an entire country physics.
Professor H.C. Verma is best known today as the author of Concepts of Physics — the two-volume book that has sat on the desk of nearly every serious IIT-JEE aspirant in India for over three decades. What's less known is how ordinary his beginnings were, and how much a plate of thekua had to do with the rest.
An average student, by his own account
Verma wasn't the prodigy his later reputation suggests. Through most of school, he saw little reason to study beyond the bare minimum. His father, Ganesh Prasad Verma, was largely self-taught himself: he'd left formal schooling after barely a month, but taught himself mathematics and went on to start his own village school, teaching every subject in it alone. When young Verma struggled at his first school, his father didn't scold him — he simply found him a better one and told him he had it in him.
It was his mother who found the method that actually worked. In ninth grade, she struck a deal: sit with your books for an hour, and you get a thekua. That was the entire bargain — not "read for an hour," just sit with the books nearby. It didn't take long for boredom to do what discipline couldn't. Within minutes of sitting still, he'd find himself actually reading. One hour became a habit. That habit, over months, became something closer to real interest.
What that habit turned into
It's easy to draw a straight line in hindsight, but the shape of Verma's later work does trace back to that one household rule: break something intimidating into a small, doable unit, and let real interest grow from there. That's more or less the philosophy behind Concepts of Physics itself — eight years in the writing, built not to overwhelm students with formulas but to make each idea feel intuitive before it felt technical.
The book became the standard reference it is today almost by word of mouth. But Verma didn't stop at writing it. He went on to design over 600 simple physics experiments using everyday, easily available materials — the kind of thing a school in a small town could actually afford to run, not just one with a fully funded lab. He personally trained more than 8,000 school teachers across the country through outreach programs, and quietly supported the education of students who couldn't otherwise afford it. In 2021, the Government of India recognised the scale of that work with a Padma Shri.
Verma has spoken since about how little he felt the hardship of a modest upbringing, precisely because there was so much else in it that mattered more. As he put it in one interview, "saara jeevan itne acche se guzar gaya ki pata hi nahi chala ki kasht kahan hai" — life passed so well that he never quite noticed where the hardship was.
Why we're telling this story
We make thekua for a living, so it would be easy to tell this story as if the sweet itself built a scientist. It didn't. A mother's patience did, a father's belief did, and a boy's own stubbornness eventually turned into discipline. The thekua was just what made the first hour bearable.
But that's exactly why the story stayed with us. In most Bihari homes, thekua was never really "just a snack" — as we've written before in why Kasaar thekua tastes like home. It's what shows up at exactly the moment someone needs a little more will to keep going — during Chhath's long fasts, during a hard exam season, during a bad week away from home. It's a small, unglamorous thing doing a fairly large job.
That's the same reason we called this brand Ek Bite, Ek Yaad — one bite, one memory. For Professor Verma, that memory is apparently still a thekua-shaped one, decades and a Padma Shri later.
Sources: The Better India; Sagar Wadhwa's interview with Prof. H.C. Verma, published on Substack.
Still the same idea, in the same handmade, small-batch way — pure desi ghee, real jaggery, no preservatives. Order Kasaar Thekua now.
