Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Vishnu Ramkrishna Karkare was born of Marathi speaking Karhade Brahmin or Chitpavan parents, which is about all he knew of his early days. He did not even know the date of his birth, because both his parents had died when he was a small child, and he had been brought up in the Northcote Orphanage in Bombay, which put down his approximate date of birth as 1910. As a boy he had received little or no schooling even though later he taught himself to read and write Marathi and Hindi. At the age of ten he began to work as a tea shop drudge in Bombay, and later move to Poona.