The 2006 competitive examinations for India's civil services is notable for the number of young people from non privileged backgrounds who feature in the merit list. Again, for the first time, none from India's elite metros appeared in the top ten.
Topping the Union Public Services Commission examination is Revu Muthyala Raju, a farmer's son and a member of the so-called Other Backward Classes, whose amazing story we will chronicle later in this special series. No less incredible are the stories of the other toppers. Like K Nandakumar, a lorry driver's son, whose success story we chronicle today.
There is, prima facie, something condescending about such headlines; an unstated presumption, almost, that a lorry driver's son topping a competitive exam is a freak show of sorts.
K Nandakumar's parents don't think so; they see their son not as some freak of nature, but as a young man who knew what he wanted, and went after it, surmounting obstacles as chance, and circumstance, threw them in his path.
"He was always a serious student," mother K Lakshmi says. "During school days he never used to go out to play. He used to go for tuitions from six to eight in the morning and again from five to eight in the evening. During exams, he studied till midnight and beyond. And in between, he was in school -- so there really was no time to play."
Amusement, as we know it, was limited to a weekend game of cricket, of the limited variety -- limited, in this case, not by the number of overs, but the amount of time Nandakumar could spare for such frivolity: exactly an hour a week.
Nandakumar's academic curve is typical of the no-pain, no-gain formulation that increasingly defines the Indian student. Up until the 12th standard, he studied in the Namakkal Government South School, an institution where the medium of instruction was Tamil.
With 1,018 marks out of a possible 1,200 in his Higher Secondary exams, he went to the Pollachi Mahalingam College for an engineering degree.
Economic constraints, and the feeling that he needed to pitch in to help his father run the household, led to a six-month stint with a private company in Coimbatore. During this period, he attempted to work days, then study nights -- but when work, and the resultant fatigue, began impacting on his studies, he quit to focus on the Indian Administrative Service exams.
His first reaction was relief; that of his parents, pride
The first time he sat for the UPSC exams, he failed. On his second go-round, he ranked 350th -- a result that parlayed into a job with the Indian Railways.
Though his sights were set on the IAS, it wasn't easy spurning the job that had come his way -- his background just did not give him such luxuries.
Father M Karuppannan, of Mamarthapetti village in Tamil Nadu's Namakkal district, had stopped his own education at the SSC level, and went to work in the paddy fields of his native village.
That proved a dead end, so Karuppannan had joined a local lorry service, as a 'cleaner'. During that stint, which lasted two years, he learnt to drive and got his license; he then parlayed that into a job as a driver, and with a relatively steady job in hand, married Lakshmi. The couple had two children: Nandakumar, now 26 and Aravindkumar, now 20.
The household ran on Karuppannan's income; as the two boys moved up the academic rungs, expenses escalated and the family finances were stretched impossibly thin.
Given this, Nandakumar could not ignore the bird in hand that was the Railways job, while dreaming of the IAS job he hoped to land some day.
So he joined the Railways, and began the required training. Nights, he shrugged off the fatigue, and studied for yet another attempt at the big one.
This year marked his third -- and, to his mind, final, attempt. When the results came in, his first reaction was relief; that of his parents, pride.
He had ranked 30th all India; in his native Tamil Nadu, where he had taken the exam in his mother tongue, he topped the charts.
Lakshmi, seated in her home in Tiruchirappalli, where the family moved from Namakkal three years ago, now anticipates her son's homecoming. He has not, she says, managed to get leave for a trip home, after the results were announced; hopefully he will come sometime in June, and the family will celebrate.
'All our life, we have saved to educate our sons'
She is used to Nandakumar being away from home. When he was studying for his engineering degree, she says, he stayed in the hostel and only came home during holidays.
The mother paints a picture of a son focused, to the exclusion of all else, on studies, on the relentless march to his self-appointed goal of becoming an IAS officer. Even when he was in hostel, she says, all he did was study. He didn't like movies; he only had a small circle of friends.
Lakshmi is most happy for her husband. "He grew up facing great difficulties and I too come from a poor background. Thus we know the value of money and have always saved. We never waste money. All our life, we have saved to educate our sons."
Even now, the grind that she has been witness to, part of, for 27 years is far from ending: Karuppannan continues to drive his lorry, going wherever the load takes him, returning whenever he is done with his deliveries. There is, Lakshmi points out, the younger son still to worry about.
Aravindkumar is currently in his second year, working towards his own engineering degree. One year's worth of education costs Rs one lakh (Rs 100,000), she says -- and that is about all her husband can earn.
To put food on the table, Lakshmi invested in a sewing machine, and works from home. "I make about one hundred rupees a day, and that takes care of the household expenses," she says, with the smile of a woman who is proud of pulling her freight in the partnership she has with her husband.
They have a small two-room house -- but, she points out, it is their own. "My husband will continue to drive his lorry till our second son finishes college," she says.
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