PATNA: Time was when Suresh Ram and his parents would live on "bhuja" (dry, fried rice) for days. This son of a landless farmer of Sitamarhi's Adhkani village, however, struggled his way to do civil engineering from IIT-Delhi and recently bagged a job in an infrastructure consultancy firm with a pay package of Rs 6 lakh per annum.
Suresh's journey to success was not easy. He was all of ten years when he lost his mother. However, his father Chhatar Ram, whose earning was not only meagre but also irregular, did not let him drop out of his Kendriya Vidyalaya in Sitamarhi.
While in ISc, Suresh had a chance meeting with a classmate's IITian brother. Impressed with Suresh's academic records, he counselled him to take the IIT-JEE. "He said, 'IIT will change your life for the better for good'," Suresh recalled and added life for him became a bigger challenge from that day onwards.
The teen, who had not heard of the IIT-JEE till then and who had never gone out of Sitamarhi, started dreaming big. "There is no electricity in my village. I studied before a lantern till late into night after helping my father in fields during the day," recalled Suresh.
The boy would then wash his uniform almost every day, except during the rains, as he had only one uniform which he also wore at home. Once on the school campus, however, he was a pampered prince of sorts. "My teachers used to take special interest in me because I could solve even complex mathematical problems," he said and added it was his maths teacher who made him realize that he was good in maths.
"Cracking the IIT-JEE was a matter of life or death for me," Suresh told TOI and added that even though he couldn't score high marks in Class XII and failed it to make to IIT in 2005, he was undeterred. "These were the saddest days of my life. I was nervous, almost depressed. But I decided to move on with a stronger determination," he said.
He was all smiles as his name figured quite prominently in the list of successful JEE examines the very next year. "Hard work pays after all," Suresh told TOI and thanked his teachers, including Super-30's Anand Kumar, for their help to him when he needed it the most.
alokknmishra@gmail.com
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