Coming out tops, every time

MR Anand

When I was in high school, there was a boy named Varadharajan in my class. For six years, till he wrote his SSLC public exam, no one could dislodge him from the first-rank holder’s pedestal. He was a timid boy, and always sat on the front bench facing the teacher’s desk. He never laughed, only smiled even when it was very funny. He had no time for the playground. He spent much of his time travelling between his home at Vandalur and school at Kodambakkam, covering a distance of about 40 km by trains daily. Those days, in the '60s, suburban electric trains did not go beyond Tambaram.

Every day, Varadharajan would get up at 5 in the morning, finish homework, take bath, dress up, pick up the two-storied tiffin box containing his breakfast of three idlis and lunch of curd rice and hurry to the station to catch Kanchipuram Passenger which would fussily steam in at 8 am. Since the train did not halt at Kodambakkam, Varadharajan had to get down at Tambaram and continue his journey in the suburban electric train. While returning home from school, he had to alight at Tambaram and spend nearly two hours on its platform bench before boarding the Kanchipuram train to reach Vandalur. It was this stopover which enabled him to become and remain a first-rank holder. He utilised the time to study and master his lessons. When students of our class XI dispersed on the eve of the SSLC exam, we gave a special handshake to Varadharajan. I personally foresaw a very bright, distinguished future for him. ‘He will certainly become a doctor or an engineer or a collector,’ I predicted.

After leaving the school I forgot all about my school and those who studied with me. One day, my father, a retired teacher of the same school, returning from a neighbourhood bank, told me that he had met Vandalur Varadharajan. ‘Do you know what he is doing? He is working as a railway ticket collector!’ he added. It was a big disappointment to me to learn that Vandalur, whom I expected to become a District Collector, had ended up as a ticket collector. ‘To become a ticket collector he need not have spent painful hours poring over his textbooks sitting on a railway platform bench,’ I said.

‘There you are wrong. Due to family circumstances he could not pursue his college studies. He took up the humble railway job to support his parents and siblings. He might not have become a collector or a doctor. But he helped his bright younger brother become an IAS officer and his brighter younger sister an MBBS doctor.’

Vandalur proved that he was not only a first-rank student, but also a first-class human being.