Rudrajit Banerjee. (Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya)

Like most 19-year-olds, Rudrajit Banerjee loves playing para cricket, head banging to Led Zeppelin and reading PG Wodehouse. But unlike most 19-year-olds, he can flaunt Manmohan Singh as his passport to Cambridge.

The boy from Old Ballygunge Road is one of the three students in India to have bagged the first round of Manmohan Singh Undergraduate Scholarship(s) to fund their studies at the University of Cambridge. The unconditional offer to study natural sciences (physical) at Christ’s College, Cambridge, is a giant leap for the ex-student of The Cambridge School in Kalighat who wants to “someday” be a physicist.

“I applied to the university in September after I heard about this scholarship being launched. It’s a big deal for me that I’ve been named a scholar after the Prime Minister who is also from Cambridge,” says Rudrajit, who topped the country with a 93 per cent in A-Level physics and won the Cambridge Outstanding Achiever Award in 2008.

“I finished school in 2008 after which I applied to universities in the US and UK. Cambridge was the first university I heard from and it was obviously my first choice,” he recounts. Rudrajit studied at Calcutta International School before switching to The Cambridge School after his O-Level examinations. He won a Science Scholarship in Class XI with a school fee waiver for a year after scoring the highest in subjects related to science. And now he’s bagged the big one — the Manmohan Singh Undergraduate Scholarship providing “full funding, covering fees and maintenance”.

Son of a chartered accountant father and a mother who is a history professor at the University of Hyderabad, Rudrajit picks his grandfather as his inspiration. “No one in my family was formally into physics. But my grandfather Ramkrishna Banerjee, a sociologist, would always discuss physics with me. I enjoy particle physics and biophysics, especially understanding the mechanism of cells and DNA through physics.”

Again unlike most teenagers, Rudrajit is not addicted to the wired world. “I don’t like spending too much time surfing the Internet for the sake of it. I’m happier reading my books or thinking about things,” says the true Taurean.

Come October, he will have a lot to think about.