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| Urmila Devi flashes a victory sign in Kahalgaon on Friday. Picture by Amit Kumar |
At 70, Urmila Devi is quite frail to play the perfect host to people — known and unknown. But she looked overjoyed on Friday morning while narrating how the family struggled to bring up a youth like Vijay Prakash.
Vijay scored 99.03 percentile in Common Admission Test (CAT) to pursue his dream of a seat in a top IIM.
Neither his father Surendra Jaiswal, who used to have a poultry business, nor mother Lalita, a middle schoolteacher in Naugachhia, was present at the rented accommodation at Shyampurchak, around 262km southeast from Patna, but Urmila Devi said: “We had to sell our farmland 22 years ago for education of our children. The tradition of struggle goes on.”
Vijay’s elder brother, Ajay, has got a job in Bangalore after recently completing BTech from NIT, Surathkal. His elder sister, Kushbu, is a final-year student of BTech at Nagpur University.
Vijay passed from St Joseph’s school, Pakartalla, Kahalgaon before he went to DPS Ranchi for Plus Two. “Our efforts have yielded fruitfully,” she said as tears rolled down her wrinkled cheeks.
Asked how her son and daughter-in-law managed to influence their children for study in this nondescript place amid the family’s poor financial conditions, she simply said: “Where there is a will there is a way”.
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