TRUE LIES: The 17-year-old holds up the controversial certificate as his family looks on pic: rajesh kumar

Someone has tried very hard, but hasn?t quite managed to tear it all off. Under a flyover in Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, among adverts of sex clinics and notices of admissions to distance learning programmes, are the scraps of what was once a tacky fluorescent-green poster. It says: Desh ka gaurav, Saurabh. Gyan Peethika ka chhatra NASA pahucha (The country?s pride, Saurabh. Gyan Peethika?s student has reached NASA), accompanied by two blackened pictures of Saurabh Singh and his school.

Seventeen-year-old Sau-rabh Singh?s life is very much like his poster now ? up on the wall, and then defaced. It is an endless row of journalists writing and then unwriting his glorious story. It is making the most of the scraps of dignity that he has left, after the world knows him as an unabashed story-teller.

Until two weeks ago, the media was awestruck at the boy?s topping the ?International Scientist Discovery? examination supposedly conducted by the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to discover the brightest scientific minds on earth. People gushed, as they did when they talked ? in the same breath ? about Aishwarya Rai presenting awards at the Oscars.

Just like last year, they talked about actress Mallika Sherawat posing for Playboy, or the very same Ash getting a part in a Bond movie. Until it was discovered that all of this was just unchecked reporting to feed people that one magic formula which makes headlines in India ? an aye from the West.

?Globalisation has already put India in the world?s consciousness. But that is not enough. Now, the normative standards of anything in India, be it the arts, education or products, are whether it is approved in the West,? says Yogendra Singh, sociologist and professor emeritus of Delhi?s Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Star struck

But Rai and Sherawat can live through rumours of international stardom without losing a manicured nail; for the likes of Saurabh Singh, the son of a local college teacher, the discovery of a hoax means the end of a dream, however fabulous. ?I just don?t know if I am ever going to be able to prove my story,? head down, Saurabh rues, the entire biradari of the Narhi Nagra village and the two police officers looking on.

It hasn?t been easy to convince Saurabh to finally come out and speak. His village supports him, they have even held a dharna on the road to protest the state government?s retraction of a prize money of Rs 5 lakh, announced before the hoax was called.

Members of his extended family stand guard in front of his house to fob off unwanted visitors. Two policemen have been stationed at his door to monitor his activities, although there has been no action taken against Saurabh yet. ?He is our own son. We will not let him come to harm,? says Ganesh Rai, the police officer on duty.

In a village that hasn?t seen cable television, the Internet, or a mobile phone connection, and has only just heard of NASA from Hindi newspapers, it might have been easy for Saurabh to stake his claim to fame. The media reported last month that he had topped an international test which he said was conducted by NASA in Oxford this January.

The media felicitated him, the President wished to meet him, UP legislators awarded him ? and his village gushed with pride. No one from Narhi Nagra has ever been to a foreign country. ?Saurabh is the first from our village,? says Sanjay Tiwari, one of the volunteer guards.

Clearly, Narhi Nagra believes in its son. Some 30 villagers stare wide-eyed as Saurabh retells his tale of his ?trip? to London. In earlier interviews, he had talked about taking the domestic Indian Airlines to London and meeting the British Queen at the Buckingham Palace. He doesn?t do that any more ? now he speaks about boarding an Air India plane from Delhi, of Oxford University with its wide arches, of red London buses, of foreign cars in the parking lots, of the Buckingham Palace Hotel where he stayed.

In his denim shirt and trousers, curly hair and bright eyes which stare directly at you, Saurabh tells a story that his village folk deem credible ? even if it?s been denied by NASA. His story is riddled with big gaps. Like the fact that he doesn?t have a passport (?V.K. Bansal, who took me to London, did all the paperwork?), like his having met no students at the Oxford campus (?Our five-day exam was conducted in the after hours, between four and seven?).

He still insists that NASA chief Sean ?Keefe (?Cin K. Kif?) awarded him the certificate at a tea party. The certificate itself is tell-tale, with its poor printing quality and spelling and grammatical errors, and the signatures of Saurabh and ?Cin K. Kif? in very similar handwriting, apparent even to the untrained eye.

Simple at heart

But the strangest part of the Saurabh saga is the fact that the boy has never been caught playing a prank. His villagers call him an introvert and a bookworm. His father Ramkeshwar Singh says his son is the best a parent can have, despite his mediocre academic performance: he secured 56 per cent marks in his secondary examinations last year.

At Gyan Peethika School in the nearby Van Vihar village ? where he stayed in the hostel ? his teachers and the hostel warden say they never had any complaints. ?He was a dehati (rural) boy, and wasn?t very smart,? says office administrator Nagendra Rao, adding that Saurabh had no knowledge of computers.

But dreams are not difficult to weave, even in this forgotten Ballia village. All around Saurabh, the search is on for demigods ? the best singers hidden in mofussil towns, actors from the back of beyond, and a child genius from a small town. You can be unknown today and a star tomorrow ? as the shy Indian Idol Abhijeet Sawant, who is all set to go for a holiday to Switzerland, learnt just two weeks ago.

Not surprisingly, says Jitendra Nagpal, consultant psychiatrist at Delhi?s Vidyasagar Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, there is often a tendency for ?a repressed aspect of an adolescent?s behaviour to emerge theatrically?. In the absence of role models in India, students often emulate Western standards of acceptance, such as funky clothes, graffiti and Americanese in language. ?Saurabh might be seeking a similar kind of pseudo-recognition,? says Nagpal.

The ways of the West, says Yogendra Singh, are a benchmark for Indians. ?Post-Independence, there was a tendency to challenge the West, to measure up to it in sociological and material standards. Now, because of the fast movement between the two cultures, the old barriers are breaking down, and acceptance by the West has gained primacy instead.?

Few years back, the entire country rose to the occasion when the film Lagaan was nominated for the Oscars. This year, a British documentary film made headlines after Oscar night merely because it was based on an Indian subject. In sports, Sania Mirza and Narain Karthikeyan are heroes because they have made it to the bottom half of the world list.

Point counterpoint

Therefore, a nation which got up at six in the morning to watch the Oscars, just so they?d get a glimpse of Aishwarya Rai on the world?s highest cinematic stage, was as disappointed as by the fact that Saurabh hadn?t actually gained an entry to one of the West?s most revered institutions. The entire story, it turned out, was just a hoax that Saurabh had cooked up for his family and friends. The boy would never have thought that his story would be picked up by a local newspaper, and then by the entire media.

His ex-principal, Reena Singh of Gyan Peethika, who allegedly said it was because of the teaching methods at Gyan Peethika that Saurabh ?achieved? what he claimed to have, won?t have anything to do with him now. His hostel warden, Ram Kripal, says that he never for a moment doubted that Saurabh had gained an entry. ?I am really saddened by the whole state of things,? he says.

Saurabh, for his part, still sticks to his story. After passing his secondary exams, he went to Kota, Rajasthan, to prepare for the IIT-JEE exam at a coaching institute there, while having taken admission in a distance-learning course to prepare for his higher secondary exams, a pre-requisite for taking the IIT entrance test. ?I stayed there in a rented room alone. I paid Rs 38,000 for one year?s coaching,? says Saurabh.

But he insists that V.K. Bansal, the founder of another coaching institute called Bansal Classes, would hold a special session on mathematics for a few boys for which he didn?t charge a fee, and which Saurabh attended. Bansal ? who suffers from severe disability and moves in a wheelchair ? has denied that.

Saurabh says that one day, Bansal said that an examination would be conducted by NASA, and those selected would get to be a member of the US agency. Saurabh says he initially took a preliminary test in Jaipur. Bansal then called him in November to say that he and three others ? from Sultanpur, Mumbai and Mangalore ? had been selected to go to London for the final test, the costs for which the Indian government would bear.

Dreams die young

?I wanted to study aeronautics at IIT Mumbai or Chennai,? says Saurabh, ?but when Bansal Sir told me about NASA, I thought it was a much better idea.? He proudly tells his relatives how he had impressed ?Cin K. Kif? with his grasp of the English language, with his pointing out what was wrong with the sentence ?My father, who is 60, is lived in Kanpur?. Saurabh didn?t point out the grammatical error, but said the sentence could mean that that he has other fathers who are not 60 years old.

Then comes the admission. ?I always wanted to go abroad. But look where going there landed me ? in the middle of so much controversy,? he says.

For a while, he may have believed himself. After all, he is not just trying to feed his own dream, but that of many other ?Saurabhs? like him. Saurabh Singh gave them hope, and, then, despair. ?It?s over,? he says, holding his head in his hands.