Anirban Deb could not sleep on Friday, so tense was he about his Plus II results the next day. After tossing and turning all night, he dozed off at dawn. So it wasn’t before 11am that he managed to wake up. The results would be published online at noon. So he was leisurely brushing his teeth when there was an urgent knock on the bathroom door.
“When I came out my father was lisping in excitement. A call had come from school that I had topped the state with 98.2 per cent and I was to come right over,” recalls the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan student. That meant rushing off without breakfast.
“My target was 97 per cent. This score was beyond my dreams. All the way I kept wondering how such an aggregate was possible.” By 11.40am, he was in school and it was in principal Rekha Vaisya’s office that he first saw his marks. His highest score was 100 in chemistry and lowest 96 in English. The rest of his marksheet read — mathematics 99, biology 98, Bengali 98 and physics 97.
The rest of his day was spent in a television studio on an empty stomach and it wasn’t till the evening that he could return home and eat. “It was pretty exciting but quite exhausting, especially since my JEE (Advanced) exam was on the next day. Thankfully, I am not aiming for engineering so the JEE results would not matter,” grins the resident of IB 74 who wants to be a doctor.
Up all night
While school was on, Anirban put in five to six hours of studies after tuitions and more in the weekends. During the study leave, the duration went up to 10-11 hours.
“When he studies, he does not care if the world outside comes crashing. Even when guests came to visit us, he never stepped out of his first floor room,” says his father Amaresh Chandra Deb, a homoeopath.
The boy has always been a nightbird. “Over the last six months before his Board exams, he would play Arijit Singh songs on his computer and study till dawn. His only condition was that his mother be with him,” he added.
“I would doze off on a single bed in his room and would force him to go to sleep as dawn broke. He likes to talk to me now and then when he studies. That is why when his annual exams approached, all my TV serials went for a toss,” mother Mukta laughs.
Anirban had scored 89 per cent in the pre-Board exams conducted by the school. “But I was more involved with preparations for competitive exams then. The two months I had in hand afterwards were enough to focus on the Board syllabus.”
At crossroads
Anirban could have been a cricketer too. A die-hard fan of M.S. Dhoni, he had been selected for the under-14 team by the Cricket Association of Bengal. An all-rounder who bowls right arm off spin, he used to play at FC Park under coach Prabir Dasgupta and would regularly travel to the districts for matches. “But when he reached Class IX, we had to put an end to that despite tremendous heartburn on his part,” his father says.
Now, he plays at IB Park in the afternoon when tuitions give over early and keenly follows Test and One Day cricket. “In his childhood, he used to write down scoreboards of India’s matches in exercise books. Even now, there is a pall of gloom over the house if the team loses. He was refusing to eat after India lost the World Cup semi-final in Australia. I got worried whether that would hamper his preparations,” his mother recalls.
Celebration time
The boy is being flooded with congratulations. Elated friends, relatives and neighbours have been dropping by. MLA Sujit Bose and local councillor Devasish Jana came to visit with flowers and sweets on Saturday night. There is talk of a
felicitation by the block residents’ association.
But he is now focused on the upcoming AIIMS entrance on May 29 and hopes to take the WBJEE when it happens. “My grandfather was a doctor. I want to follow in his footsteps,” he says.
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