Hyderabad, July 22: Two years ago, young Yangala Lakshmi Pathi of Chittoor district went to meet the district collector seeking financial help to purse his Intermediate. But the then collector was preoccupied and could not meet the lad.
Instead of being discouraged, the youth resolved to himself become a collector some day.
Today, Lakshmi Pathi, who bagged the fifth rank in the EAMCET engineering stream, said he was halfway towards his destination. Son of a farmer in Kalakada mandal, in Chittoor district, he did his schooling in Telugu medium.
The switchover to English in Intermediate was a difficult decision. And another problem cropped up — paying corporate college fees. Initially, he had a very tough time and had to put in additional efforts by taking special classes in his college. But at the end of the year he scored 90 out of 100 marks in English.
“I have already joined IIT Chennai.
But my ultimate goal is to become a collector and serve the people,’’ Lakshmi Pathi said. He scored 962 marks in Intermediate, 157 in EAMCET, and secured Rank 469 in IIT.
The hurdles for the State topper in the engineering stream, Md Ghouse Jani of Visakhapatnam, were even higher. Barely a fortnight before his Intermediate examination, this son of an autodriver lost his elder brother. For nearly 10 days he was inconsolable but his teachers came to his house and put him back on track.
Time has been a healer. Ghouse Jani is now happy and confident. “Actually, I did not check my result because based on my Intermediate and Eamcet marks I was sure that I would get the first rank,’’ he said.
Fifth-ranker Challa Madhuri of the MBBS stream was a trifle unlucky. She went two ranks down as she failed to mark correctly an answer requiring a choice between a positive (+) sign and negative (-) sign in the Chemistry paper.
“The question was `Calculate the heat of combustion’. The gunshot answer for this question is the (-) sign. But I marked it as (+),” she said. The girl, however, has a positive outlook and is on the way to becoming a doctor like her inspiration, mother Vimala.
–Agencies