Vandalur Varadhu: The First-Rank Holder!

When I was in High School, there was a boy named Varadharajan in my Class Six. We other students used to address him affectionately as Vandalur Varadhu. For six years, till he wrote his SSLC Public Exam, no one could dislodge him from his pedestal of first-rank holder.

He was a timid boy. Though he scored high marks in all subjects and always obtained 100/100 in Mathematics, he remained unassuming and humble. He always sat on the front bench, facing the teacher's desk. He never laughed, only smiled, even when a very funny thing happened or was said in the classroom. He had no time for the playground.

He spent much of his time traveling daily between his home in Vandalur and school at Kodambakkam, covering a distance of about forty kilometers by train. Those days, in the sixties, suburban electric trains did not go beyond Tambaram.

Every day, Varadharajan would get up at five in the morning, finish homework, take a bath, dress up, pick up the two-storied tiffin box containing his breakfast of three idlis and lunch of a lump or two of curd rice, and hurry to the station to catch the Kanchipuram Passenger, which would fussily steam in at 8 AM. Since the Kanchipuram Passenger did not halt at Kodambakkam, Varadharajan had to get out at Tambaram and continue his journey in the suburban electric train.

While returning home from school, he also had to alight at Tambaram and spend nearly two hours on its platform bench before boarding the Kanchipuram train to reach Vandalur. It was this stopover in Tambaram which enabled him to become and remain a first-rank holder. He utilized the time he had on his hand, when he waited daily for catching his connecting train, to study and master his lessons.

When students of our XI C section dispersed on the eve of the SSLC Examination, we gave a special handshake to Varadharajan. I personally foresaw a very bright, distinguished future for him. “He will certainly become a doctor, or an engineer, or a collector,” I predicted.

After leaving the school, I had my own ups and downs in my life. I forgot all about my school and those who studied with me.

One day my father, a retired teacher of the same school, returning from a neighborhood bank, told me that he met a schoolmate of mine. He was none other than our First Rank Vandalur Varadharajan. “I could not recognize him. But he remembered himself to me with folded hands,” said my father.

“Do you know what he is doing? He is working as a railway ticket collector!” he added.

The news really struck me hard. It was a big disappointment to me to learn that Vandalur Varadharajan, a studious, hard-working first-rank holder for six school years whom I expected to become a district collector, had ended up as a ticket collector.

“To become a ticket collector, he need not have spent painful hours poring over his textbooks, sitting on a railway platform bench, missing completely a life of play and pranks which we enjoyed,” I said with sadness in my voice.

“There, you are wrong. Due to family circumstances, he could not pursue his college studies. He took up the humble railway job to support his parents and siblings. He might not have become a collector or a doctor, but he helped his bright younger brother become an IAS and his brighter younger sister an MBBS,” said my father.

Vandalur Varadharajan proved that he was not only a first-rank student but also a first-class human being.