Monday brought with it some very happy news for 15-year-old Jayashree, who managed 91.7% in her SSLC exams. Life has always been a struggle for this little girl, who doesn't use a last name because her father abandoned his family when she was very young. Her mother, who runs a small tailoring unit from her house, couldn't make ends meet and Jayashree ended up shuttling between a series of ashrams.
Four years ago, she was picked up by an NGO, Sahasra Deepika, where she has been living since, having finally been given the opportunity to follow her dreams. "I wake up at 3 am every morning to study and go on till about 8 am," Jayashree said. She has no intention of cutting her academic career short and interestingly, doesn't want to take the almost cliched engineering route either. "I want to do Travel and Tourism," she states. "Otherwise, I'd like to be a journalist."
Mahesh loves to play cricket and wants to be a software engineer. It was such a struggle to make ends meet at home, that his family had no choice but to uproot itself from time to time, in the hope of finding a better life. Mahesh has been in and out three schools and currently lives with his family in Hulimavu, where they own a small printing press. "My older brother Lingaraju works in the shop and my parents stay at home," he said. Not every story has a happy ending. Renuka Hosamane, whose parents are both farmers in Hubli, is completely blind.
Poverty forced her to abandon her education for two years, although she had studied in Braille all her life, in her native village. After Samartham, an NGO for disabled children found her, she used computers and speech-based software to complete her SSLC exams. Life might not ease up for her and she isn't sure whether she will continue studying, despite her latest accomplishment. Each year, amid the toppers and the prodigies, come a league of little heroes, for whom even attempting the exam is an achievement.
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