he boy failed in his standard three English exams despite teachers writing down the answers on the blackboard for students to copy.
He could hardly speak in English till after Plus Two and hated attending classroom lessons.
But he always dreamt of becoming a civil servant.
“Till this moment I cannot believe that I am an IAS officer.
If I can, then there is no reason why you cannot,” said District Collector M.G. Rajamanickam in a candid conversation with school students at an open workshop organised jointly by The Hindu in School and Neo IAS, a Kochi-based academy on how to prepare for civil service exams here on Tuesday.
His fairy tale on how a student who deliberately failed in Mathematics exams entered the Indian Administrative Service had the students spellbound.
The ploy to fail in examinations despite being proficient in the subject was to prove that he didn’t want to be part of a rat race.
The school even arranged special tuition by its best Maths teacher ahead of SSLC exams.
He religiously attended the sessions solely out of the desire to savour the delicacies the teacher used to serve.
And in an internal test, he scored 13 marks.
“It bested my previous best of 12,” he recollected with a chuckle. But in the final exams he scored hundred in Maths and emerged topper in his school.
Then against his wishes he was forced into engineering.
He passed M.Tech with a gold medal only to chuck away a lucrative job with a hefty pay cheque to pursue his dream.
The conviction paid rich dividends as he bagged 80th rank in the civil service examination at the national level.
Hailing from a predominantly police family, he initially thought of becoming an IPS officer and even got a keychain inscribed with the words ‘M.G. Raja IPS.’
It was later during his interactions with district collectors while travelling across villages in connection with Arivoli Iayyakkam (Literacy Movement) in Madurai, he realised that his destiny was IAS.
But even after becoming an IAS officer that first dream of IPS lingered on.
So, he married an IPS officer.
“Now her IPS rank comes after my name (Nishanthini Rajamanickam),” he signed off amidst wide round of applause.
