Twenty-three-year-old M.Moorthy, in the midst of the hectic schedule that the life of a medical student demands of him, still wonders if it is one beautiful dream. He was barely 10 when he was pulled out of Class V and taken to a construction site in Bangalore by his mother.
Until then, Moorthy was a topper in Kayalayapuram government school in Harur in Dharmapuri, under the care of his maternal grandfather.
But, when his father walked out on them, Moorthy’s mother was compelled to pull both Moorthy and his younger sister out of school.
“Our mother took us with her to a construction site in Bangalore. I could even not lift the bricks initially. Then I got to work with a carpenter for one and half years.” A chance visit back to his maternal grandfather’s home back in Dharmapuri changed things for Moorthy. School teachers Guberan, Sivakumar of the newly-opened National Child Labour Project and NCLP coordinator Saravanan persuaded the family to send him back to school.
“NCLP gave me a new lease of life,” says Moorthy. “Even today, I wonder if this is all a dream. I never imagined I would ever be back in school, let alone study medicine.” Moorthy, came district first with 459 in SSLC and 1,123 in Plus-Two, topping NCLP students in the State.
His higher secondary education was taken up free of cost by Vijay Vidyalaya in Dharmapuri, under the initiative of then Collector Amudha. “I was unsure of what I wanted in Plus-I. It was once again Saravanan sir, and Guberan sir, who sowed the seeds of the ambition to do MBBS in me,” he says.
