Thursday, May 23, 2013
New Delhi: N Shiva Kumar is one blissful soul who never in his wildest dreams visualised being splashed on the front pages of the every newspaper he was selling as a vendor.
With a life no short of a fairytale, he felt a strange mix of pride, dignity and belonging in supplying the copies of the dailies featuring his own eventful saga.
Young Shiva Kumar’s story is that of self-belief and determination. He was able to crack one of the toughest entrance exams, the Common Aptitude Test (CAT), and succeed in gaining admission to the premier Indian business school - the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) - at Kolkata.
“I have worked as a delivery boy since the time I got into Class VI. I continued doing that till I cleared Class X Board exams. This helped me earn some money to run my family but I wanted to make it bigger for me. That is when I decided to start my own agency and become an independent vendor. I used to read a lot, mostly the newspapers and journals I sold. In the final year of my engineering session, I appeared for the CAT in order to be able to get into some business school for higher education,” Shiva, 23, told Gulf News.
An engineering student from Banaswadi, Shiva, is the son of illiterate parents who had no means to run the family of four. Seeing the misery at home, Shiva started working as a newspaper delivery boy at the age of 11 earning a meager salary of Rs150 per month.
“My mother was a simple housewife and father a truck driver, who could barely earn enough for a square meal for the family. I would see people coming to our door every morning asking for the money back borrowed by my father. That was really painful. I even sold flowers that my mother strung into garlands by the roadside for a couple of years before becoming a delivery boy,” Shiva narrates.
An eighth semester computer-science student of Bangalore Institute of Technology, Shiva is now taking an education loan to fund his IIM studies. But he still gets up early along with other four boys working in his agency, stacks bicycles with newspapers and delivers them from door to door.
“No doubt it is hard managing work and studies, with the two always clashing with each other. In school, I would get up at 4am every day, deliver the papers and head to school. That means I had to skip breakfast every day. And even after skipping breakfast, I would still be late. And in college, I always sat on the last bench to catch up on some sleep,” he adds.
One of Shiva’s daily clients became his benefactor once when he ran out of money to fund his school education.
“In standard nine, I was asked to stop coming to school as I had not paid my tuition fees. I was totally disillusioned at the thought of having to quit school. The next day, I approached the first customer I was delivering the newspaper to and requested him to fund my education. His name was Krishna Veda Vyasa. With some hesitation, he agreed to pay for my education. Although I had asked him to pay only for the continuing term, he obliged and paid for the entire year. He would come to my school from time to time to check my progress, speak to my teachers and have their opinion about me. After realising that I was a top student all through, he later funded my higher education as well, and to date he is supporting my studies. In a way, I owe my success to him, more than to anyone and anything else,” he explains.
Shiva has grand plans to return to the very society which gave him so much.
“After graduating from the Indian Institute of Management, I would want to start a charitable institution by the name of Educate India. I will help educate the underprivileged children who, like me, have dreams bigger than their means,” says Shiva.
By Karuna Madan Correspondent
Gulf News 2013. All rights reserved.
