His father is a small-time welder, the medium of instruction in his school in Bihar was Hindi and he had scored 75 per cent in his Class XII examinations. That was in 2011.
Five years later, he is in Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, and has just landed a Rs 1.2 crore job with tech giant Microsoft. What makes it sweeter for him is that he will be working at their headquarters in Redmond, Washington. And at 21, Vatsalya Chauhan has an amazing tale to share of the turnaround.
However, when the IIT-JEE results came, they were a bit “let down” — Chauhan’s rank was 9,000 plus. “Supporting his coaching classes in Kota for another year would have been difficult and I told him he could still get into an IIT with that rank,” said his father Chandra Kant Singh, who makes and repairs metal grilles, gates, shutters, almirahs at a shop in Khagaria, earning nearly Rs 1.5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh annually.
With another year of preparation, Chauhan sat for the IIT-JEE in 2012. However, four days before the examination, he was running high fever. “His temperature was at 103 degrees but his health improved a little by the time the examination day approached,” Chandra Kant said.
And then the results were declared — his rank was 382. He had also appeared in other competitive examination and had fared equally well. A Bihar and Jharkhand topper in AIEEE, Vatsalya still thanks his teachers in Kota. He then enrolled in Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science, at IIT-Kharagpur.
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