Handling fame...

IIT topper a victim of success

Hemali Chhapia | TNN

Mumbai: For the painfully shy Shitikanth, topping the fiercely competitive IIT entrance exam has been akin to wearing a crown of thorns.
Ever since the results were declared, the 18-year-old’s life has been turned upside down. So much so he fled his house in Patna and arrived in Mumbai on Monday a little past midnight to escape the long line of politicians, touts, coaching class tutors and other opportunists who had given him no rest since the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT) declared him the topper on May 30. Unable to deal with the constant badgering and cajoling—“please endorse our class’’, “please appear in this ad’’, “please be the chief guest’’—the teen did the only thing he could think of to retain his sanity. He cut and ran.
Sitting in a faculty room on the TIFR campus in Mankhurd, Shitikanth refused to lift his eyes from a book. “My house is no longer the normal place I lived in all these years,’’ he said.
After landing in the city, Shitikanth, who is preparing for the International Physics Olympiad in Vietnam, phoned his mentor Prof Vijay Singh, and asked if he could arrange accommodation for him in Mumbai. Like the other four students representing India in the Olympiad, Shitikanth was scheduled to arrive in the city in the first week of July. He put his “unscheduled’’ arrival down to “too many disturbances’’ back home. “He is keen on bringing back the gold medal this year,’’ said Singh.
Shitikanth’s father told Prof Singh, the national co-ordinator for the Science Olympiad, that politicians had given them no peace, phoning his son and landing up at Patna home. “A party wants to give him an award, some local politician wants to felicitate him,’’ his father told Singh, who taught at IIT-Kanpur before joining TIFR’s Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Mankhurd. Coaching classes queue up for endorsements
Mumbai: The IIT entrace exam topper, Shitikanth, has fled his house in Patna and reached Mumbai to escape the line of politicians, coaching class tutors and others who have given him no rest after the exam results were out.
Shitikanth said that representatives from two or three coaching classes even landed up on his doorstep. “They wanted me to allow them to use my name for their advertisements,’’ said the soft-spoken topper who has chosen to study at IIT-Kanpur. His endorsement was made even more desirable by the fact that he had topped all the exams conducted in the run-up to the IIT-JEE.
After he was declared the all-India top-ranker, the chief minister of Bihar Nitish Kumar invited Shitikanth to a meeting. “I had some questions for him. Each year, there are floods in north Bihar. I asked him what mechanism he has put in place to ensure that life and property were not damaged. Also, I told him that schools here do not encourage research and something needs to be done about that,’’ he said.
Shitikanth, is the son of doctors who work in government hospitals. An alumnus of Patna’s St Michael High School, he scored 93% in Class X and 91.4% in Class XII while at Singhania School, Rajasthan. He has been in tutorial town Kota, Rajasthan, for the last two years preparing forthe JEE.

TROUBLED GENIUS: Shitikanth has fled his Patna home and taken shelter in Mumbai with his mentor, Prof Vijay Singh of TIFR