Respected Sir
I am very glad to write this letter to you. At first I thank you for giving me a chance to make myself known to you by this letter. I am also thankful to your organization with such kind persons.
Actually, I belong to the most poverty stricken district in Orissa, which comes among the K.B.K. district, that is Bolangir. My father, Mr Tankadhana Tandi is a school teacher and running his family with 8 members, excluding grand mother and grand father. I was reading in a M.E. school before and got a chance to get into Navodaya system. Further you only changed my fate and now I am in JNV Bangalore ?U?.
During the first stage of my school life, I had an ambition to be a scientist, after that I changed my thinking and longed to be an IAS. After that I desired to become a journalist, next an author and so on. I had not thought about any of the aim for a longer time. I was sinply wondering with many aims. And I became disappointed, that what should I do after I come out of JNV. Sometime I asked to myselfr ?shall I do B.Sc. after reading in JNV?? I had no answer fro any of my questions.
In class 9th I heard about ?Dakshana? and I thought, I am not intelligent enough to hope for a seat in it. Few of my seniors were reading there so I also had a passion to get it. In class 11th one day, our prinicipal sir Dr monoj Das called a student among us and told about the future plan of Dakshana ie 40-50 students all over India. We finally gave the exam.
Maths portion was little bit hard for me but the logic questions were good one. I hadn?t prepared anything for this exam so I was not so confident about it. Anyhow I got it and became very happy. Everyone in my school and my family were happy to know about it except my mother, because she doesn?t want me to be very far from her.
The delay of the date of moving to JNV Bangalore made me to go through the website of Dakshana, and I was very surprised to see a headline there. It was ?Dinner with Warren Buffet?. Some of my friends told me you are going to have dinner with Mr Warren Buffet if you excel there! I believed that but when I came hare, I got the chance to go through the annual report of ?Dakshana?. I found there the real meaning of the line ?dinner with?.?
In Cuttack, some of my seniors told me that Mr Mohnish Pabrai is going to meet you next. I was overwhelmed with joy because I have heard that he is a person with great personality. I wanted to meet him not because he is the founder of Dakshana but for the reason that his personality has amazed many students in Orissa as they said to me. More over I got the chance to be coached for him only. That changed my life, I settled my aim. I got a chance to forget everything and concentrate only on single ambition i.e. IIT.
All my thinking got changed when I learned that very good coaching is going on here. I am happy to be a JNV student for the Dakshana only. Moreover, I am too happy to be a Dakshana scholar. It changed my life to a great etent.
I have always tried to write some good article. When I read the annual report of Dakshana, I got there one thing more. That is :- the desire of Nehruji and the IIT and the desire of Rajeev Gandhiji and the Navodaya system.
IIT and Navodaya, these two are established very perfectly today. Now the next step is the bridge between them i.e. Dakshana. I will try my best to make Dakshana successful over the passing years and I will like to join computer science in IIT.
I am very thankful to you for taking pain to read my writing which may be boring.
Thank you
Yours faithfully
Ashish Charan Tandi
10.2.2009.

From JNV Belpada, Odisha.
Coaching Location: JNV Bengaluru Urban, Karnataka. (IIT-JEE 2009-11).

Current Institute: IIT Bombay,Mumbai,Maharashtra
Stream: Aeronautical Engineering
Yr of expected graduation: 2015

Note: This is the exact reproduction of the essay sent to us.