In the early hours of August 8, R.Swathi, who had applied for counselling with a score of 1017/1200, came here to our campus with her mother Thangaponnu - a shepherd - all the way from Musiri in Trichy. On asking our guards for directions, mother and daughter were informed of having come to the wrong venue, causing a lot of confusion. At around 6.30 am, a group of T-Walkers - Mr. M.Saravanan, Mr.Paramasivam and Mr.Jaishankar - noticed the commotion and decided to get involved.
Mr.M.Saravanan, a CEG alumnus, told the pair that they had mistaken Anna Arangam for Anna University, the former being located in Coimbatore. He then got on the phone with one of our former Vice Chancellors, asking to be connected to the registrar of the Coimbatore campus - Mr.C.R. Anantha Kumar - who graciously agreed to hold out their time slot by four hours. On hearing this, Mr. Jaishankar rushed home to book flight tickets for the duo, which cost a total of Rs. 10,500.
Returning with the tickets in hand, the three T-Walkers faced one last hurdle - the mother’s fear of flights. The three of them hence accompanied the duo to the airport, requesting extra attention to be given to them by the airport authorities. Mr.Saravanan then handed over four hundred rupees to Swathi for hailing a taxi on landing in Coimbatore. By one o’clock, Swathi had an admission letter in hand for the B.Tech course in biotechnology, at the Coimbatore campus.
In Swathi’s words, “We took off at 10.05 a.m, landed at 11.28 a.m and, in the next hour, had the admission letter in our hands. It looks like a miracle now. It was very kind of them to do so. They came around like angels when we had lost hope.”
The whole group of T-Walkers has decided to share the cost of the flight tickets. When they called up the mother, Thangaponnu, to check if her daughter had secured admission, they found that she wanted to repay her benefactors; they, however, refused.
The three T-Walkers have been contacted by a dozen media outlets so far, ranging from Vikatan to CNN-IBN. They are, however, unwilling to talk to the media about this - because they believe theirs was but a natural response to the situation. Have good people become so scarce, that we’re calling this a miracle?
As Gandhiji once said, “You must not lose hope in humanity. Humanity is an ocean”.
Faith in humanity, definitely restored.
