Tales of immense pain, infinite sacrifices and courage to overcome unconquerable odds are abundant in the lives of millions of students in our county. Among them, a very few with their raw talent and determination have performed exceptionally well to reach the –pinnacle of success and have brought fame to this great nation. Their academic accomplishments are so imposing that on occasions their CVs looks terrifying. Vision, perseverance, honesty, integrity, respect, and most of all the right to education are the driving force behind their exceptional feats.
Here is a brief overview of 5 exceptional achievers who were extraordinary in studies and went on to win the most prestigious prize known to mankind, the Nobel Prize, and brought great glory to our nation, as listed on Career360.
1. Sir C.V. Raman
Born on November 7th, 1888 to a lecturer, Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman is arguably the greatest mind to be born in our country. His academic brilliance was at view from a very tender age.
Raman won a scholarship and joined the Presidency College at the age of 13. At 15, he completed his graduation (B.A.) and also garnered the gold medals for Physics and English. At 19, he completed his Master’s (M.A.) with the highest distinctions. Later, he cracked the Civil Services competitive exam for the Finance Department with the highest marks and was appointed as the Assistant Accountant General in Finance Department in Calcutta.
Raman’s heart though was in research, and in 1917, he resigned from his government service and continued his research at the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta.
In 1930, his outstanding work related to scattering of light fetched him the Nobel Prize in Physics, which was incidentally the first for an Indian Scholar who studied entirely in India.
Raman’s contribution to the field of science earned him a lot of accolades and awards. Bharat Ratna (1954), Knighthood (1929), Franklin medal and Lenin Peace Prize are a few to name.
2. Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath was born in Jorasanko, Calcutta as the youngest of the thirteen surviving kids of Debendranath Tagore and Sarada Devi.
Tagore was a born genius. He was unhappy with his formal schooling and chose to be schooled at home. He opted to study history, art, mathematics, science, Bengali, Sanskrit, Upanishads and Romantic poetry from his home.
Tagore started writing poems when he was just eight years old and published his first major collection under the pen name Bhanushingho, when he was 16.
Worldwide recognition came to him with his English translations of Gitanjali, for which W. B. Yeats wrote the introduction. In 1913 he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in literature for his outstanding contribution to the field.
3. Har Gobind Khurana
Born on 9th January 1922, Har Gobind Khurana is best known as the man behind the development of chemical methods to determine the nucleotide sequence of RNA (Ribonucleic Acid) and for deciphering the genetic code.
Har Gobind Khurana was from a poor family and his father was a village patwari (taxation official). In spite of the difficulties, his father was inclined to educating his children and they were practically the only literate family in the village of Raipur.
Har Gobind Khurana attended D.A.V. High School in Multan (now in modern-day West Punjab, Pakistan), and perceived his Bachelor’s (BSc) and Master’s (MSc) degrees from the Punjab University in Lahore. In the year 1945, a fellowship from the Government of India made it possible for him to go to Britain and perceive his doctorate studies from the University of Liverpool.
In 1952 he went to the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. Though this university offered little in terms of facility at that time, it gave him the freedom to carry out research in the field of his choice.
In 1968, Har Gobind Khurana received the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology, along with Marshall W. Nirenberg and Robert W. Holley for cracking the genetic code.
His greatest works includes Gitanjali, Jana Gana Mana, Gora, Ghare-Baire, Rabindra Sangeet, Amar Shonar Bangla and so on.
Rabindranath Tagore was knighted by the British Crown in 1915, but he renounced his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.
4.Amartya Sen
Amartya Kumar Sen, the 3rd November born Indian economist and philosopher is next on our list.
Named as Amarthya (Immortal) by the great Rabindranath Tagore himself, Sen began his high school education at St Gregory’s School in -Dhaka in 1941. His family had to relocate to India following the partition post independence. In India, Sen attended the Visva-Bharati University School and later joined the Presidency College Kolkata. While at the college he earned a First Class (Congratulatory First) in B.A. (Honours) in Economics and emerged as the most prominent student of his batch. Sen earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge.
Amartya Sen received the Nobel Memorable Prize in Economic Sciences in 1988 for his exceptional contribution to the field and for his interests in the problems of the poorest members of the society.
In spite of being a permanent resident of the U.S. for nearly 5 decades, Sen has declined U.S. citizenship and has retained his Indian citizenship, claiming that his Indian identity is significant and very important to him.
5.Subramanyan Chandrasekhar
Subramanyan Chandrasekhar was born on October 19th, 1910, as an eldest of the four sons and the third of the ten children in a Tamil Iyer family. As his paternal uncle, Nobel Laureate, Sir C.V. Raman, Chandrasekhar was outstanding in studies and was intellectually curious.
Chandra started working on his first scientific paper “The Compton Scattering and the New Statistics” when he was just 15 and his findings was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society in 1928. On the basis of his first scientific paper, Chandra was accepted as a research student by R.H. Fowler at the University of Cambridge.
In the summer of 1933, Chandra was awarded a PhD degree and was also selected to a Prize Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge.
In January 1935, Chandra presented his initial conclusion of the “Chardrasekhar Limit” in the form of a research paper at a meeting of the Astrophysical Society. Though reputed scientists ridiculed him and rejected his finding initially, it was later accepted worldwide.
In the year 1983, Chandrasekhar was awarded the Nobel Prize for science for his theoretical work on the physical processes of importance to the structure of stars and their evolution. He was 73 years old when he became a Nobel Laureate.
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