Two years is quite a long time, at least for Nikhila S L. A final year BSc Chemistry student of S N College, Varkala, today, she is probably the first undergraduate student in India to qualify for GATE and Joint Admission Test for Masters (JAM) at the same time. What makes this remarkable is that the road to this was a rocky one.
Nikhila began studying for her undergraduate degree at the University College Thiruvananthapuram in 2018. The next year, she had attempted suicide owing to alleged harassment by the college's SFI unionists. Even though she was hospitalised at the right time, her suicide note had garnered a lot of attention. Soon after, she had shifted to S N College, a college under the same university. While talking to EdexLive previously, she had said, "I lost a lot of friends after the incident. They feared that it may be dangerous for them if they kept in touch with me. There were a lot of rumours about me," she says.
Interestingly, the tiff had occurred between the activists and her, because Nikhila had allegedly refused to skip her classes and participate in a rally. Someone who opposes student politics, she had previously said, "I don't believe in student politics. I go to college to study and I do not want anything to affect my academics."
Turns out, that was what she actually did. Expressing her excitement over clearing the exam, Nikhila wrote on her Facebook wall, "I had a sort of hatred towards the people who belittled and made fun of me, when I left my first college. I then realised that hatred will do no good, but the best revenge was to study well. That was when I thought that I must study to qualify for JAM."