Toppers Swarnava Chakrabarty and Sharanya Chatterjee get candid

The arrival of a messenger from Bikash Bhavan with a box of sweets and a bouquet of flowers along with a congratulatory message from the chief minister alerted

Swarnava Chakrabarty that he had come fourth in the state in the Class XII Central Board of Secondary Examination (CBSE) results.

There is no way of knowing where he stands in the all India merit list as the board has announced that this year the Class XII toppers’ list will not be published to avoid unhealthy competition amongst students.

Swarnava, a student of Hariyana Vidya Mandir, has scored 99 per cent. This was the first Board exam he sat for as he finished Class X in a Covid year. “Our results were based on pre-Board scores as we did not get to take the exam in 2020.” He got 98.6 per cent then. He does not rue the chance to not sit for the test as Class X results, he points out, hardly are of use later in life.

What he missed more is the chance to attend school. “Both Class X and XII went by sitting at home attending classes online. We could finally attend practicals from December 2021.” But he also counts a positive in the time he got to study at home in Class X.

For the Class XII exams, he did not have any tutor at home. “My father is a chemistry teacher at Sukantanagar Bidya Niketan. So he taught me chemistry,” says the resident of Rabindra Pally, Kestopur. Since his focus is on cracking the all-India engineering entrance tests, he enrolled in an all-India coaching class in Ultadanga, where he got a partial scholarship.

“I started preparations from Class XI itself as the syllabus is so vast. There was no free time.”

His seat for the Board exam was at Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan.

Since the Board results, he has appeared for several competitive examinations, with only JEE (Advanced) remaining on June 4. “My goal is studying computer science at any IIT, especially IIT Bombay,” says the boy who loves reading fiction. “Agatha Christie to Sunil Gangopadhyay, J.K. Rowling to Rabindranath Tagore, I love to read everything,” he says.

Sharanya Chatterjee was nervous in the run-up to her first Board examination though she had the luxury of writing the papers from her school itself. So she devised a strategy to calm her mind. “I tried not to think that it was a public examination with thousands of others appearing with me. All I wanted to do was focus on the question paper,” says the BA Block girl.She had finished the syllabus early and could keep the final three-four months only for mock exams. While she studied for eight to 10 hours round the year, before the exam it was 10 hours daily. Her mother being an English teacher at a Habra College, she was guided by her at home. “But before the exam, Ma thought I needed some extra help from a school teacher who would know the pattern.” So an English tutor was added to the litany of science subject tutors. “But we prepared the routine in such a way that I did not have more than one tutor in a day, leaving me enough time to study on my own.”After each paper during the examination, she did not try to predict her score. And on D-Day, her father was asked to check the result on the website as Sharanya was too tense. “I expected over 97 per cent. This score was beyond my dreams,” laughs the Bishop’s Award for Outstanding Performance trophy winner from her school.Now her goal is research in her favourite subject biology. “I have always loved to analyse off-beat topics. During the pandemic period, I became more inclined towards research on medicines.”She has another leg of the Common University Entrance Test coming up on May 27. “I also mean to take the IISER Aptitute Test.” The Bharatanatyam dancer loves to write short stories. “All the plots come to my head before the exams, so I have to scribble them down. After all this gets over, I will sit down to flesh out those plots.”