The accolades have been torrential for Ahmedabad boy Rush Kalaria (19), a member of the victorious team which won the International Cricket Council-sponsored Under-19 Cricket World Cup 2012. In the 16-day-long international biannual tournament held in Australia between August 11-26, which attracted teams from 16 countries, the India Under-19 XI beat Australia by six wickets in the final. “Life has been a whirl ever since we returned from Australia,” says Rush who together with his team mate from the state, Smit Patel, has become a celebrity in Gujarat.
Although in the World Cup Rush played in only one match against the West Indies, in which he scored three runs and didn’t take any wickets, he was India’s leading wicket-taker in the Under-19 Asia Cup 2012 tournament held in Kuala Lumpur in June, in which he bagged a five-wicket haul against Pakistan in the final which helped India secure a tie.
A final year commerce student of H.L. Commerce College, Ahmedabad, Rush took to the cricket oval when he was a primary school student. Since then, this left arm medium pacer has been representing Gujarat in the Under-15, Under-16 and Under-19 inter-state tournaments. “I also had the opportunity to play on the senior domestic circuit when I was picked for Gujarat in the one-day league,” he says.
Rush attributes his rise to the top in teenage cricket to all the encouragement he received from his father Bipin, an Ahmedabad-based dyes and chemi-cals trader. “Although he didn’t play serious cricket himself, he is an avid student and follower of the game and provided me every opportunity to develop my bowling and batting skills,” says Rush gratefully.
He is equally beholden to his first coach Jaiprakash Patel, and Tarak Trivedi who coaches him currently. “Both have played important roles in helping me raise my game as did India test star Zaheer Khan. Before we left to play the World Cup in Australia, Zaheer gave me valuable advice to improve my line, length, and control,” he recalls.
In the final year of his degree programme, Rush admits it’s a trifle difficult to concentrate on studies in the midst of so much cricket and all the felicitations. “It’s distracting but one learns to manage,” says Gujarat’s new cricket star who was awarded a special prize of Rs.5 lakh for doing his bit to bring the Under-19 Cricket World Cup 2012 to India.
R.K. Misra (Gandhinagar)
Onkar Singh Gujral
The first step for him was to apply online for the Intel-sponsored IRIS (Initiative for Research & Innovation in Science) fair in August 2011. Among the applications, 100 well-researched project proposals were selected for entry and evaluation at the Intel ISEF (International Science and Engineering Fair) held between May 13-18 in Pittsburgh, USA. This meant that his innovative science project was among the best in the country and among the top 1,600 worldwide. But Onkar Singh Gujral (15), a class X student of La Martiniere for Boys, Kolkata, wasn’t content with qualifying for the final round. At the David Lawrence Convention Centre in Pitts-burgh, he made a strong and persuasive blueprint presentation for which he received a Grand Award and a cheque for $500 (Rs.25,000) on May 18.
Onkar Singh’s award-winning project facilitates the discovery of benign and malignant tumours from biopsies, and detects differentiated neoplasm which has been a challenge to oncologists for several decades. The solution has been applied on brain and breast cancers, hepatocellular carcinomas and skin melanomas with results of 98.42 percent accuracy and 93.91 percent specificity. The processing time is ten seconds within which it easily distinguishes between benign and malignant tumours.
Encouraged to experiment and enquire from a young age by his mother Arvinder Kaur, a teacher at La Martiniere for Girls and businessman father Manmohan Singh Gujral, Onkar was playing computer games at age three. By middle school he had started participating in robotics events in the tech fests of reputed institutions such as Jadavpur University, BESU (Bengal Engineering and Science University) and Heritage University. In the past three years, he has bagged the first prize twice and third prize once with his designs of mind-driven robotic wheel-chairs and architecture frameworks for cancer diagnosis. Last year he won a subject category silver award at the IRIS National Fair held at Mumbai, where he was the only high school student winner.
A cricket buff, Onkar plays “para-cricket” and regularly follows inter-national test matches and tournaments. However, robotics technology and programming are his primary passion which he wants to pursue at the Massachussetts Institute of Techno-logy, Boston — “the world’s foremost institution of technology education”.
“I want to work on artificial intelligence in software architecture development,” says this budding genius who has already travelled some distance on his chosen path.
Baishali Mukherjee (Kolkata)