This is the remarkable story of a newspaper hawking kid who
jumped the odds to emerge as a chartered accountant.
Kalyani Ramalingam grew up in a lower-middle-class family. Her father
owned a small shop: distributing newspapers, selling periodicals, school
notebooks, cigarettes, chocolates, etc., in Chintadripet, Chennai. She
was the youngest amongst five siblings: with two elder brothers and
two older sisters, the crowd at the 1BHK home was large.
All seven of them (Dad Ramalingam, mom Saroja, elder sisters
Banumathi and Kalavathi, elder brothers Gnanasekaran and
Balasubramanian) would sit together on the street in front of the shop
to segregate papers streetwise and take turns in distributing. Maybe it
was her first experience in accounting, tallying numbers! The family
drops papers even today, notwithstanding her changed status, and the
mantle of leading the charge is on her elder brother. Both the volume
and the money are better, as they now distribute to 1000 as against 200
families earlier.
Life in the 1970s and 1980s was a grind. Food was a necessity, and the
rest of the things, including education, were a luxury. The government-run ration shops that sold provisions came in handy. India too was
in the grip of Fabian socialism. Gnanasekaran wanted to study in a
Polytechnic, but the dream never took off. Kalyani was lucky to do
graduation, for no one in the family went beyond class XII.