2 girls from Jalandhar school clear NEET with flying colours

2 girls from Jalandhar school clear NEET with flying colours

Jalandhar: Coming as a moment of pride for Jalandhar as well as for Punjab, two girls from Delhi Public School here have made it to the list of NEET-UG toppers, the result of which was declared on Tuesday evening. While Ashika Aggarwal has secured the 11th rank by obtaining 715 marks out of 720, her friend Gauri Gupta stands just behind her with 710 marks and got the 55th rank. Both girls have been the best of friends and the closest competitors at the school as well as at the private coaching centre in the city where they took tuition. Both are likely to be classmates again at AIIMS in Delhi.

As Ashika marked one question in chemistry wrong and lost five marks, Gauri did two questions in the same subject wrong to lose 10 marks. In Class XII CBSE examination too, both had faced a fierce contest in the medical stream. While Ashika had got 96.6 per cent, Gauri had trailed with one mark obtaining 96.4 per cent. Both say that despite close competition, there was not an iota of rivalry between the two as they always help each other.

Ashika’s father Vasu Aggarwal is a chartered accountant in the city while her mother Anu Gupta is an Associate Professor of Food Science and Technology at DAV College here. Both said they were sure of their daughter’s success but never knew that she would be among the toppers. She has been a state-level basketball player and a good dancer too, says her mother.

A resident of Maqsudan locality, Ashika said that learning to keep calm through hard times helped her scale heights. “At the end of my Class XI, I had begun showing a fall and my mock tests fetched me as low as 540 out of 720 marks. I had almost given up. But then my teachers counselled me for days and pushed me again saying I could do it. That was the turning point. I realised that ups and downs are bound to happen and that I need to continue to do better,” she said.

Gauri, too, has been a class apart. She prepared for both NEET as well as JEE-Mains and Advanced, taking double pressure in two years. “I liked both biology and mathematics and I could not give up either of the two subjects,” she explains. She got 99.76 percentile in JEE-Mains and is awaiting JEE Advanced result. “I kept mathematics as I got continuous guidance from my elder brother Soumya Gupta, who is studying in IIT-Guwahati and my grandfather who was a Chief Engineer in the PSPCL. I kept biology as my father Col (Dr) Suraj Gupta has remained my mentor,” she shared.

Gauri had got into the habit of taking competitive examinations much earlier. She had cleared National Talent Search Examination and Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana too. Gauri’s mother, Abhilasha Gupta, is a homemaker and says that she looked after both her kids as her husband, who is a doctor in the armed forces, was always busy. “Currently too, he is in Assam and we will wait for him to return in the next few weeks and only then celebarte,” she adds.