From the construction worker who won a place at medical school to an art exhibition in a country with no galleries, we asked journalists for their most optimistic tales of the year
Founder of the Migration Story, India
Shubham Sabar, 19, was working at a construction site in Bengaluru, capital of India’s southern Karnataka state, when he received a phone call from his teacher back home, hundreds of miles away in Odisha state, telling him he had passed the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (Neet) – India’s tough admissions examination for undergraduate medical and dental colleges.
Snippets of the news reached me on WhatsApp and I commissioned the Odisha-based video journalist Rakhi Ghosh, who walked through farms and forests to reach Sabar’s home in Khordha district. She met Sabar, who had returned home and was getting ready to join the Maharaja Krishna Chandra Gajapati Medical College in Berhampur – about 90 miles (150km) from his village.
Sabar, who was born to farm worker parents, studied late into the night for the exam, which nearly 2.3 million applicants sat. He knew that education was the only way he could help his family and the tribal community in his village, where “people first pray for a cure before seeing a doctor”, as Sabar told Ghosh in the video report.
