 | | Akhilesh Yadav at a meeting with the governor at the Raj Bhavan in Lucknow on Wednesday. (PTI) |
Bangalore, March 7: Hardly anyone noticed the unassuming boy in baggy trousers and over-sized T-shirts who shared a house with three friends and ate at wayside eateries. Till someone noted the striking resemblance to Mulayam Singh Yadav. Some 18 years after Akhilesh Yadav graduated as an engineer from a Karnataka college, the institute's vice-principal remembered the Samajwadi Party's "poster boy" as a quiet, "down-to-earth" student who stood in the queue to pay his fees. "I am sure 80 per cent of the students had no clue who Akhilesh was. It was someone in the administration who made a good guess going by the boy's striking resemblance to Mulayam Singh Yadav," recalled Syed Shakeeb-Ur-Rahman, the vice-principal of Mysore's Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering where Mulayam's son, hailed as a "game-changer" in Uttar Pradesh, studied between 1990 and 1994. Mulayam was chief minister when Akhilesh enrolled as a fresher, though he lost power the next year. By the time his son graduated, he was again back at the helm. "He was such an unassuming and down-to-earth boy that no one ever took note of him," the vice-principal told The Telegraph. Akhilesh was a student of environmental engineering in the multi-branch college, considered among the best in the state, where he got admission under the management quota. His admission form had "agriculturist" against his father's name. "No one would have guessed that the UP chief minister's son was studying in our college," the professor recalled. "As far as I know, Akhilesh lived like any other ordinary student and shared a small house with three of his close friends." Perhaps the only give-away was the Maruti Suzuki Gypsy he often drove. He never took part in any college associations or extra-curricular activities. Akhilesh remained in touch with Shakeeb-Ur-Rahman even after he moved to Sydney to do his master's. "He would often call me. Once, when he was just about entering politics I was in Delhi on some work. He visited me at IIT-Delhi where I was staying," the professor said. Akhilesh, who picked up a smattering of Kannada during his four years in the city, was particularly fond of Mysore Pak, a popular sweet. Among his best friends in Mysore was Mohammed Ashraf Geelani, a mechanical engineer who works in Dubai. "I am really happy that Uttar Pradesh has such a soft-spoken leader who identifies himself with the common people," Ashraf's mother Haseena Sharief said. "I wish him well." | 
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