The Better India · 11 hours ago

Kerala Man Spent 13 Years in an Orphanage Before Becoming an Ias Officer & Collector

Abdul Nasar was five years old when his father died and the weight of poverty reshaped everything, eventually landing him in an orphanage where he would spend the next thirteen years. It was there, in the middle of that loss, that a chance encounter with a young IAS officer named Amitabh Kant quietly planted a dream that neither hardship nor decades of waiting could extinguish. He delivered newspapers, tutored students, worked hotel kitchens, and sat for civil service exams across three separate attempts - not in spite of the life he had lived, but seemingly because of it. By 2019, Abdul Nasar had become District Collector of Kollam, completing what the article calls "a journey shaped by years of work, study and persistence." His story asks nothing dramatic of the reader - only that they notice how a child who once ran away from an orphanage just to glimpse his mother managed, through patience and quiet resolve, to become exactly who he had imagined he could be.