Chasing dreams and being practical

Some news to keep the motivation up. I have directly copied the news because its all from Horse's mouth:

Suri: As they sat behind the railway booking counters, few would have spared them a second glance. Crouched over the desk, furiously counting money and issuing tickets to impatient passengers - that’s what ‘office’ was for the two of them. Surely one of the most monotonous jobs possible, you’d think. But now the names of Ravikant Singh and Keshavendra Kumar are on one of the most elite merit lists in the country. Both have cleared the civil service examination this year: Keshavendra bagged rank 45 and Ravikant 77.

Till the two friends join the IAS academy in Dehradun, Kumar will serve as the railway booking clerk at Suri station in Birbhum. Singh works at the same post at Ukhra station in the neighboring district of Burdwan.
Their theme for a dream can be traced back to their first meeting in Barrackpore. Both of them had seen struggle in childhood, and could relate to each other. As they were both employed with the railways, they vowed to pursue better careers together.
The going was far from easy. Though Singh and Kumar had graduated from the Indira Gandhi National Open University (IGNOU), they did not have the family support to study further. Singh, who hails from the Akhilitolla village in Bihar’s Ara district, lost his mother in childhood. He and his five siblings were brought up by their father, a milkman.
“We were extremely poor and looked down on in our village. I wanted to prove myself and the only way to do that was to work hard. I knew that my father was in no position to send me to a good school or pay for private tuitions. What I needed was a job - any job to support my family,” Singh said.
After completing schooling from Ara, Singh joined a Barrackpore college. He cleared the Railway Recruitment Board (RRB) examination and joined Eastern Railway as a commercial clerk in 2002. “I could not dream of becoming and engineer or a doctor. But I knew that becoming an IAS officer was within reach as I would not require much money to prepare for the exam,” Singh added.