In time, the school born of Anand Prakash Chouksey's abandoned dream had sent 550 to IITs and more than 600 through NEET, bringing its little-known town into notice. In Burhanpur, Madhya Pradesh, a town more readily remembered for its old stones and the history that clings to them than for its schools, there began, some years ago, the work of a young man named Anand Prakash Chouksey.His first desire had been to become an engineer.

But the circumstances of his family did not permit every desire to be followed. His family earned its livelihood by selling milk, and there were obligations that could not be put aside for the sake of one young man's ambition.

Thus the profession he had imagined for himself remained beyond his reach.Yet there was one thing within his reach: teaching. He began to teach when he was but fifteen years of age.It was not, at first, the beginning of an institution.

It was simply a young man teaching what he knew to the children who came before him. In time, however, the small occupation acquired a larger purpose.

He established Sonu Coaching Classes, and thereafter New Vision Higher Secondary School. In 2002–03 came Macro Vision Academy.The school would grow, though not in haste.

From the modest beginning in Burhanpur arose a residential CBSE school, it is revolutionising the k-12 education in the region, equipped in later years with the conveniences of modern schooling and devoted in particular to the preparation of children for the country's most difficult examinations.The record of the school gives some measure of what followed. According to the institution's own account, more than 1,200 of its students have cleared the IIT and NEET examinations.A BEGINNING IN BURHANPURThe early part of Chouksey's story matters because the institution that came after it was founded upon a plain idea: that the place in which a child is born ought not to determine the limits of what he may become.New Vision School was established under the Anand Educational Technical and Vocational Society in 1998.

The society, according to the account maintained by Macro Vision Academy, was formed with the purpose of advancing education, public awareness, preparation for competitive examinations and vocational learning.The work did not transform itself into an institution all at once. It proceeded by degrees.Teaching became a school; the school grew into a residential institution; and, in time, its classrooms came to be occupied by students.THE ROAD NOT TAKENThere had been, in Chouksey's youth, another road available to him: to leave Burhanpur and seek his fortune elsewhere.

He did not take it. Instead, the institution he built remained in the town in which his own story had begun.Years later, that decision acquired a meaning of its own.The students of MVA began to appear in the great national examinations.In 2025, Majid Mujahid Hussain, a student of the academy, obtained All India Rank 3 in JEE Advanced.

The result attracted attention in part because of its origin. The student had not prepared at one of the celebrated coaching centres of a metropolitan city, but at a school in Burhanpur.The Times of India reported that Majid had joined MVA after Class 10 and attributed his choice, in part, to the teaching he found there.The figures that the academy now publishes tell of a larger story.

Its records list more than 550 IIT/JEE selections, 1,900 JEE-Main selections and 630 NEET selections, besides more than 80 selections to institutions abroad.The institution also took an early interest in the use of technology in the classroom. In 2020, India Today reported that Macro Vision Academy had received recognition as an Apple Distinguished School and was employing iPads and Mac computers in its teaching.THE TAJ MAHAL AND THE TEACHERThere is another structure associated with Chouksey, though it belongs to a different part of his life.In 2021, he completed a one-third-scale replica of the Taj Mahal as a residence for his wife, Manjusha Chouksey, herself an educator and the academic director of MVA.

The four-bedroom house had taken nearly three years to complete. Before beginning the work, Chouksey and his engineers studied the original monument at Agra.The two undertakings make an unlikely pair.One was built as a home for a wife.

The other, in a broader sense, was built as a home for learning.The marble residence has become a curiosity of Burhanpur, and visitors have taken interest in the resemblance. But the school is the larger work of Chouksey's life.

Its walls have contained the ordinary days of thousands of children: lessons, examinations, failures, successes and the slow business of growing older.For a man who once chose teaching after being unable to pursue the profession he had first imagined, there is something fitting in the course his life eventually took. He did not merely remain in the classroom; he enlarged it.And in Burhanpur, the principle with which he began remains perhaps the simplest account of his work: a child may be born in a small town without being required to keep his ambitions small.- Ends