Hyderabad: While most candidates who sat the NEET-UG re-examination on Sunday, June 21, were teenagers, one aspirant at a Hyderabad centre stood out for a different reason. Karunakar David is 67 years old, a retired government servant, and he has been chasing a medical degree for years, not for himself alone but to honour a promise made to his mother.

David, who spent part of his childhood in Yemen before returning to India, built a career in government service. But the aspiration to become a doctor never left him. His mother was a senior physician who wanted her son to follow her into medicine, and that wish stayed with him long after she was gone.

Sunday’s re-examination was another attempt to make it real. For David, the test was less an exam and more a reckoning with an ambition he has carried across decades.

Whether he clears the cutoff this time remains to be seen. But at an age when most people are well into retirement, the fact that he showed up at all says something about the kind of promise he made and the kind of man he is.