Central Telegraph
Tarak was born at Majupara, near Kanchrapara, in the 24 Parganas district of West Bengal. Coming from a lower-middle-class family, his father Kalimohan was a clerk at the Central Telegraph Office in Calcutta. Noticing the flair of this brilliant student with the pen, his headmaster encouraged him to appear in an essay contest on the theme of patriotism. Impressed by the quality of the paper by a school boy of sixteen years, one of the judges, the Barrister P. Mitter, founder of the Anushilan Samiti, asked his associate Satish Chandra Basu to recruit the boy. On passing his Entrance Examination with very high marks, in 1901, Tarak went to Calcutta and got himself admitted to the well-known General Assembly's Institution (now Scottish Church College) for university studies. In his secret patriotic activity, he found full support from his elder sister Girija.