Five stages shape a student’s journey through India’s competitive examination system. But when the system fails them, what remains of the future they spent years sacrificing everything to reach?
Denial
There exists an undeniable comfort in telling yourself that your life is not actually on hold. The same repetitive routine is not holding you back; it is preparing you for the ultimate test. You wake up right as the alarm starts to go off; you brush your teeth, staring into the abyss of your own eyes in the mirror; you eat your food, mentally preparing yourself for yet another ordinary day to come, which somehow finds a way to seize your heart. You convince yourself you are doing this by choice; you will get far ahead in life if you make this one last sacrifice. There is a future waiting for you.
Yet the reassurance bleeds you dry.
You’re not postponing living in the present; you are waiting for the right time. Most Indian students fall prey to this predatory education system where one competitive exam after the other forces your hand and breaks your will. No amount of coaching, classes, or revision prepares you for what is yet to come, but you still somehow believe that your sacrifice has a purpose. One day you’ll wake up, and all you need will be yours, as long as you stay put.
Your plans will wait for you, friends will wait for you, opportunities will wait for you, the world will wait for you as long as you clear the next attempt. Unfortunately, life doesn’t wait, and that future you keep wishing for is always just far enough to justify sacrificing the present.
This is the first sign: you believe the life you are postponing is still waiting for you exactly where you left it.
Anger
Then someday the system fails you. A dagger is plunged right into your gut, and as you lie bleeding, you realise.
A paper is leaked, an examination is cancelled, a result is delayed. You are yet again forced to wait just a little longer and accommodate someone else’s failure as if time must be an administrative inconvenience and not something that has already been taken from you.
Over the past decade, India has seen nearly 90 reported paper leaks across multiple states, affecting crores of students and job aspirants. From recruitment exams to board exams, NEET, and UGC-NET. The numbers are so high that they don’t even feel human.
People seem to forget that every single one of those numbers was a student who spent months or years preparing. A student who woke up early, paid for coaching, declined opportunities, rescheduled plans, all for one exam. They promised their families that this time would be different, and it was, in the most gut-wrenching way possible.
The founder of Shiksha Nation, Saurabh Kumar, said, “Students prepare for years. The system must prepare with equal seriousness.” That is not a demand. It is the least students should be able to expect from the system.
A paper leak is not just an administrative failure; it is a disruption of a student’s timeline. The anger does not simply lie in taking the paper again but in the time that feels wasted. They did everything right, and yet the future they had readily waited for was snatched away right in front of their eyes.
But anger does not always make you leave. Sometimes, it makes you hold on tighter.
Bargaining
As it slips through your fingers while you weakly try to grasp it, you know you don’t want to give up. No, you can’t give up, not after everything. You can’t leave, but you can compromise; you can negotiate. You can bargain with your own life.
One push harder, one more attempt, one more strategy, one more schedule. After this, you would never have to sit down to cram for hours again. The people in your life will stop being distractions; their company will become a celebration. Opportunities will envelop you as a family’s arms on result declaration; you will touch the horizon, and this time you won’t fall back down again.
The problem with “one more year” is that it seems redundant by the fourth time you say it. Preparation stops being a period of life and becomes the organising principle of life itself. There is a logic to it: after investing so much, stopping feels more frightening than continuing would. The years of effort you’ve poured into it would only be justified if you clear the next attempt.
The future keeps moving, and you keep following it; chasing the next, the next, and the next.
But eventually, the promise of the next attempt begins to lose its shine. You look around and realise that the years you were promised would come later have already passed.
Depression
This is perhaps where the waiting begins to reveal its cost. As it kicks in, you sink.
You notice how the people in your life moved on to bigger things; they graduate, find jobs, get married, all the while you were making decisions dependent on an examination calendar.
Your future leaves you behind.
It’s not that you aren’t working hard. What makes it so difficult is that you are relentlessly doing exactly what you should’ve been doing. Everything that is required of you, you deliver, and yet nothing in your life seems to have moved forward. Your everlasting dream of success fails you; that strange emotional experience of prolonged preparation breaks you not only physically but mentally. It eats away at your hope, at your faith till the time you cannot imagine breaking out of this cycle controlled by an exam.
You cannot imagine a free day without guilt; you feel wasted, abused. Every conversation revolves around your examination. Your life is not yours anymore. It has been taken from you, and now you’re devastated. Utterly helpless.
Acceptance
Suddenly it sets in: acceptance doesn’t have to mean accepting failure; it is something more.
Imagine telling every student that they have to give up their careers and that an exam does not matter when it so clearly does. To many students, it matters enormously.
Reality occurs much later for these students; degrees don’t guarantee employment, and employment may not guarantee security. For them, competitive examinations continue to represent one of the few reliable routes to stability. For a system to fail these students is a complete breakdown of trust. How can you tell students to move on after making them depend on these examinations in the first place? How does mismanagement on the system’s part become the fault of a helpless student? The acceptance must be of something else.
The future is not guaranteed simply because you have sacrificed your present for it.
That’s it. Hard work is not a contract with the universe; preparation does not ensure the examination is conducted fairly, and eventual success cannot return to you the years that have passed.
But what happens when you do continue? What happens when you do exactly what the system asks of you?
The Aftermath
Ayushman Singh did what the system asked of him. He continued. But that doesn’t mean nothing was taken from him.
He had bought a guitar in Class IX. By the time he began preparing for NEET, it had become, in his words, “just a piece of furniture” in his house. After the examination, he finally had the chance to sign up for guitar classes. Two days after learning that he would have to sit for the examination again, the guitar, which would finally be strung with life again, sank back into the darkness, camouflaged.
He had to postpone the life he had already started imagining.
Now, one would assume that his greatest loss after this experience would be time. Perhaps confidence. But, what he lost was the trust in his own nation. “Broken systems don’t just leak papers; they destroy trust,” he said.
And perhaps that is the problem with resilience. We see a student continue and assume that nothing was taken from them. We see them return to the classroom, the coaching centre, the examination hall, and assume that they have moved on.
They have not necessarily moved on. They may just have had nowhere else to go.
Image Credit: Ayushman Singh
Read Also: The Ghosts of Indian Small Towns: What Changes, What Stays
Ahana Dey
