It caught my eye easily. There was a post on how teens studying in demanding coaching institutes in India have been losing out on growing up normally, some of them even taking their own lives when the pressure of meeting the expectations of their parents and the faculty at the coaching institutes goes far beyond their endurance limit.
Another precious life lost in the IIT-JEE race!
I could immediately relate to it as a mom of a son who went through this, at least a part of this, some years back.
He used to leave home around 7 am and return around 9.30 pm, the entire day spent on commute to school, attending full-time school, and eight hours later again on commute from school to coaching institute, hours of study session there, followed by commute to home - the seemingly endless travel in autorickshaw and bus and metro train having tested his patience everyday and having made demands on his health often. Naturally, he used to crash out routinely at his desk when he attempted to finish tutorial assignments after dinner. A year went by in this manner. The tutorial faculty wasn’t in a position to give him respite from this rigorous schedule, a schedule that was completely unfamiliar to him, he having been able to come up with decent scores all through his school life with minimum or just moderate effort, for possessing a well-endowed left brain.
Always known as a naughty, happy-go-lucky, often hyperactive, lively boy in his school and neighbourhood, he didn't bother to put in efforts to live up to the expectations of his school teachers since he never really took his potential seriously. He didn’t give a damn to his parents' expectations. He always had a mind of his own and NEVER cared about competition or doing something to make his parents happy. Whenever he achieved something, it was because HE WANTED to get it, NOT because I, his mother, wanted him to get it.
But his tutorial was different. They didn't slash the
admission fees to a fraction for nothing. They wanted the right outcome for him
- they wanted him to toil, despite him being a full-time school student, as
much as the other batches of students who attended the study sessions there
itself, without having to commute for long hours to visit any other
institute, spending the hours between 10 am and 4 pm, toiled! They wanted him
to be in the top layer when the results would be out.
In one word the daily schedule was inhuman!
When he was starting his twelfth grade, we rented out our own house and moved into an apartment as tenants. This was to spare him the agony of rushing from one vertex to another of the triangle of home, school, and the tutorial. Our new home sat somewhat midway between his school and the coaching institute. So his travel now was along a straight line instead of hopping along the sides of a triangle! He could finally start his day later and wrap up his day earlier. Sometimes he got a ride home in the family car while returning from the coaching institute to our new home on those days when his dad would wind up at his workplace before 8 pm.
Earlier, when he was in his eleventh grade, we used to get calls from the main centre of the tutorial chain stationed famously in a different part of India, far away from our home state, urging us to send him there, with the promise of special grooming for the formidable IIT-JEE exam! We were clear in our minds - we kept telling ourselves silently that whatever he managed to do from his hometown, we would be okay with that. No matter what, we WOULDN'T pack him off to any other place in this world when we very well knew that he was going through an academically challenging curriculum, while still navigating adolescence.
When I look back at those TWO apparently inhuman, grueling
years of his life, I do occasionally feel guilty. We, his parents, hadn't
foreseen what was coming when he had taken admission in the coaching institute
enthusiastically, inspired by seeing his friends having enrolled there much
earlier, and so we couldn't think of pulling him out of the gigantic chaotic
mess he suddenly found himself in by the time he had taken the plunge. A boy
who never was studious by nature, who never cared about scores, who loved horsing
around, had suddenly got attracted to this rat race, after having got smitten
with the IIT-JEE bug, and cooperated with the tutorial faculty for more or less
two years!!!! Such was the power of the regularly doled-out motivational words
of the tutorial faculty! And I shudder to think of what would have happened had
he failed them! It wouldn’t have been easy for the tutors to look away and
forgive him, I have that nagging feeling. After all, they were emotionally
invested in the students in whom they saw the potential to crack one of
the world’s toughest exams.
Once he had entered the precincts of one of the haloed engineering institutes of India, no wonder he quickly went back to his ways, enjoying life more than doubling down to run another rat race, the race to compete with the highly competitive bright minds assembled at the IITs - much more challenging than the IIT-JEE journey itself to get in there. And he "studied bare minimum" (in his own words) the first two years of his college life.
In a flashback of the two-year drama that played out during his higher secondary studies, I find myself feeling grateful to his tutorial faculty because they made him believe in himself. His dream of bagging a seat in one of the top premier institutes in India became a reality after all.
Had the outcome been very different, he would have still emerged a resilient young adult, thanks to the faculty that trains the students there to help them transform into great fighters. I know of students who have made it to premier state-level and national-level engineering institutes after having made more than one attempt at the tough IIT-JEE exam, having allowed themselves to be relentlessly groomed by the tutorials’ faculty to not give up on their dreams. The tutorial culture laid bare before my son the fact that a disciplined approach to studies, daily intensive hours of study at the coaching institute while nurturing a never-say-die attitude does make a big difference. He got to know how consistent and focused efforts refine the faculties of an IIT-JEE aspirant. New concepts of Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics introduced in the evening sessions got increasingly difficult, with his fluctuating scores putting to test his sense of grit. The students, all of them, went riding a rollercoaster of emotions, licking their wounds and nursing their fragile egos and the faculty helped them get a handle on their mounting stress. Over these two years, my son, alongside his peers, got polished into something close to his best version - something that I, his mother, wouldn’t ever have achieved on my own, for the adolescence years are the most tumultuous years of one’s life!
There were numerous cases of bright students who weren't keen to make it through and switched to other streams after a few months of struggle in the eleventh grade itself - Commerce or Humanities or Design. And they went on to derive pleasure from and often shine in their chosen academic paths. And that opened my eyes to a hitherto unexperienced reality! There was a vast terrain outside STEM, a land largely unexplored and parched!
Well, I was transforming into a new kind of parent eventually.
IIT-JEE is not the sole exam in India that tests a student’s sharpness. There are equally tough exams that the Indian youth, with different dreams, prepare for. Every individual in this world has the right to pursue their own dreams, irrespective of how Indian society looks at those dreams.
Here I must say that I have a daughter, too. She is treading a completely different path since we believe in not exhorting a fish to climb a tree.
Life is all about finding one’s place in this world, no matter how much exploring one needs to do to find one’s calling. We, parents, need to be patient, with a readiness to spend our hard-earned money in letting some of our hesitant children, dream of pursuing a different course in institutes other than the coaching institutes, just as Indian middle-class society, so fixated on Engineering and Medical as the routes to a stable and secure life, needs to come of age in this regard. Just as I have great regard and admiration for the faculty of the coaching institutes spread all over India for being adept at building resilient young adults as they guide the fresh-out-of-school students into cracking challenging competitive exams, I also have equal regards and respect for the teachers and tutors who go all out to guide the other students who dare to choose to travel a different path, a path where their creativity or energy finds an avenue - be it art or design or music or sports.
My post, though initially speaks volumes about the grit that the coaching institutes in India inculcate in their students, also wants to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the Indian youth today needs to be allowed freedom to listen to their heart and feel emboldened to walk an unbeaten path if they feel that something apart from Engineering and Medical has been strongly attracting them for long.
Too much adulation of the challenging NEET and IIT-JEE exams has the power to deflect the attention of creative, though occasionally slightly nervous and hesitant, individuals. Raring to go, having a penchant for stepping into the offbeat realms like film-making, screenplay writing, painting, sculpture, farming, writing, and several other fields as they stand at the cusp of making a major decision in their life, they sometimes need a reassuring message from our society that it’s perfectly okay to experiment, to try out something that is not so common across the Indian middle-class households. And when they falter and question their own decision, quite often taken after a lot of deliberations and navigating through much naysaying from relatives and sometimes parents, let us not quickly dismiss them as failures. Let us help them look deep into themselves, if necessary reconsider their choice, have a fresh look at the options available to them, and if the situation demands take a step back and not lose the intent to explore till they experience their Eureka moment.
Let the New India support the treasure hunt of these individuals who yearn to walk a different path.
STEM alone can’t and shouldn’t fill this world!
.............................
Aparajita Bose
