Futures put to the test

Pretty much all Indian kids in Class 10 and 12 who are taking their public exams are quaking in their boots.

Every year, March heralds the arrival of board exams, a term synonymous with late-night cramming and much finger biting over something that will make or break careers. This is similar to the GCSE and A level exams in England but much more brutal in its execution.

In a country obsessed with turning its children into doctors, lawyers and engineers, these exams are seen as precursors of potential students (Class 10) studying towards choosing a stream that will prepare them for pre-medical exams. For those in the science stream in Class 12, they’re looking for a spot in medical and engineering schools.

The Indian curriculum is followed by a number of schools in this country, and one only has to look at the faces of harried parents to understand its true effect.

Your grades in Class 10 will determine whether you qualify for one of three streams – science, commerce or arts, with science being the most prestigious. And depending on how they fare in academia for the next two years, legions of 18-year-olds will qualify as future doctors and engineers.

Having been through the system, I know it is tough and fiercely competitive. It’s the stuff that nightmares are made of.

I used to be one of those kids that others hated for barely cracking a book but managing to pass with modest grades. But that sort of luck was supposed to run out when you sat for a public exam with millions of others. And so every year, journalists would gather in front of schools and interview traumatised students staggering out of exam halls after having expunged every thing they knew about calculus, genetics or Shakespeare. Inevitably, they would also capture the tears.

But no one teases you about crying after the public exams because entire generations have grown up with that disappointment of knowing they may have just blown their chance at a respectable career.

To this day, I sometimes wake up in the middle of the night, clammy from a panicked dream of staring at the mathematics exam from Class 10 or physics from Class 12 (my lowest scores).

Even though my grades were decent enough in Class 10 to get me into the science stream and thus several pre-med exams, I was eventually talked out of medical school by my father, a doctor, who recognised early on that I asked too many questions.

But the nightmare of one of the toughest exams in the world remains so intense that I wouldn’t even wish it on my enemies.