GASICS Part 10

The day of advanced is a milestone in every JEE aspirants life.

4th June 2023 certainly was in mine.

You walk into the centre nervous, your heart thumping loudly as you take your seat. If you've been serious about the mission, the whole of your self image is built around how well you do on this particular day.

How much work you've done, pain you've gone through, hours you've put in, all of it boils down to 6 hours in a cramped cubicle, a fan above you if you're lucky.

I didn't have much left in me to hope for much from this day. An All India mock test had given me a projected rank of 3000, and I was ready to take it and move on with my life. And yet, as I walked out after the second paper, I knew that it had all gone wrong.

Like a runner on a cool down lap, it took a while for my mind to realize that the marathon was over. The holidays were spent in with a routine of waking up at 5:30am sharp, cycling for 20km, then swimming another 2km. You can take the kid out of the JEE, but you can't take the JEE out of the kid.

The hope was that I would at least get the 3k projected rank, but the number on the scorecard was unforgiving. All India Rank 5796 would mean I would do Metallurgy at IITM.

All coaching institutes have a day for felicitation of their toppers. I didn't want to go to mine, and it turned out way worse than imagined.

They called people with ranks in the top 1000 to go up on stage and give speeches about how great their experience was. It all felt fake, made up, pure white, to the inky black that my last 4 months had felt like.

At the end, they called everyone from the batch on stage, to give us a standing ovation.

There is a feeling, a special feeling, an intense cocktail of hatred, shame, and anger, that bubbles to the surface, when you realize that even though you're on stage, the clapping is not for you. Sure, you're physically up there, but no one would care or even notice, if you weren't.

When the batch photo was taken, I did my best to hide behind someone else.

There was a dinner held in our honour after, but I couldn't keep it together for any longer, so I convinced my mom to leave early. In the car ride back, I started thinking about taking a drop year to give JEE again, to fix the injustice.