My Rendezvous with the Dichotomy of Competitive Exams. | by Pankhuri Srivastava | Sep, 2025

Recently, I went to appear for a competitive exam. Now, this statement does not seem extraordinary, as in a country like mine, where hundreds of exams are conducted every year at the national and regional levels, every other household (or maybe every) has an aspirant whose day starts with newspapers, daily practice sheets, aptitude books and ends with highly charged motivational videos/topper talks enough to give an adrenaline rush even to commoners. Now, I particularly was not quite interested to write this exam, but on constant persuasion of my parents, a few trials at tossing the coin (yes, I am paranoid that way) and with pinning my reason to go for the exam on parental expectations and other things, I embarked upon this journey with little preparation for the actual exam. I was not expecting anything out of this given the humongous competition and my lack of preparation, honestly, but I anyway just decided to go.

This journey might not give me any results academically or materially, but on a deeper psychological level, it has given me a wake up call. I realised how small of a fragment I am, of such a large crowd of extremely hard working, dedicated and ambitious people. People from all sorts of background working relentlessly to secure a better future for themselves. I believe this is the beauty of Meritocracy. No matter where you come from, whether you’re the child of an affluent family or you come from a marginalised segment, economically or socially, you can always go up the ladder if you work hard enough. Of course I’m not delusional but well aware that this is not that simple but even if one of us makes it there with hard work, it instils an affirmation that it is doable. The testament to this are the newspapers filled with success stories of toppers post the results day with some of these high scorers fighting with not so favourable conditions but still making it to the top. And it’s worth seeing how amusing is the vibe at homes of the aspirants, with the parents encouraging that next year, yours would be one of these stories.

But anyway, without digressing much, let’s focus on my small story. So I reached my place after taking 2 trains, one a slightly comfortable journey but the other being almost a cannon event in my life. While being standing in the general compartment of a train filled with only and only aspirants of this one particular exam, I decided to put on my AirPods and listen to There Is a Light That Never Goes Out by the Smiths and look outside at the houses and fields afflicted with floods and people struggling to commute. Now if you have a decent comprehension of imagery, this would appear as one frame that can shed light on “divides” in this country beautifully. Nonetheless, I decide to put my phone aside and listen to the conversations instead. All talking about the exam. Discussing questions, indulging in political discourse on upcoming polls and whatnot. What it made me realise was how charged all these aspirants were for this exam and how each of them have had their share of struggles. Some came from cities situated at the opposite end of the country, some had strained finances, while others had been preparing for this exam for past 4–5 years, all in the hope to make it, someday.

Now of course this made me think, how all of us are basically gambling with our lives and careers, in quest of something so unpredictable. Unpredictable because in a country like mine, the number of applicants to these exams goes in millions while the number of seats stall at merely few hundreds or thousands sometimes. With such a low success ratio, these exams compel us to believe in both Plato’s idealism and Machiavelli’s realism (metaphorically of course). Somewhere in the middle of “the success rate is too low” and “I can make it”, we choose to risk it all. Careers and lives. This, you guys, is the dichotomy of competitive exams in a country like mine. It’ll give you just the enough hope to stay longer in the cycle when you feel like giving up and breaking out of it. Hope and despair, simultaneously.

P.s. — This was my personal take on an experience I had recently. So, nothing very serious here, just something I wanted to share 🙂