On you MARK…get set go

The Great Indian Elimination Circus: Breeding Burnouts for a Living

Let’s be honest: if an Indian parent could genetically engineer a child in the womb to crack the IIT-JEE or the UPSC, they’d do it without a second thought, probably installing a couple of extra memory chips where the artistic neurons used to be.

We are a nation utterly paralyzed by the fear of the “Unsafe Bet.” The brilliant stand-up comic Kanan Gill nailed the punchline of our entire middle-class existence. He pointed out that in India, whether you want to write a bestselling novel, rule the bureaucracy, or just count other people’s money behind a bulletproof glass partition in a bank, the undisputed, holy mantra is always the same: “Do engineering first.”

It’s a hilarious, tragic farce, and we all play along.

I know a boy whose absolute dream was to study international relations and media. He didn’t want to just report the news; he wanted to become a global political influencer, targeting the Indian Foreign Service (IFS) to shape policy on the world stage, or find global alternates if that failed. Naturally, his mother panicked and consulted her uncle—the head of an IIT. Sitting on his academic throne, the uncle scoffed at the boy’s ambitions with the casual arrogance of a self-appointed god-maker. “Let him do engineering,” he decreed. “It will ensure a decent JOB. Then he can do an MBA, and after that, he can try for the IAS.” The absurdity was staggering: to become a global diplomat, the boy was told he must first spend four years calculating fluid mechanics and two years analyzing corporate balance sheets, just to join the civil services through the back door. The message was clear: forget your passions, boy; get the tech stamp, hide behind the system, and maybe then you can go live your life.

Then there’s another lad I know. His family owns lush farmlands and a perfectly healthy barn of cattle. He wanted to farm. But his parents insisted on engineering anyway—just in case the cows went on strike and he needed a backup desk job to survive. A third kid I know opted for engineering for the grandest, most profound reason of all: all his friends were doing it. Misery, as they say, loves company.

We have built a monstrous, multi-billion-rupee empire of coaching classes that thrives on one ugly, undeniable truth: our schools don’t teach, and our exams don’t evaluate. They eliminate.

And let’s drop the myth that these exams are a grand equalizer. The playing field is about as level as the Western Ghats. The modern competitive exam is a game rigged entirely in favor of those who can buy the premium ticket. If your parents can shell out lakhs for air-conditioned coaching factories, endless test series, and the inevitable therapist to manage your adolescent breakdown, you’re in the elite tier. If you can’t? You’re just fuel for the statistics.

Schools have happily joined the racket. They sort children like graded vegetables, quietly kicking out anyone who falls below the sacred 90% threshold so the school’s billboard looks pristine for the next batch of victims. Teachers are graded like assembly-line managers on their factory yield. The entire enterprise runs not on the joy of discovery, but on pure, paralyzing terror.

In this grim sausage-factory, curiosity and creativity are treated like dangerous mental illnesses. A child interested in the soil, the arts, or simple exploration is viewed as an economic liability. We funnel our youth into “predictable success,” which is just a polite term for well-paying, soul-crushing boredom.

The exam validates nothing but a very narrow, robotic type of intelligence: the ability to memorize formulas under excruciating time constraints and vomit them onto an OMR sheet faster than the terrified kid sitting next to you. It doesn’t prove you understand physics; it proves you can survive a pressure cooker.

Our collective obsession with institutional rubber stamps has reached a level of pure comedy. Look at our university professors—the supposed guardians of intellect—who broke into rapturous applause when Rahul Dravid refused an honorary doctorate in sports science. Dravid, being a man of actual substance, said he couldn’t accept it because his own parents were academics who spent years grinding for their degrees, while he had done no such research.

The professors cheered his “humility,” entirely missing the devastating irony of their own applause. By treating a university stamp as the only valid proof of intelligence, they essentially declared that two decades of world-class, on-the-field experience, tactical mastery, and psychological resilience under intense global pressure are totally redundant unless backed by a dusty academic thesis. If a lifetime of masterclass execution doesn’t equal knowledge, what does?

A wise bank chairman once told me that hiring an engineer with an MBA to handle basic banking accounts is a colossal waste of human life. “Give me an 18-year-old who actually studied basic commerce and accounts in the 12th standard,” he said, “and let me train them on the job. It would change the entire flow of the system.” But heaven forbid we do something logical. We prefer our bank tellers over-qualified, deeply indebted, and profoundly depressed.

While we treat our youth like contestants in a dystopian survival movie, the rest of the world has figured out that you don’t need to break a child’s spirit to educate them.

Finland looks at our system with absolute horror; they rely on continuous teacher-led evaluations and project work, without a grand national guillotine of a final exam. Canada, New Zealand, and the US look at the whole human—essays, portfolios, what you actually do outside the classroom—rather than a single Sunday afternoon test score. Argentina keeps university doors open to anyone with a high school diploma, choosing to level up those who struggle rather than locking them out at the gate. Heck, Malaysia even allows grown adults to convert actual life and work experience into university credits. Imagine that! Valuing what a person can actually do in the real world.

By contrast, we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with China’s Gaokao and South Korea’s Suneung—societies famous for spectacular test scores and tragically high youth suicide rates. We don’t nurture; we filter.

By the time an Indian child finally collects their graduation gown, they aren’t an educated citizen. They are a cynical, exhausted burnout. They have spent the best years of their youth staring at coaching-class blackboards, forsaking sunlight, friendships, and hobbies, all to achieve a digit on a rank list.

Our competitive exams are an elimination machine designed to reward the most compliant, well-coached robots. If the purpose of education is to create thinkers, eccentric geniuses, and pioneers, we are failing miserably. We are merely producing a generation of terrified survivors who know how to pass a test, but have completely forgotten how to live.

This post was written for Blogchatter Bloghop a collelctive writing effort.