The Unexpected Gift of Failing IIT-JEE

At 30, I defended my PhD and signed an offer to become an Assistant Professor at an R1 University in Boston. But I was labeled a failure before I had even turned 18. For at least six months, people did not smile when they talked to me. Maybe they thought it was somehow disrespectful. Maybe they were trying to hide the schadenfreude. Perhaps I am misremembering. I will never know. But I know when it happened. I can still slip into that day. It was the morning the 12th-grade Gujarat Board results were released. My parents and I were hunched in front of a 17-inch laptop screen with a speck at the center. With bated breath, my father typed my roll number and pressed enter, and in the same breath, his face dropped. I did not want to look at the marksheet. My mom tried to wipe the screen and checked again. No change. 73%.

In the following days, we repeated this ritual for various other engineering entrance exams to the same effect. JEE — not cleared. AIEEE — not good enough. If I were to be an engineer, it would not be at a premier institute. When the 12th grade results were announced, there was still hope. People in the know theorized that my mark sheet must have been mixed up with someone else’s. A silly misunderstanding that would be funny in years to come. However, after the next sets of results, people did not offer theories; they expected explanations. How did I go from being an exemplary student to a supposed failure in a year?

This began a series of visits from friends and family, characterized by prolonged silences and uncomfortable small talk. The initial phase of condolences and support segued into social isolation, particularly from friends. My Facebook feed overflowed with images of friends celebrating their results — parties I could have attended but wasn’t invited to. Perhaps they feared I’d dampen the mood, or maybe my failure became an uncomfortable topic they preferred to avoid, or possibly they suspected that my failure was contagious. It did not help that I spent hours imagining them talking about me. Laughing. Saying they knew this was going to happen.

The weird thing is that I mainly felt numb while all this was happening. I hated myself for it. I would think of ways to make me feel as sad as was expected of me. This involved conjuring various hypothetical lives — each more tragic than the last one. I would vividly envision myself living in squalor or working jobs that gave me no happiness. But no matter how hard I tried to summon that despair, it felt like I was watching it happen to someone else. I thought that I failed at grieving, too. “I am not here. This isn’t happening” became my mantra.

In this stupor, I enrolled at a local college to become a Computer Engineer. On the first day, our lecturer posed a challenge: solve an algorithm and earn an automatic A, regardless of attendance. It was a futile attempt at humor beyond the syllabus’ scope. Silence filled the room. The lecturer, now amused, urged us on, proclaiming us the country’s future. Still, no one spoke. With a smirk, the lecturer scrawled the problem on the board, punctuating it with a smiley face — a gesture that repulsed me and felt like another taunt. I looked around and realized no one here knew me. I was not a failure here. I could become whoever I wanted. I could reinvent myself. So, uncharacteristically, I rose, erased the smiley face, and offered a feasible solution. The room’s gaze shifted as if I’d done something remarkable — the validation I’d longed for and hoped IIT would give me. I also did not attend that class for the rest of the semester! 

Later, I discovered that a few other students in the class knew the solution but did not want to embarrass the lecturer. They only looked at me in awe because I had the defiance to challenge the status quo. This tiny incident significantly impacted me, and I learned two important things about myself. First, I only wanted to become an IITian for external validation. Two, I felt truly happy in front of a classroom solving problems. From that day, I decided to explore what else made me happy and pursue only that. This single-minded pursuit of finding happiness included trying out quite a lot of things — from politics to fiction writing — and is a topic for another day. But nothing came close to the joy I felt in front of the classroom, solving a problem and challenging the status quo.

My parents gave me an opportunity to study in the USA for graduate school, but succeeding at a top research university required a significant reinvention. I had to show everyone, even myself, that I belonged — that I could keep up with other students, not just from IITs but also MITs. It wouldn’t be fair of me to depict what followed as a Rocky-style training montage, giving the impression that I succeeded through an unparalleled work ethic. I had already attempted this approach in school, and it did not yield positive results. Truthfully, this time was different. By the time I started grad school, I was so in love with research that it became a state of being. Nothing else made sense. I couldn’t even imagine doing anything else. I was pursuing what gave me meaning — and that was enough.