Chapter 1: Left home for IIT-JEE preparation
How a shy boy from a small city in Punjab, India endures 2 years of loneliness, unbearable heat, bad food amidst trying to get through the exam called JEE(entrance exam for IITs) in Kota, Rajasthan.
I will be writing about my journey here from being a small naive boy to being a man. A journey about how life has changed in these past 8 years. Your responses are welcome.
I will start with telling you about what is IIT, for those of you who don’t know about it. Indian Institutes of Technology are a group of institutes in India coveted for Engineering degrees here. The acceptance rate here in IITs is 0.7% which is much higher than those at Ivy League colleges in the US. So to get into these one has to go through a rigorous academic syllabus.
So I landed in this new place called Kota (the Mecca for JEE preparation). I was very innocent back then just a 14 year old boy. I cried on my first day there because I was all alone in this new place and the temperature was touching 40 degrees plus but decided that nothing can be changed by my crying, I had to accept my reality and face it. This is the place I visited daily for my classes (Bansal Classes), nostalgia pours in looking at this image:

Well I started going to the classes, was eating food which had more water than dal, I was living on 3rd floor of my pg, and the room was small. Somehow I put in my efforts and after one month of studying got 600+ rank, I was disappointed, I got pushed into a lower category batch. I remember watching through the balcony and thinking why am I here. I can’t compete with these people. I remember I saw a boy who used to have fun scoring a great rank and there I was feeling jealous looking at him thinking how he is lucky and I am not.
Days passed and I met new people in this new batch, basically got 2 fabulous friends, we studied together, encouraged each other and being shy I never asked my teachers for my doubts(big mistake don’t do it) but got them cleared from my friends. Another month passed and all 3 of us got amazing ranks with me getting 175 rank up from 600+ and both of my friends also getting good ranks.
Again a new batch this time I was promoted from 6th batch to 2nd batch (batches of 100 people). Here again I met my old friend and I was on the move again. I liked to study I liked to just do it, my heart was there in it. Physics, aah I loved it. months passed by and I was on the roll sitting in 2nd batch and beating 1st batch students.
No home sickness, no worries about how bad the food was or how hot it was. My dumb ass walked 2+ kms every afternoon to go to classes in 40 degrees Celsius of heat. It was hot really hot I just wanted to pick my foot up as soon as possible from the road. Now when I think about it it seems like idiotic that why did I walk in that scorching heat should have taken some auto etc. but back then I was hard, I was very tightwad, very conscious that this money on which I was studying was hard earned by my sister.
Thats it for now I think, will write next chapter soon. Have a great day!!!
