It is ok to be mediocre

There’s something about the sambhar at the Sangeetha hotels. When it’s served with an idly, all etiquette vanishes and you see yourself pouring all the sambhar you get over the idly and make a mash out of it. And all this best gulped down with extra strong filter Kapi.

So I was returning to my uncle’s place in his car from Sangeetha hotels. My aunt was automatically entitled to sit in the front seat since my uncle was driving. My cousin and I were put in the back seat.

“So Easwar, I plan to enroll Santosh in Narayana, they have opened up in Chennai too”, said my uncle. “They start the IIT entrance preparations from 6th std itself, I had a word with a few of my friends there, once we enroll him into the school, there is nothing we need to worry about, they take care of everything” he continued. “So what do you think, if he starts preparing now, it will be really easy for him to crack IIT”.

I looked at my cousin. I knew that he had enough intelligence to flush the toilet after use, but nothing more. I really can’t blame him, the mediocre IQ ran in our DNA, no amount of gamma radiation could alter it.

“So what do you think?” repeated my uncle. I could think of a lot of things, that about a million students write the exam every year, and probabilistically speaking, the chances for a person with average IQ to get through is very low.
Narayana themselves train thousands of students and there aren’t that many seats in IIT.
You are going to ruin 6 years of his childhood for an entrance exam which he most likely won’t crack

This is what I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to spend money on an uber if he did chuck me out of the car.

If I did tell them that their kid was mediocre, it would have hurt them and my cousin too.
Everyone has this feeling that they are somehow special, meant to achieve great things. If not now, there will come a time when we actually do extraordinary stuff, no matter how ordinary the present is.

We need not build reusable launch systems to bring meaning to our lives.
Maybe a design iteration to reduce a bit of server load is enough.
It is ok to be mediocre.