A Competitive, Insecure, Overachiever
I was once dating this girl and she said she did puzzles to relax. Hated it when I called it jigsaws. I’d never tried them before, so I bought a small one. Texted her later: ‘I just finished my first jigsaw … Only took me 5 minutes!’
She was like, ‘You timed yourself?’
And I said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’
‘It’s not a competition’ she said. “You’re a competitive person, aren’t you?”
“Yes, but it’s not my fault! I was made competitive without my consent.”
I was also made without my consent; but we’ll leave unpacking that for later.
When we were kids, every Sunday, my dad would make me and my sister compete against him in solving Sudokus — a way the Japanese invented to relax.
And then after that, my Dad would sit me down and we would go through the Sunday Classifieds — the matrimonial section. And he would point how all the parents of the daughters in the same family sub-culture as mine (caste for those of you who understand that), how all of those parents, were looking for an engineer son-in-law, and that too an engineer who had gone to specific University.
Because going to this University is the arranged-marriage-equivalent of getting a 6-pack abs. And, trust me, girl’s parents in my sub-culture are obsessed with abs.
And so my dad had decided, before I was born, that I would go to this University.
To get into this University, there’s an entrance exam. You can only take this exam twice in your life, in the last year of your high-school and the year after. The acceptance rate is less than 1%. In my year, about a million kids dropped out before even applying, because they knew they weren’t going to get through. I was going to have to compete against the remaining half a million.
So, at age 15, my dad sent me to this city that stands at the edge of the desert in the north-west of India, a thousand kms away from my parents, that’s from here to Krakow, into another province, another culture, another language,
to the best cram school in the country
all alone.
What is a cram school, some of you might be wondering?
It’s kind of like an alternative high-school, where you don’t study the regular subjects like English and History, but instead only focus on preparing for this Engineering Entrance Exam.
My cram school had 5000 kids, divided into 50 classes of a 100 kids. And what class you got assigned to depended on your rank against the other kids.
Every 6 weeks, you had exams that would test you on everything you’d learnt up until that point. So each exam you had more and more that you had to study and revise.
And after each exam you would get a rank. And based on this rank, you would get reshuffled into the hierarchy of classes.
Imagine the Hunger Games … but for science-nerds.
And like the Districts in the Hunger Games, the higher classes, got the better teachers; so you better not be in a low class.
And in a city of teenage-nerds, the attention you got from girls came from what class you were in, so you better not be in a low class.
And most of all you better not drop a class. I did. A few times.
First day after the reshuffle, you look around sheepishly, trying desperately to hold at bay the insecurity and the sinking feeling that you just aren’t smart enough. Worthless. And then the teacher comes in and actively points out at all the Losers and gives an applause to the person who’s climbed the highest.
So you studied like your life, and your future wife, quite literally, depended on it. For two years, 14 hours a day, every day. Every waking moment. Every assignment, against a clock.
And then because I’m me, I overdid it. It is almost a certainty that the randomly assigned seating in a random high-school in the city, for the actual entrance exam is not going to have air-conditioning. Remember this is summer at the edge of the desert. It might not even have a ceiling fan, or you might not be seated in the best position under it, or the electricity could go out in the middle of the exam. So, for the last 3 months before the exam, like a professional athlete, I practiced under true test conditions — I lived without the desert cooler and a fan, in the sweltering 40-degrees heat, at the edge of the desert.
Until I became one with the heat.
And turned 17.
It’s a brutal city, a brutal high school experience. You go through a Battle Royale like that and survive, it changes you, without you realising. It makes you the kind of person that the biggest corporates in India love to hire — “a competitive, insecure, overachiever”.
And then you move to Europe and you talk to Europeans about what their high school experience was like…
And the girl you’re dating makes fun of you for getting competitive about … relaxing…
And slowly, you realise, that maybe, not everything in life is a competition, that Life is not a competition, that you don’t need a trophy for every little thing in your life.
And that you are, in fact, “allowed” to do some things, like growing out your hair, getting fancy shoes or even getting up on the stage — just for the fun of it.
I can’t tell you how liberating it’s been.
