Category: Childhood and Education
Tagline: The real beginning of every Indian student’s story
Hey, before we get into career tips, interview hacks, or skill building — I want to start from the actual beginning.
Not from college. Not from my first internship. Not from the day I figured out what digital marketing was.
From the very start. From childhood. From the moment this whole “student life” thing actually began — before we even understood what was happening to us.
Because honestly? Nobody ever talks about this part.
You Were Born — And The Plan Was Already Ready
Think about it.
You were maybe 3 or 4 years old. You didn’t know what a career was. You didn’t know what a degree meant. You didn’t even know what money was properly.
But somewhere in your house — at the dining table, in a relative’s visit, in a casual conversation between your parents — your future was already being discussed.
“She should become a doctor.”
“Engineering is the safest option.”
“Government job — that’s what gives security.”
Nobody asked you. Nobody waited for you to grow up and figure out what made your eyes light up. The plan was ready before you were.
And honestly — I am not blaming our parents for this. They did what they knew. They did what their parents told them. They wanted security for us in a world that felt uncertain to them. That love was real — even if the pressure felt heavy.
But let’s be honest about what that did to us as children.
The Earliest Memory Of Pressure
Do you remember the first time marks mattered?
I do.
It wasn’t even my own exam result. It was seeing how adults reacted to results — good ones got celebrations, sweets, phone calls to relatives. Bad ones got silence, disappointment, long lectures at night.
And just like that — without anyone explaining it — I understood something as a small child:
Your value is your marks.
Not your kindness. Not your creativity. Not the way you made people laugh or the way you noticed things others didn’t. Not any of that.
Just marks. Just numbers on a paper.
And from that moment — whether we knew it consciously or not — most of us started living for those numbers.
The Childhood That Got Replaced By Studies
Remember how childhood was supposed to feel?
Playing until it was dark outside. Making up stories and games from nothing. Drawing without anyone telling you it was a waste of time. Singing just because you felt like it. Having absolutely no agenda for an entire Sunday.
Now tell me honestly — how much of that did you actually get?
Because for most Indian students I know — childhood quietly got replaced somewhere along the way.
Replaced by tuition classes after school. Replaced by homework that took up entire evenings. Replaced by weekend coaching centers. Replaced by “beta padhai pe dhyan do” every time you tried to just exist and breathe for five minutes.
We went from being children to being students — and nobody asked us if we were ready for that switch.
The Comparisons That Started Early
And then came the comparisons.
Oh the comparisons.
“Sharma ji ka beta 95% laya — tum kya kar rahe ho?”
“Your cousin got into IIT coaching already — when are you starting?”
“See how disciplined she is — why can’t you be like that?”
Every comparison felt like a small message delivered to your heart:
You are not enough as you are. Be more. Study more. Score more.
And slowly — quietly — many of us started believing it.
We started believing that we were in a race. That everyone around us was ahead. That falling behind meant failing at life itself.
We were children. We should have been worrying about which cartoon to watch.
Instead we were worrying about our rank in class.
What Nobody Told Us About This System
Here is something I wish someone had told me much earlier:
The system was never designed to help you discover who you are.
It was designed to produce — workers, employees, people who follow instructions well and don’t question too much.
Think about it. School teaches you to sit still, follow rules, memorise information, reproduce it on exam day, and get graded on how well you performed within a very narrow definition of intelligence.
Creativity? Emotional intelligence? Communication skills? Finding your unique strengths? Understanding money? Learning how to handle failure?
None of that. Not in the syllabus. Not in the marks sheet. Not in the report card.
And then one day — after 15 years of this system — we graduate and walk into the real world and wonder why we feel so unprepared.
We were prepared for exams. We were not prepared for life.
But Here Is The Other Side
I want to be fair here.
Because education — even with all its pressure and problems — also gave us things.
It gave us discipline whether we liked it or not. It gave us the ability to learn and absorb information. It introduced us to subjects that some of us genuinely fell in love with. It put us in classrooms with people who became our closest friends. It gave our parents hope and something to be proud of.
And our parents — even when their pressure felt unbearable — were carrying their own fears. Fears about our future in a competitive world. Fears from their own experiences of struggle. Love expressed in the only way they knew how.
Understanding that doesn’t erase how heavy it felt. But it helps make sense of it.
So Why Am I Writing This
Because I think a lot of us started this student journey without ever being asked what we wanted.
We just got placed into a system — a very specific Indian system of education and expectations — and we ran inside it as fast as we could trying to keep up.
And somewhere along the way many of us lost touch with the question that actually matters:
Who am I outside of my marks, my degree, my rank, and my family’s plan for me?
This blog is my attempt to answer that question honestly. For myself. And maybe — if you’re reading this — for you too.
Because I think we deserve to tell the full story. Not the edited version where everything makes sense and works out perfectly. The real version. The messy, confusing, sometimes painful, sometimes beautiful version of what it actually means to grow up as a student in India today.
And this is just chapter one.
Before you go — tell me in the comments:
What is your earliest memory of feeling pressure as a student? The first moment you realised marks and future were serious business?
I genuinely want to know. Because I have a feeling your story sounds a lot like mine.
— Jyothi