We can’t always build the future for our youth, but we can build our youth for the future.*
I had always wanted to be an engineer, but considered myself a little handicapped by the fact that my father was a CA and had little idea about how to go about in the engineering field. What is a good subject / stream to choose. Which college would be best? How to go about preparing for the same. He did not know about all of this and neither did I at that time. From his point of view, he did tell me “Son take up commerce, and become a CA and I can give you all the guidance required”. But my interest was never in that field. So engineering was what I did. But for lack of all the knowledge and facilities, I could only join the local engineering college in the city that I was staying in. Not to take anything away from that college, it is today listed as the 13th best college for engineering in India. But still it is not an IIT, nowhere near it in fact.
I actually first came to know about the clout of the IITs when I was already studying engineering. Obviously by then it was too late. The situation today is so different, with every possible information available on the net and at the click of the mouse. During those days, everything was passed on by the word of mouth or through books.
So for my son, I always hoped that he would have the interest and the inclination in this field to be able to utilize my experience. He was probably in the 3rd or 4th standard when he declared to someone who casually asked him what he wanted to do, that he wanted to be an engineer like Papa. But at that age many kids do want to emulate their fathers and tend to change their likings, as they grow older. So I did not read too much into it. Then as he grew older, his liking for science and math’s grew distinctly stronger. It was probably in the 6th or 7th standard that I had told him about the IITs and the importance of doing engineering from there. He then asked me what he needed to do to get an admission in one of them. I only told him to just concentrate on his studies as he was doing normally and the rest I would tell him at an appropriate time.
He was always reasonably good in studies but never came out first or second in the class. Our estimation was that he must have been in the first 5 probably. He was very good in Physics, Chemistry, and English. Reasonably good in maths, and a little poor in Hindi always having studies in the convent schools. Whereas his mother tutored him up to about the 6th class for the other subjects, I myself taught him maths even till much later. of the year to be a little more serious this year. In the 10th class, he cleared the board exams with about 90% marks. That was the first time that I felt that he was in with a serious chance for the IITs.
At the beginning of the 11th class, I told him that he needed to join a coaching class for preparation for the entrance exams of IIT, the JEE. However in the teens one never seems to understand the wisdom of what the parents say. He did not want to join a coaching class with the argument that “what good would it be if I did it with the help of a coaching class”. I tried my best to argue with him that it is perfectly legal and moral to take coaching for such a tough exam, but he would not agree. He was however agreeable to taking a correspondence course. So we paid up the fees and got him to join the Brilliant Tutorials correspondence course. These classes send their printed materials to the students which they are supposed to solve and can write back to them for any problems that they cannot solve. Every once a month or so there are exams that one has to appear at a nearby centre. So even though I was not very happy about his decision, but had no choice but to play along with him. In the first exam at the centre, he got 34 marks out of 200. However he explained to me that since the exams were from the combined syllabus of 11th and 12th and he had not even studied a majority of the topics, that was the reason for the low score. Several months down the line his scores improved to about 65 or so. Brilliants also give out their own percentile scores based on all their candidates appearing in these exams. My son there was in about the first 6% students. But these were only students who had enrolled in Brilliants. With no data on how many students join this course, this did not seem like an encouraging statistic. And I told my son so. His 11th class finished like this. There were no board exams this time, so we really could not gauge his progress.
During the holidays before he was to start his 12th class, when an exam in Ahmedabad was due, I did not find him making any preparation for going there. Nor did he ask us to drop him off. When I enquired about the same he told me that none of his friends were with Brilliants any more and they had all joined local coaching classes in Baroda. I then took this opportunity to bring up the subject again and asked him also to join before it is too late. This time he agreed. So I went and met the director of Yukti Classes the next day and enquired about their programme. They basically had the 2 year coaching programme, but said that they also run a one year concentrated course which has classes everyday, as against the 3 days a week that the other programme runs on. But he had already missed about a month of classes even for the crash programme and would need to work very hard to catch up. We agreed to that and I quickly paid the requisite fees.
From then started a phase of very rigorous routine for the poor boy. He used to go to the school at about 6.45 AM in the morning. After finishing of school he would go straight to the coaching classes, which started at about 3 PM and lasted till about 8PM. He would mostly be home at about 9PM. His mother packed him 3 lunch boxes to keep him fed and nourished for this rigorous routine. Now with this kind of preparation weather he made it or not, I would surely have no regrets left that we did not try hard enough.
After appearing in the AIEEE, it was now time for the actual appearance in the IIT JEE. There was only one thing that I told him on that day. He just needed to forget all that I had told him all his childhood and adolescent days about this being the most important thing in life. I said forget all that. Appear as if the exam is meaningless. And know it too, even if you do not clear this exam it does not matter, we shall find several other equally lucrative things to do for you. Even though my son did try to ask me what that would be, I told him I shall answer that question after he finishes with his exam.