by JEE dropout rate correlates perfectly with ‘child’s actual interest,’ study confirms in news that surprises no children
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
India Satirical News: Engineering Your Happiness (Whether You Want It Or Not)
KOTA, RAJASTHAN — Arvind Sharma, 47, assistant branch manager, has enrolled his son Vikram, 16, in a two-year IIT-JEE coaching programme in Kota at an annual cost of Rs 1.8 lakh, plus accommodation, meals, books, test series, and the mental health counselling that the institute now includes as a standard package, which is simultaneously progressive and a signal about something.
Vikram wants to study art. He has wanted to study art since the age of seven, when he filled his first sketchbook and showed a facility for drawing that his art teacher described as “genuinely exceptional” and his father described as “a nice hobby.” The two assessments have coexisted since then in the Sharma household with the specific tension of two tectonic plates, each moving slowly, each confident it is moving in the right direction, with a seismic event that family members can feel coming but nobody wants to be responsible for triggering.
Kota: The Factory That Dreams Are Made Of (Or Processed Through)
Kota is the coaching hub of India — a city in Rajasthan that has built its entire economy around the preparation of teenagers for competitive entrance examinations, primarily IIT-JEE and NEET. Approximately 150,000 students live in Kota at any given time, separated from their families, housed in hostels, and subjected to a schedule of classes, mock tests, doubt sessions, and performance reviews that would exhaust a professional athlete and is being applied to sixteen-year-olds.
The outcomes are mixed in the precise way that the word “mixed” understates: a small percentage of Kota students crack IIT or AIIMS; a larger percentage score well enough for other good engineering and medical colleges; a larger still percentage do not qualify and return home carrying the weight of their families’ investment and their own sense of failure, which in a culture that conflates educational outcome with human worth is a genuinely heavy thing to carry at eighteen.
The IIT: Why Does Everyone Want This
IIT graduates appear in Reuters tech and business coverage with the frequency of a theme — leading companies, building startups, heading research institutions, winning international recognition. The IITs are genuinely exceptional institutions that produce graduates of world-class quality, and the brand power of an IIT degree is real in both the Indian market and globally. Parents want this for their children for reasons that are not irrational. The opportunity the IIT represents is real. The question is whether the path to it, as currently structured, is worth the cost to the children walking it.
Vikram Sharma, asked by our correspondent whether he was enjoying Kota, said: “The Physics faculty is good.” This is the complete answer. He has given up Instagram. He calls home on Sundays. He is sitting his mock tests. He has a sketchbook under his mattress. He draws late at night when the lights are supposed to be off. The drawings are excellent. His father does not know about the sketchbook. The seismic event has been postponed, not avoided.
The Compromise: Still Pending
In many families, the Vikram story ends with: he takes JEE, does not qualify for IIT, finds a reasonable engineering college, graduates, works in IT, draws on weekends, and arrives at forty with a career that is fine and a creative life that is smaller than it might have been. In other families, it ends with: he tells his parents at seventeen, there is a crisis, he studies design, builds something genuinely interesting, and his parents come to terms with it before they fully expected to. In a growing number of families, the conversation happens earlier, because someone in the previous generation fought it and won, and told their children it was possible.
India is changing in this direction, slowly, as it changes in all directions: slowly, unevenly, with enormous variation by class and region and generation, and with the specific pace of a culture that is large enough that even slow change means millions of people shifting simultaneously, which adds up to something that looks, from a distance, like transformation.
India satirical news, full marks for effort: Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
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