Sunday, 17 August 2014

Entrance Exams & Coaching Centers: A Retrospect




Mother Nature herself in such matters has been prejudiced; as she concentrates her greatest devotion not to the maintenance of what already exists but on the selective breeding of offspring in order to carry on the species, a silent ploy by nature to topple the balance in the hands of the goddess of eternal justice with complete awareness of the fact that she is blindfolded, so how is it wrong if humans, a product of Mother Nature herself, have inherited this trait.
I considered myself lucky when destiny placed me among the top 1 percent of the students in such an exam, but this gives me neither reason nor a passion to speak highly of this process or enough experience to question the existence as such. When entrance exams was taken as an example to explain the survival of the fittest after successfully clearing them, the underlying irony never had a chance to be glimpsed upon as any attempts were drowned with proud smiles and nods and satisfied faces as they knew very well, they were all safely set apart by ditch called entrance exams that ran very wide and by fortune they were on the safer side of that ditch.
In all the hatred, fear and anxiousness surrounding the entrance exams, therein lay a spring that never dried up, and that spring in other words are the over ambitious coaching centers. Remember, coaching centers are here not because you need them, but YOU need them just because they are here.
These were the ones who understood the juvenile spirit of parentage and how they respond to a rallying cry of their child’s future, thus to the parent is the rallying cry first addressed. And hence, the child is made to enter into this vicious game. He arrives with little broken pieces of a dream, slowly, they clean up, dry him out, put him back together, piece by piece. They clear his heads, teach him confidence and discipline, and prepare him. They probably do a good job of this, but then there is the threat, fragile as he still is, and somewhere in between under pressure from school and parents has a break down, what he has worked so hard to produce is now past.
He now loiters about and passes senseless comments. He comes first to take position in the last bench and has a restless time waiting for the short ten minute break between the classes and then after the break prays for the teacher to be late. He begins to start drifting to the lower social level and mixes up with a class human beings through whom his mind is now poisoned, in addition to his mental misery he now lunges into a road to physical misery as well. Of course, the people who regularly ensure his fee is up to date know all this as well, and they still turn a blind eye, for the child comes at a cost, a stiff one indeed. Hence, they do their best, and strike the parents blind and make them stand near a corpse that bleeds with every sign of decomposition with a blank promise that these were indeed signs of renewed vitality of their dreams. Hence, the parents are made to spend extra resources on more materials, test series and counseling sessions, which the child takes on maybe not to his natural liking yet he joins in it out of sheer indifference.  Hope, he feels a hypocrite for even thinking the word.
I saw this happen maybe for a hundred times right before my eyes and the longer I observed greater was my dislike for such coaching centers which greedily attracts students under its tutelage just to break them mercilessly in the end.
This probably was one of the many reasons I dropped out of coaching classes in spite of threats, protests and laments from my parents. Guess I was after all right in what I did.

Note:- I have nothing against coaching centers as such. Some of them and maybe certain branches of the famous ones are really good. My advice here is not to encourage anyone to stop attending coaching classes but to tell them make sure you attend one when you have a clear idea about how to take an advantage of the guidance provided and the system.
Secondly, generalizing the student as a “he” may make you feel like I am gender biased or maybe that girls are spared of a similar fate, but both the beliefs should be dismissed because my experiences had been with a majority of male friends in this regard that’s why I used a “he”. 



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