I remember that feeling with startling clarity. Not because I was a top student bracing for a near-perfect score. But because I was the opposite, and had spent the final weeks desperately trying to make up for it.
This is that story, and it’s also a message to every student and every parent, in the thick of this season right now.
How I Got There
I began as a reasonably good student, and then a bad decision — one I’ve written about elsewhere and won’t revisit here — sent my grades into a slide that gathered pace before I knew how to stop it.
By the time I reached senior school, Maths and Science had become more than just difficult subjects. They had become a source of genuine dread. The kind that makes you walk past a textbook rather than open it.
Part of the problem was a school teacher who knew his subject — both Maths and Physics — but had no gift for making it understandable. He didn’t intentionally destroy my interest, but he destroyed it thoroughly.
By the time my father stepped in and enrolled me in a private maths tutoring program a year before the final exams, the damage was done, though not entirely irreversible.
Mr Rafique was a different kind of teacher altogether. Strict, no-nonsense, impatient with excuses but patient with genuine effort. He helped me dismantle the fear I’d built up, brick by careful brick.
What he couldn’t do was recover the two years I’d spent looking the other way.
February. The Last Ditch.
With March exams looming, I spent February doing what students know is a losing strategy: cramming everything I had avoided into the final weeks, hoping some of it would stick long enough to put on paper.
In cricket terms, it was the equivalent of wasting the first 40 overs and then attempting to slog through the last 10. Winning the match was never on the cards. The best I could hope for was to leave the ground without being booed.
My parents watched all of this with a kind of parental resignation — the quiet acceptance that the outcome was now largely out of their hands.
They wished, as I did, that I’d started earlier. But wisdom in hindsight can’t undo decisions already made. The only thing left was to sit the exams and see.
What made the pressure sharper was the company I kept.
My closest friends at the time were toppers who made the work look effortless. I was proud of them. I also, somewhere in the back of my mind, worried that my poor performance may reflect badly on them.
That added a layer of motivation, not wanting to let people I cared about down.
The Results
When the Class X scores came in, I had 68 per cent, and I celebrated.
My parents, who had spent weeks preparing themselves for something worse, exhaled with visible relief. Nobody in our house was pretending this was a stellar result. But it seemed enough to secure admission to the best college in town for the subjects I desired.
Enough to close this chapter and open the next one.
We were satisfied, and we didn't much care what anyone else thought. I had learned what it felt like to salvage something from a situation I had allowed to deteriorate. That lesson didn't appear on any marksheet.
But it has shown up, quietly and repeatedly, throughout everything that came after.
What's Changed And What Hasn't
When I sat my board exams, my friend Subrata Ghosh topped our entire batch with 92 per cent. He was the only person in our batch that year to cross 90. That was considered extraordinary — something to be genuinely admired.
Today, that score would barely register.
Marks above 90 are common. Marks above 95 are expected in many households. Perfect hundreds in individual subjects have gone from remarkable to almost routine in some boards.
The numerical bar has moved so dramatically that yesterday’s exceptional is today’s average.
But here’s what hasn’t changed: the weight that those numbers carry in the minds of students and families. If anything, that weight has grown heavier. Social media has ensured it.
These days, results announcements bring a particular kind of performance alongside the scores themselves — parents posting their child’s marks publicly, celebrating in spaces where everyone can see.
And I want to be careful here, because there is nothing wrong with pride. If your child has worked hard and done well, celebrate that. They earned it; you earned it together.
But does that celebration need an audience?
Because every post of a perfect score lands differently in the home of a child who scored less. The celebration of one becomes, quietly and without intention, the humiliation of another. That’s worth thinking about.
The Question Worth Asking
Those marks I received in Class X and XII — 68 and 72 per cent respectively, a result I once worried might define me — stopped mattering the moment I completed my education. What I did after, who I became: none of it traces back to that number. Nobody has asked me about it since.
So why do we treat these numbers as though they are destiny?
Usually, if we’re honest, it’s because of what other people’s children scored. X’s daughter got 95. Y’s son got a perfect hundred. And suddenly, our child’s 78 — a score that would have been quietly celebrated in another context — feels inadequate.
Not because it is, but because comparison has made it feel that way.
Every child is different. Every child will find her own path, develop her own strengths, discover her own version of success, and that version may look nothing like the one we mapped out for her at fifteen or sixteen. The child who barely scraped through her boards may find her footing later and go further than anyone expected.
Marks measure performance on a specific set of questions, on a specific set of days, in a specific set of subjects; they don’t measure curiosity, resilience, emotional intelligence, creativity, or the capacity to recover from difficulty, which, as it happens, are the qualities that tend to determine how a life actually goes.
What I'd Say to Every Student Now
Whatever number you get — high, low, or somewhere in the relieved middle — it is one data point in a very long story; it is not the story. If you did well, be proud. You worked hard, and it showed. If you didn't do as well as you hoped, you are in good company, and I mean that literally.
Some of the most interesting, capable, accomplished people I know have a story about the exam they didn’t ace, the result that didn’t go as planned, the moment they thought had closed a door that turned out to be the beginning of an entirely different direction. And if you’re somewhere in the middle, celebrating a 68 per cent that felt, against the odds, like a victory — celebrate it. Fully, without apology.
Because the real exam isn’t the one you just sat; it’s everything that comes next.
And that one, nobody can take for you.
This post is part of an ongoing series sharing life lessons from lived experience — offered in the hope that something here finds you at exactly the right moment.
About Me
I am a thinker at all times. I see, I think. I hear, I think. I read, I think. Every weekend I write. I would love to know what you think.