The Curse of a Borrowed Dream

I used to count it as a birthright, the romance of this soil. The chaos, the colors, the ancient weight of a billion stories—I wore it like a badge of honor, a secret privilege granted only to those born on this side of the map. For seventeen years, I believed it was a boon to wake up in India.

That belief bled out of me somewhere between the geometry of a coaching center’s waiting room and the silence of my own desk at midnight.

The shift wasn’t dramatic. There was no single breaking point. It was the slow, cumulative suffocation of watching six-year-olds—six-year-olds—hunched over desks meant for teenagers, their small fingers gripping pencils that looked comically large in their hands. They were learning to solve for ‘x’ before they had even learned to skip rope properly. The JEE and NEET machinery doesn’t wait for adolescence to knock; it claims them in primary school, hollowing out their childhoods for spare parts to fuel the assembly line of merit.

I walked past those coaching centers every day. The glass facades reflected the same tired sky. Inside, rows upon rows of children sat under the flicker of fluorescent lights, their faces a uniform shade of exhaustion. I saw myself in them. I saw the ghost of who I might have become if I hadn’t been lucky.

Society draws a very small circle on the ground and declares that if you stand outside it, you are invisible.

Only one profession retains its sanctity here. Only one. The white coat. The stethoscope. The MBBS tag that functions less as a degree and more as a social visa into the realm of the worthy. Fail to secure that single seat, and the arithmetic is brutal and swift. You are subtracted from the sum of respectability. You become the cautionary tale whispered at family gatherings, the footnote in someone else’s success story.

I have seen the light drain from a cousin’s eyes because he fell short by three marks. Three decimal points on a grid, and his entire being was reduced to a fraction of a failure. He wasn’t a bad student. He wasn’t lazy. He was simply crushed by a machine that processes human potential through a sieve too narrow for the human soul.

And yet.

Here is the sliver of light in this architecture of despair: my parents refused to play the game by its cruelest rules. When the whispers started—the sideways glances from relatives, the “helpful” suggestions to try again, to not give up—my mother closed the door to our living room and told me, plainly, that my value was not a multiple-choice question.

My father sat across from me, his hands resting on his knees, and said the only thing I needed to hear: Study what you want.

That phrase should be ordinary. In any functional society, it would be. But here, in this pressure cooker of borrowed dreams and deferred identities, it felt like an act of quiet rebellion. They looked at the rigid blueprint society had drawn for my life and chose, instead, to trust the messy, unquantifiable reality of my own inclinations.

I am grateful. Deeply, achingly grateful. But gratitude does not erase the horror of the system I am leaving behind. It does not absolve the structure that tells a child in the sixth standard that their worth will be decided by an exam they will take six years from now. It does not fix the grotesque calculus of reservation debates—where the anxiety of merit and the violence of history collide, and students are reduced to competing over scraps of dignity.

I wonder, sometimes, what it feels like to grow up in a country where education isn’t a battlefield. Where curiosity isn’t sacrificed on the altar of a rank. Where turning sixteen doesn’t mean signing away your adolescence to a quantum physics textbook that you hate but must love.

My first answer here is not a manifesto. It’s not a solution to the problem, because I don’t have one. The problem is too vast, too interwoven with the DNA of a nation obsessed with scarcity and survival. All I have is this confession, poured out as honestly as I can manage.

The curse of India is not her dust or her poverty or her noise. The curse is the systemic theft of a child’s right to a slow, meandering youth. The curse is a society that loves the idea of a doctor more than it loves the actual, living child standing in front of it.

I survived not because the system spared me, but because two people in a crowded country chose to see me rather than the mark on my report card. I survived because my loved ones built a moat around my spirit, insulating it from the siege of expectations.

But I look at the children in those coaching center windows, and I know my survival is just an exception. A statistical anomaly. A random pocket of oxygen in a drowning room.

And I don’t know whether to be grateful or to be sick.