Two decades ago, on a hot Sunday afternoon, I was writing what felt like the most important exam of my life. It was a day I had been preparing for over two years. My parents, probably, had been preparing for it since the day they first thought of having a child.

It was the IIT-JEE. Back then, there were no JEE Mains and JEE Advanced. The first stage was called the JEE Screening, and only around 15,000 students cleared it to earn the right to write the final examination — the JEE Mains. I managed to clear the first level, and was seated at a desk, waiting for the invigilator to distribute the mathematics question paper. Our guy was probably a bit annoyed, forced to work on a Sunday, a day he would have spent with his family. But here he was, “invigilating” 40-odd kids who would never forget those two hours for the rest of their lives.

A familiar classroom, an unfamiliar pressure

My examination centre was familiar territory — the same school where I had sat for the Class XII board exams. There was something reassuring about walking through those gates again. A famous alumnus of that school, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, wasn’t famous yet.

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