Our students deserve all the accolades because of the circumstances, ordeals indeed, they go through to pursue their academic dreams. We make them experience all the discomfort - or adventures, as per some Pollyannas - of practical life. I felt like prolonging the prologue to the length of an elegy on the pain, anguish and agony they face in their student life, but the gravity of the issue pulled me back. The circumstances that threw me into the melancholic abyss are related to the ongoing exams for higher secondary education in Punjab. Remember that after completing this level of education, the students pursue their professional studies in arts, medicine, engineering or technology.

Sweltering heat, peak power loadshedding, insufficient facilities, a student-unfriendly environment at the examination halls and poor real-life planning are a few inhibitors that turn the exams into a ring of fire that students have to squeeze themselves through to be declared an educated community in whose hands lies the future of our........

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