The exam season is here. The supposedly deciding day for a lot of kids out there. Irrespective of whether they’ve studied or not, anxiousness will be at its height.

I’m sure like me, most of you must clearly remember, your 10th and 12th Boards! That build-up of 10th since we were kids as if the world’s going to change, was high AF!

We just kept going to the next level with the same anxiousness. 10th kuch nahi, 12th matter karta hai, was what everyone kept saying.

When I loosely floated the idea of taking up Arts, although I wasn’t sure of it, people went like, “You kidding, right”. There’s this stream-hierarchy, right?

Science> Commerce>Arts!

And in a system where marks decide what kind of a student you are, thinking of taking anything other than Science is like, committing a sin.

From worrying about leaving that one objective question till 10th, to slowly tranitioning into paas hojaenge na? attitude over time. But, of course, when shit got real sduring my PG, it was scary.

Before this point, I was never scared of exam results. But sabka time aata hai! And this wasn’t the best of times. On hindsight, the biggest life lesson, but man, it was too scary. I realized what depression actually meant!

But then one phone call changed everything. It was a call from my Abbu. 

Just for context, we don’t talk that often on the phone. Our conversation during college used to be like, “Khaana khaaya? Mausam kaisa hai? Paise hain ?”  And in that particular order, everytime.

So, almost a week or two before the final semester, he called me up and said, “What’s the worst that’ll happen? You’ll have to repeat only, right ?”

And then post that night, this thought sunk in. Slowly.

It wasn’t as if I stopped worrying until the day results were put up on that notice board, but that call brought me back from a weird thought process to a reality that this wouldn’t be an end of things.

If you know of anyone who might be feeling scared of the repercussions of exams and what-after, talk to them. It makes a huge difference.