You must have heard this from someone at some time in your life:
“Oh, you have a lot of potential! If only you work hard, everything is within your grasp.”
Such bollocks we tell kids, right. You give them hope, give them dreams, and you fill them with regret when they are not able to realise the potential you perceive.
This is how my life was from the beginning. Always the second-ranked student in my class. Little did I know that it was not my potential that gave me a podium finish; instead, there was only one guy in my class who was good. I was the famous guy who used to score the second rank without studying. Oh, what good old days!
Then he went to a different school. A school with an entirely English medium curriculum. And you know what, he excelled in that environment. I thought this was how competition is for us ‘intelligent’ students. So, I joined the same school after my 8th standard(I ‘cleared’ the entrance test). I thought I was as good as these fancy people.
And then hit the reality, ‘CBSE 9th standard’. For a guy from the MP board, it was an absolute tragedy(not the same for the other guy, though!). I barely passed my very first unit test. Oh, English medium is not for us lackeys!
Still, I somehow passed my 10th with an 8.2. At that time, it felt like such a big achievement for me. I got the ‘coveted’ PCM stream in school. Then came the horror show. I started failing in almost every subject, every test, even in English! Friggin' English. Oh, you cannot even imagine how it was being me. The only thing that kept me going was my poetry. I was a decent writer, good orator, and class clown. Obviously, it was going to make me a name for myself. But this story is not about that.
You know how much I scored on my first 12th attempt. Please guess it!!!
I scored 53% in 2014. Oh, the look on my parent's faces. THE HORROR!!. To have your siblings topping the exams, and everyone used to think you were the brightest one, your life cannot be worse. I tried to jump into Hathikheda dam, but wtf I caved there too!! I saw the water and then thought it may be a tad better to live. What a coward!
Now, obviously, in a lower middle-class family, we start thinking that maybe this is it. I think I have learned enough to survive in this land. All I have to do is cut all the ties with my past. Maybe I will enrol in the army, or become a poet, or maybe something else.
You know what I did, I took haven in one of the most outstanding careers a middle-class guy can take and became a CUSTOMER CARE executive! 3PM-1AM. What an eccentric path!!!! Left studies and started working and earning. Maybe life is not that bad. I can earn, I can do whatever I want, and I don’t have to see my parent's disappointed faces(although we lived in the same house).
But life as a human is not that easy. Oh god, why do you have to make us like that? I could have lived my life happily like that, but no, you had to poke your nose in that too. You made me dream again. I do not know how(maybe because I was fairing really well at my job, or perhaps because everyone around me sucked), but I somehow got hope when one of my friends told me about an improvement exam. Oh, you can improve your 12th marks! What an initative sirji.
I gave 12th again. You can’t write a script like this. I scored 69%. Hahaha. But it was enough to convince everyone in my family that maybe I could study again. I can get a job after my college as an engineer(eligibility criteria), and I will earn threefold what I am earning now. I started dreaming again.
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But this time, it was different. I realised I was not the same guy who I was in 2014. Something changed. I definitely knew what. My job and experience at AEGIS(the customer care centre) have made me grounded and attached to reality. I cannot thank that experience enough because maybe my life would have been different if I had done something else. This was the point where I realized my childhood was gone.
My dreams now were not outlandish. I just wanted to land a moderate-paying job and live my life happily. Owing to my okay JEE marks(103), I was able to land a college under the tuition fee waiver scheme. For the Sourabh of 2014, this was the shittiest college one could go to, but somehow the Sourabh of 2015 was content. I continued my call centre job even during my first semester, although part-time(You can change your timing after 6 months of experience).
This time, I did not make the same mistakes. I let go of the ghost of my past. I was focused, I was hungry, and I completed my graduation with honours. I met my rival, my brother, and like-minded friends in these four years. I got placed into Infosys, and I think I was able to realise the dream that I had in 2015.
What should I do next? Excel at the training programme in Infosys? I completed the training as an HPF(High performer)! Be good at my job? I used to be appreciated every once in a while in my project! I think that was it. I even had an innocent crush on a girl in my office. Maybe I will get married in a year or two!
But then everything stopped. This time, it was not just me; it was the whole world. You guessed it right, COVID-19. Lockdown. I was separated from maybe the only girl that I ever loved. I was stuck again! But this time, I took it as an opportunity. I once planned to give CAT in my final year. Maybe I can utilise some of my free time preparing for this exam. Maybe my job at Infosys is not the place where I was supposed to peak at my career. It was the time to dream big again.
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Three months later, I began to realise that I could do good in the exam. You know what, I did good. Scored 99.28%ile(79.6 in VARC, though). Although I did convert IIM Shillong, I decided to let that offer go as I did not want to be a part of the online curriculum(Ironically, I was a software developer). So, back to square one!
After my life became monotonous, I decided to leave Infosys(You can never stick to one place, Sourabh!). It was difficult. Leaving my first achievement, my friends and the place that kind of moulded me and gave me exposure to a whole different world. I cannot forget the memories still, GEC 4(you will understand this only if you were an infoscian).
Next stop, Hyderabad! What a city! I got a job in Cracku as a product manager, and now, maybe now, I started enjoying my life. I started performing in open mics, started partying and honing my table tennis skills. I had some relationships, but that is again a story for someday else. But as with everything, this feeling was also ephemeral. My childhood friend passed away on September 5. I became hopeless again, aimless again, and obviously devastated. I came to Hyderabad to give CAT one more go, but maybe this was not what destiny wanted.
It took me some time to recover, and I realised that it was already October 23. I was performing very badly at my work and was getting scolded every week by my CEO, but somehow it meant nothing. Now, only 35 days left before CAT 2022. Oh, I was not prepared for this realisation. This may sound like bragging and showing off, but I did not sleep for more than 3 hours during those 35 days. I was so out of practice that I was not even able to clear my QA cutoffs in most mocks.
Cut to November 27th. My exam went bad, and I had given hopes of even scoring the marks that I scored in my last CAT. But in hindsight, now I realize one thing for sure. Your days of hardship never disappoint you. I scored 99.57%ile against all odds. Flunked my quant and scored a mere 96%ile(only if I had made better choices in the exam, this would have been a very different result). My logical reasoning(99.96) did not disappoint, and now, I am on the verge of clearing IIT Bombay SJMSOM(will easily clear the waitlist) and NITIE(which most probably will clear the waitlist). Could have performed a tad better in the IIM Lucknow interview(Rank 779), but I think I don’t have that regret.
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I know this story sounds a little bit exaggerated, but all I can give you right now is the mark sheets and scorecards of my exams. My experience, however, cannot be validated with any evidence.
If you have read till here, you might have wondered why I wrote this whole story. Is this my peak, I hope probably not. If you think this is to inspire someone, then maybe you are wrong. Whether I am bored right now, yeah, you can say that. But all want to know through this is whether I can narrate a story. Will I write a novel, I cannot say! But I do want to know whether I can write the same or not. Maybe someday, if I am good enough, I can transform this piece into a novel worth sharing.
A poet, aspiring writer, and management aspirant, this was Sourabh Singh signing off!!
Special mentions:
Adarsh Patankar(My topper friend)
Vaibhav Chaturvedi(The improvement exam guy, and my mentor)
Ritik Keshari(The Rival, hehe!)
