An enduring image of education I have is tenth standard results. The daily newspaper showcased the smiling faces of future VIPs, while the majority of us, anticipating what that publicised success meant for our peace, prepared defence.

Slowly fate unravelled in percentiles that meant huge gulfs on the planet. Overnight, friends became mutual suspects, science scorned the arts, successful and unsuccessful trajectories could be imagined, winners and losers assumed shape. If I could live it again, I would call it stupid; if I look back at it, I would say the same thing. The only other term for it is ‘breaking news.' A day of results usually broke me. May be that's how I became journalist?

Households

In the Kerala of the seventies and eighties, they remembered these rank holders religiously. If you came face to face with this bandwagon, you gazed up the nearest coconut palm or mango tree for relief because the ground seemed lost to discussions about grand future spanning IIT to IAS with MBBS in between.

Every family was like a competitive unit, its present harnessed to hardworking parents, its future pegged to promising child. Those enjoying the present and taking the future lightly were few. Over time, as a deliberate dash of cool began adhering to this minority rebel faction, being ‘cool' also set in as family fashion.

On the surface nobody had tension; look closer, they worked hard while you slept after play. So now, in addition to the honestly talented, you also had the smartly talented to cope with. Needless to say, in my adult years, I studied humanities and traded those coconut palms and trees for walks in the Himalaya. Truth be told even the Himalaya is threatened. So seek refuge in any contrasting metaphor — Siberia, Arctic, Antarctica, Mongolia, Alaska, Patagonia, whatever. Or be in the city and keep Alaska in the mind.

Around the time I scraped through to college, the tutorial craze started. In the sciences, a wave of entrance tests authored an industry of coaching centres. Newspaper advertisements announced faces separated by decimal points in the race to be doctor and engineer. Many years later, I saw the same still going on in far off Mumbai where entire hoardings at crowded spots such as railway stations, displayed young faces with the marks they scored.

They remind me of an anxious mother, whose son — a science student — was my friend. Briefly in college the boy failed to get a berth in science and was cast into the humanities lot as my classmate. The mother asked me point blank, “what future does he have?” It helped me understand households.

Growing up

I have often wondered what happened to the rank-holders of my time. A few continued the trait into college but many sank out of sight. Most of them, I am certain, are successful somewhere — in Kerala, elsewhere in India, West Asia, the UK or the US.

Looking back, I don't think, that one day in teenage, when a clutch of faces in the media divided us as successful and unsuccessful, had anything to do with academic brilliance or love for science and arts. That day was the first taste of adulthood for life as man and woman lost to success or lack of it. Perhaps it is only correct then that life after tenth standard should be the stuff of well-deserved oblivion. Imagine science and humanities authored by the mentality of winning and losing — is that understanding?

(The author is a freelance journalist based in Mumbai)

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