Rat Race
In my batch right now, there are essentially two kinds of people.
On one side are the general category students like me hooked on caffeine and anxiety grinding relentlessly for the NEET PG prep. They juggle exhausting hospital duties, endless lectures of rapid revision, GTs, revisions again, and Qbanks. Most of us quietly put their lives on hold: gyms abandoned, hobbies shelved, social circles shrinking.
Every day feels like a calculation:Is this enough? Will this be enough?
I am pretty sure that it's a do or die game for me, as someone who wont be able to survive in a hectic clincial branch as medicine, the only option that remains for me are the top branches like Radio and derma which close at 500. Coming from a middle class family with absolute zero background, this feels daunting.
On the other side are those with near-guaranteed outcomes. A surgery seat at 40k. Medicine at 20k. The certainty itself changes everything. You rarely see them studying. Or maybe a half hearted attempts at picking up BTR and scooting through them. Instead, you would see them fooling around, parties, smoking breaks, trips, and an ease that only assurance brings. Life, after all, is meant to be enjoyed especially when the system already promises you a soft landing and a robust safety net to fall upon.
Many of them come from deeply privileged backgrounds: parents in the bureaucracy, siblings already in residency, financial cushions that absorb failure without consequence. Access to the best resources Marrow subscriptions, MacBooks, quiet homes, time things that are spoken of casually but mean everything in competitive exams. And yes some carry certificates that everyone knows are fabricated fake EWS, fake OBC because loopholes reward dishonesty better than effort and its easy to survive in this If you look at the EWS and OBC cutoffs of IPU,you would realise why many of them are after forged certificates, have even seen some students changing their surnames from 'Pandey' to 'Pandit' just so that they can get that very quota.
Meanwhile, students like me general category, middle class, first-generation doctors live in a constant state of uncertainty. Most of my day goes into reviewing flashcards, revising concepts, trying to stay afloat. I gave up the gym. I gave up most of what made life feel balanced. Stopped watching movies, stopped listening to my favourite songs, dropped my plans for things I had always planned when i would eventually start earning. And still, there’s no guarantee I’ll get the branch I want next year. Not even close.
What hurts more than the competition is the realization that no amount of hard work can bridge the gap of generational privilege. I know I will likely never match the financial security or social capital some of my batchmates were born into even if I outwork them every single day.
This makes you ask uncomfortable questions.
Where did I go wrong?
Why does grinding through UG only land me in another race where the rules are stacked again?
People like to say the world is unfair and that’s true. But what hurts more is how systematically that unfairness is enforced, normalized, and defended, especially in a country as ours. Merit is preached endlessly, yet rarely rewarded in proportion to effort. The reservation system, as it exists today, no longer corrects disadvantage it often preserves privilege under the label of backwardness, while people who genuinely struggle are told to work harder. What's worse is that, reservation has essentially become an organised means to solicit votes from the their favourables, or that the ones who actually need reservation are never going to have it,
Maybe this sounds like whining. Maybe I’ll whine again during counselling next year. But unless you’re a general category, middle class, first generation doctor in this country, you genuinely don’t understand how heavy this feels how demoralizing it is to realize that effort is necessary, but never sufficient.
And above all, its exhaustion from running a race where the finish line keeps moving, but only for some of us.
Apart from my usual academic preparation, I have come to realize slowly and with considerable difficulty that next year will also demand a different kind of endurance. I will have to learn to absorb realities that are far harder to revise for.
I will watch people who vacationed in Dubai secure seats through EWS. I will see those who scraped through exams on the mercy of professors walk into the most sought after branches at the most prestigious colleges. I will see interns who barely touched their books confidently announce their branch choices for next year.
And I will have to learn to live with it not because it is fair, but because it is real.
But if I ever get a chance to make things fair, I will, for sure!
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This was so relatable!
ReplyDeleteGlad!
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