ACE WITHOUT PACE

Kunal Purswani

Why I chose to leave PACE and how it turned out to be the best decision of my life.

In India, the IIT coaching industry nets almost 10000 crore rupees a year, reported Times of India in 2008, a decade ago. Now, the industry is worth 600 crore rupees in Kota (the ‘hub’ of IIT coaching) itself. Every year, students who have just passed tenth grade are herded into these coaching centres with hopes and dreams of becoming IITians. Most of these students leave their families and live in rented rooms.

Luckily, I had the choice of living in my home when I had applied for PACE, a coaching institute in Bombay. Yes, even I was an aspiring IITian before the devastating reality of the competitive examinations hit me.

My middle-school teachers always encouraged and nurtured my scientific temperament by sending me for quizzes/competitions or giving me projects to complete. In fact, I spent most of my life in middle-school either studying or working on something. Although, studying took up a major part of my time because I wanted to get into the best IIT. IITs were presented to me as the haven of learning, opportunity and most importantly, success, and I was convinced of this. By the time I was in the tenth grade, I had already secured admission in PACE with a good scholarship. Everyone in my family was really happy that I was going to be an IITian, surprisingly, except for me. To secure the scholarship, students have to give an entrance exam in the institute, and that is exactly where the internal conflict started.

On the day of the examination, I arrived at the institute half-an-hour earlier to make myself comfortable in the place, but what happened is the exact opposite and I thank God everyday for that opportunity to roam the campus. Demotivated students littered the hallways of the school. Students were studying in the worst conditions possible; with poorly ventilated rooms and leaking ceilings and cracks in the wall. When you think about a school, you think about students spending time with their friends and being happy. This place was anything but a school, with depressed students sitting in unhygienic conditions with open textbooks throughout the day.

Only after a few days of research did I realise that these students were better off than most. Kota, the Headquarters of IIT coaching, has the worst standards of living. As mentioned earlier, students leave their families and live in hostels with little/no hospitality. Streets are full of students staring into their textbooks. There are posters of institutes all over the place and within these institutes are posters that say things like “think about your parents” and “IIT is the only successful path in life”. This is what got me thinking. Why has the Indian society accepted that sending their children to ‘pressure cookers’ is the only way of succeeding in life?

I had around 7 days to decide whether or not I wanted to accept PACE’s offer and they were the most crucial days of my life. Everywhere I looked, I saw another reason not to conform to society’s model path to success. In my school itself, we had students who score average marks but are international level sportspersons or flawless writers. None of them were studying/going to IIT, yet they were so successful already. Reflecting on this, I realized I wasted most of my life studying for something I didn’t truly want in the first place, and I know I’m not the only/first one to realise this. If it weren’t for the Indian mentality, a lot of these students who are herded into institutes could have been great artists, sportspersons or businessmen (yes, we had those too). Hence, I mustered up the courage to tell my family that I don’t want to accept PACE’s offer. They were devastated.

Instead, I chose to do the IB, which offered an all-round development. At first, I hated it because the science we were learning was too basic compared to what my friends at PACE were doing. It was only after a year that I understood what a gift the IB was. So many of my friends who were amazing orators or videographers were stuck at PACE doing nothing but academics (yes, these were the ones I was jealous of), while I learnt how to write my own research paper and at the same time organise a TEDx event. I was being designed for the real-world.

Challenging the belief that IIT was the only path to a successful life as an engineer was one of the most transformative experiences of my life. Now, all I hope is that everyone recognises that coaching institutes have no incentive to make children successful, their only goal is profit maximisation and they play on our mentality to do so. Yes, a lot of IITians have high-earning jobs, but going through hell is not the only way to get where they are.