Under Pressure

Bina and Rini outside their Tirur home. Rini is home studying for the Board Exams.

Regular readers of this blog might remember Rini. (If not, refer to an old post entitled, “Rini of Tirur” in the blog’s archives.) Jenna and I met Rini early on in our stay in Tirur on the Muslim holy day Eid al-Adha. At that time, Rini impressed us then with her independence, her self-confidence, and her well-articulated English. She seemed to be a girl who knew what she wanted and where she was going in life.

I am happy to report that Jenna and I got to visit with Rini one final time before we leave Tirur on Sunday. Rini had been away for most of the intervening time at boarding school in Thrissur, which is about a 90-minute train ride south of Tirur. She is a Plus Two standard student (the highest level of secondary education in India), and she is currently preparing for the high-stakes Board Exams in early March. Her school gave students two weeks’ leave so they could concentrate on studying for the tests.

The Board Exams, to say the least, is a nerve-wracking affair for hundreds of thousands of ambitious Indian teenagers. Imagine the ACT or SAT. Now imagine if it lasted an entire week instead of just one day; that it asked you essay questions instead of multiple-choice; that it challenged you with topics ranging from Calculus to Organic Chemistry; then imagine that it determined whether you got to graduate high school or not and that it also had a significant bearing on what college you were accepted to after matriculation. If you imagine all this, then you have the Indian Plus Two Board Exams.

A recent editorial in The Hindu showed a student weighed down by a futuristic looking contraption strapped to his back with a scientist busily writing down figures on a notepad. A woman dressed in a sari—assumed to be the fictional student’s teacher—gestures towards a road sign that says, “Board Exams”. The teacher in the cartoon is saying, “Don’t worry, son. It is all for your benefit.” The student looks troubled and dyspeptic with sweat beads popping off his forehead.

The cartoon’s point, I think, was to convey the immense amount of pressure placed on Plus Two students by the Board Exams. With one set of exams, their futures are determined, their ambitions realized or denied, their dreams fulfilled or shattered. In addition, a nation which feels such a need to develop into an international superpower (based primarily on its reputation as an IT hub) finds a fresh crop of whiz kids to burnish that image but with no clear option for the students who fall short.

For her part, Rini expresses a desire to attend one of India’s prestigious IITs (or India Institutes of Technology), which were famously praised in Thomas Friedmen’s The World is Flat. “I would like to go to IIT-Chennai or IIT-Bangalore,” she says matter-of-factly. “My dream is to be a civil engineer. The IITs are the best schools.”

“But you must study hard to get into those schools,” says her mother Bina, whom we had also met earlier. Bina evinces the typically ambitious agenda Indian parents have for their eldest children, and backs it up with a strikingly blunt assessment of her daughter. “Bina is lazy. She needs to study more. She is also fat because she is lazy.”

For an awkward moment, Jenna and I stare at Rini (who has been sitting serenely by her mother as she says these things) and wait for her reply. We wonder if a domestic row will break out in front of our eyes.

Instead, Rini cracks a smile and chuckles, “Mother, I am fat because I eat a lot. It has nothing to do with me being lazy. But yes, I am lazy. Too lazy. Other students have been studying all year for these exams. I just started last week.”

“How much do you study each day?” I ask.

“I get up at five in the morning for namaz (prayers). Then I go back to sleep…” Rini says.

“See! Lazy!” Bina interjects, playfully slapping Rini’s shoulder. Rini laughs again.

“I get back up around six and study until lunchtime. I take a nap in the afternoon, then study several more hours in the evening.”

“So, maybe eight hours a day?” I push for more details.

Rini squints her eyes, “No. No, probably around ten.” Lazy indeed, I think.

I thick textbook entitled Topper’s Manuel for Organic Chemistry sits heavily on the coffee table between us, stacked atop a pile of local newspapers. I absent-mindedly flip through the book, which is in English. However the book’s practice problems and helpful hints appear as impenetrable to me as Malayalam script.

“Is this yours?” I ask.

“No, it is my cousin’s,” Rini replies. “She is around here somewhere,” she continues. “But I have a book just like it. My cousin is a year older and took the Board Exams last year. She did not get a good enough score, so she must take them again.”

My eyes stop on a problem. What is the drug that best fights malaria infection? A) aspirin, B) penicillin, C) chloroquine, D) percotomel

I read the question to Rini. “I believe it is ‘C’,” she says. I check the answer at the back of the book. She is right.

After another hour of idle chat—and a few more practice problems—Jenna and I take our leave. Bina and Rini take us to the front door. “Good luck,” we tell Rini.

“Thank you. I will do my best,” she says with a shy smile.

We shake hands and Jenna gives the two women short hugs. It is yet another farewell in our final week at Tirur. But something inside me suspects this is not the last I will hear of Rini. Maybe if Thomas Friedmen ever writes a follow-up to The World is Flat, I will read about her in that.