My father took loans and worked at jobs far beneath his calibre as an aeroplane pilot. Unable to cope with either the corruption or the callous attitude in the ‘civilian world’, as we call it, he would quit each time. We would all be relieved when this happened as none of us liked seeing him struggle. To make up for the loss of income, my mother would increase the number of students who came home every evening for tuitions. At night, my father would pick up my brother from his coaching class, so that he could study from another remote-learning coaching package he had been enrolled in, complete the homework prescribed by the teachers at his new school, and prepare for his frequent assignments and exams. Bafflingly, the curriculum for the IIT entrance exam is different from the curriculum at school. On his fifteenth birthday, I had bought him a basketball and hoop, which he immediately put up in the courtyard of our home. For three years, the only physical activity he did was shoot the ball in the basket a few times during study breaks.
At the end of three years, my brother’s school marks dipped because of his focus on the IIT entrance exam. He was unrecognizable in appearance and spirit—he had fattened up and was irritable most of the time. He was demanding with my mother, who would sit up with him at nights, helping him learn by rote lessons in organic chemistry, a subject she had herself never studied. There was one picture of the monkey god Hanuman on his study table and one inside his books. My parents became more devout than ever before. There were always more books to be bought for my brother, and we sold our family home to continue his coaching classes and get him all the study material he needed.
Finally, the time came for the IIT exam. My brother’s scores did not make for the top percentile, which was required to study at IIT. This meant he had failed. Moreover, his moderate performance in school got him a seat in a relatively low-ranked college in Delhi. I will never forget the reaction—my family remained unfazed by his results. My brother decided to forsake his seat in college, take the year off from any formal education, and instead prepare again for the IIT entrance test the following year. My parents supported him wholeheartedly. By then, I had moved out of India to pursue my own university education in Paris on a full scholarship. I worried for my parents in New Delhi, working as a team to support my brother, who did nothing else but sit at home and prepare for the fourth straight year to make it through to IIT.
The following year, he succeeded in clearing the IIT entrance. It was as if an unsurmountable weight had been lifted off our family’s shoulders. We could laugh and make plans again. With the savings from my scholarship money, I organized tightly budgeted holidays for my parents in Europe. When I started working, I would get my brother to live with me in Paris during his summer vacations and send him off with a camera I’d gifted him to Amsterdam, Madrid, Rotterdam. I would hook him up as an intern at local companies in Paris, and take him out to bars. All those years of preparing for one ghastly test had to be undone.
My brother eventually regained his social skills and physique, as well as his humour. He completed a master’s degree in the human computer interface degree at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, and after a year of work in Washington DC, he joined Google’s headquarters in San Francisco. I was not sure whose dream it was—his or my parents’—that had come true. Perhaps my parents’ dreams had become my brother’s. I was only glad that things turned out the way they did instead of going wrong as they do for so many people.
I have often talked to my parents about those gruelling years they chose to put my brother through. We reminisce about the shared experience of the struggle, and the pride it ultimately brought us. My parents—much to mine and my brother’s frustration and admiration—have insisted on living their lives in exactly the same manner as before. They do not accept financial support from us. Indeed, the story of each child and each parent is different. However, after returning to India as an adult and a soon-to-be-parent myself, I feel I am better able to understand the sense of perennial deprivation that frames the context for this behaviour.
First, there is an overarching sentiment among adults in India that nothing ever works here. It is not just the 21.9 per cent of Indians living below the poverty line who feel the lack of resources.6 The colossal size of our population, combined with pathetic distribution systems of food, money and health services, leaves hundreds of millions wanting more. We are habituated to expect that due resources will either not reach us at all or not be received in their entirety, and certainly not on time. Adults, no matter how wealthy, are frustrated, and do not wish this life for their children.
Second, most of our educational institutions were established in the decade or so after Independence, by the elite who focused on higher education as that was what they themselves desired the most. They ignored the needs of the masses, who still lack primary education. Since then, education, and Macaulay’s gift of the English language, has at times become more
