Hardik Rajgor

“D id you study in the  ICSE  board,” a colleague once asked me while we were engaged in conversation for half an hour and fast running out of  small talk . “No no, SSC board,” I replied back softly, with mild resignation. “Oh, your English is pretty good. I thought you must be from the ICSE board,” he said, with that arrogant confidence I had become too familiar with.   The various boards that constitute the educational system in India are like the caste system. IB board students are the  Brahmins . ICSE and CBSE students are Kshatriyas and Vaishyas respectively, and we State board students are treated like the lowest rung in the social hierarchy. Students from other boards look down upon us, the same way the internet looks down upon netizens who typ lik dis. SSC board students become  Monisha Sarabhais  to the posh and sophisticated Maya Sarabhais of the country. Our emotions were aptly captured by Shilpa Shukla in  Chak De India   when...

I grew up in the suburbs of  Mumbai  and  apun  ka childhood was really  fatte . Kids would do a lot of  bol bachchan  on the ground   but then had to back their  shanpatti  with  kadak  football skills.   Those merely engaging in  bhankaas  were taken to the  khopcha  and given  kharcha paani.  One couldn’t go home and do  panchayat  about the  lafda  that happened on the ground because no one wants to be friends with a  phattu  who complains to mom. Also, because your  bantai  log wouldn’t be pleased, and  tereko dho dalega . We believed in being  bindaas  and settling our  nalla  problems  sumadi mein. As we got into  school , I turned out to be an average student who ended up scoring below average marks in  Hindi . “ Tereko  kitna aaya?” I would ask my friend who also barely managed to scrape through. ...

I ’ve been an average student throughout school and college. The guy not nerdy enough to be in the front bench but not naughty enough to rule the back bench either. I was strictly mediocre, like  Akshay Kumar , of whom not a lot was expected but he just seemed to keep doing fine. I scored just enough which ensured that my parents had to never visit college but not enough to avoid comparisons with Sharmaji ka ladka. I never ever failed. And then I enrolled for the chartered accountancy course. My dad’s a chartered accountant and a lot of my uncles are CAs, and naturally I was going to be a CA. That’s just how Gujarati and Marwari CA families roll. Dad, of course, didn’t tell me that. He told me that if you like math, you should pursue the CA course. This bullshit sales pitch was right up there with the time he convinced me to have paracetamol because it looked just like Polo. I cleared the entrance exam (CPT) in my first attempt and felt that I could conquer the world. Like...