The Internet only wants to sell you the winning part.
The masterclass, the framework, the seven habits.
Nobody sells you the story of losing.
My younger daughter went for her driving test last fortnight.
Two months of practice behind her. She was ready to show the RTO inspector what she had learnt.
She almost got through it clean. Then, right at the end, the rear wheel found a pole.
She walked back to the car looking composed. The moment she sat down, she fell apart.
Crying, properly crying. Two months, she said, all wasted.
Her elder sister had failed the same test three times. That makes me the only licensed driver in the house, a fact I do not mention too often.
But what struck me was something else. My daughter had never failed at anything before.
Every exam, every test, she had passed. The only question was by how much.
This was her first real failure. And it hurt exactly as much as first failures do.
Nobody talks about this side of things anymore.
The Internet only wants to sell you the winning part. The masterclass, the framework, the seven habits.
Nobody sells you the story of losing. Especially losing with company.
So let me tell you mine.
Key Points
- A week in, my friend Aji vanished. I found him hiding in the commerce section. I pulled him out by his bag strap. I told him we chose this together, so we suffer together.
- We understood nothing. Biology and chemistry were a fog.
- In the lab, we had to skin a frog and pin it to a wax tray. Every time my scissors moved, something went wrong.
- We failed every midterm. Our teachers looked at us the way you look at a dog that has chewed through the sofa again.
First Lessons In Losing
In tenth grade, a few of us chose the science stream. We were reluctant, but proud of ourselves anyway.
The admission clerk asked for my surname. I told him I did not have one.
Back home in Kerala, a first name and a father's name were always enough. In fact most used just alphabets, not even full form.
He looked at me like I had confessed to a crime. Then he pointed at the Malayali boy ahead of me, who had cheerfully supplied one: Puthenpurakkal.
I tried reasoning with him. I warned him that a name of that length was asking for trouble in Gujarat's paperwork.
He did not care. No surname, no exam.
So I gave up and offered my ancestral house name instead. A word so complicated I will spare you the spelling.
The clerk went pale. He asked what it meant.
I did not know. I still do not know.
He wrote it down anyway. Years later, when the cricketer Marvan Atapattu became famous, people asked if we were related. The names rhymed just enough.
School Science Struggles
We passed tenth grade and marched into science in eleventh.
A week in, my friend Aji vanished. I found him hiding in the commerce section.
I pulled him out by his bag strap. I told him we chose this together, so we suffer together.
That turned out to be a bad decision.
We understood nothing. Biology and Chemistry were a fog. We dragged one more friend back from the same escape attempt.
In the lab, we had to skin a frog and pin it to a wax tray. Every time my scissors moved, something went wrong.
Only Jacob could do it properly. Another friend. He later became a chef in America, which somehow made perfect sense. He has since moved on to something else entirely, and is doing well.
We failed every midterm. Our teachers looked at us the way you look at a dog that has chewed through the sofa again.
By the board exams, we had made peace with it. We played cricket. We played football. We knew what was coming.
During the final exam, the school owner's son sat beside me. Third attempt, that year.
He assumed I was smart and asked me to tilt my paper so he could copy.
I was planning to copy off him. We were both in trouble.
The paper arrived. I recognised nothing on it.
Three hours, no early exit. So I wrote anyway. Cricket, in the physics answer sheet. Movie reviews, in chemistry.
The owner's son copied every word. My film reviews went straight into his science paper, and he never blinked.
The biggest fool in the room, it turned out, had been sitting next to me all year.
Results Day Reality
Results day came. Forty-eight of us in the batch.
No online checking back then. You stood in a line and looked the clerk in the eye.
We read our fates off each other's faces as they walked back. Aji went first. Blank.
Then Albin. Then Jacob. Same blank face.
The clerk handed me my sheet and looked at me properly. Good marks, he said. Go frame it.
Then he asked if we had any shame.
I walked back to the others. We compared sheets.
All of us had failed. Thirty-six out of forty-eight in the whole batch. Close to a record, I'd say.
I tore mine up right there. The others kept theirs.
The next morning, we woke up and carried on like nothing had happened.
Why Failure Builds Resilience
Today, in 2026, a child gets a B-minus and the parents assemble a small task force.
We teach kids to argue over a lost mark. Nobody teaches them how to lose one.
We never learned to be depressed about failing. We just signed up again, in commerce this time.
The owner's son failed that year too, naturally.
None of us turned out ruined. We are all somewhere in the world, doing fine.
I doubt any of my old friends have told their children this story. Consider it told now.
They should understand that some failures are just the first draft of a story worth telling later.
And my daughter's second test is today. She will not cry even if she fails. I am sure. That is a lesson you learn from experience.
Feature Presentation: Ashish Narsale/Rediff
