It’s my second year of B.Com, and I’m standing in front of the results board like a deer caught in headlights. You know that moment when you’re watching the Mumbai Indians team bat and they lose their last wicket on 99? Yeah, that level of “this can’t be happening.” There it was, glaring at me in all its glory: 06/50 next to my name in Economics. Six. Not sixteen, not sixty percent, just a plain, devastating six.
My brain went through the five stages of grief faster than a Netflix episode buffer. First came denial: “Maybe they mixed up the names?” Then anger: “This system is rigged!” Bargaining followed quickly: “God, if you fix this, I promise I’ll actually read the textbook.” Depression hit like a ton of bricks, and acceptance? Well, that was nowhere to be found. A friend, let’s call her Ms. Misery-Loves-Company, sidled up to me with her own single-digit catastrophe. “Dude, the entire class got demolished,” she said. “We’re all in this sinking ship together.” But here’s the thing about sinking ships, some people grab life jackets, others go down with dignity, and then there are those weird ones who insist the ship isn’t actually sinking. Guess which category I fell into?
While everyone around me was forming a support group for academic casualties, there was this annoying little voice in my head that kept going, “Nope. Not buying it.” The math was simple and terrifying: 6 + 30 = 36. I needed to score 30 out of 50 in the next term just to avoid repeating the year. That’s like needing to win the lottery after already losing your wallet, technically possible, but requiring divine intervention. But that voice? It was relentless. It was like having a personal hype-woman living rent-free in my brain, constantly chanting, “You didn’t write THAT badly. You know you didn’t!”
So I did what any self-respecting student with trust issues would do, I became a detective in my own academic mystery. For Rs 100, I could get access to my answer sheet, to potentially confirm my worst fears or vindicate my stubborn faith in myself. I’d spent more money on worse decisions, so why not? Fifteen days. Fifteen whole days of existing in academic purgatory, where I oscillated between “I’m a genius who’s been wronged” and “I’m a delusional failure who can’t accept reality.” Then came the SMS. Yes, an actual SMS, because this was back when phones were still primarily for calling people and occasionally playing Snake. The message was shorter than a haiku but packed more suspense than a season finale: “Your paper is ready for collection.”
Walking into that examination office felt like walking out to bat in the final over with more than 30 runs needed, except instead of facing a bowler, I was about to face cold, hard numerical judgment. My hands were shaking.
Knock knock.
“Come in.”
The examiner looked up from her mountain of paperwork and asked for my roll number with the efficiency of someone who’d processed thousands of these requests. And then she handed me my paper.
36 out of 50.
Not 6. Not 16. Thirty-six.
I stared at that number like it had personally insulted my ancestors. Then I looked at the examiner, then back at the paper, then at the examiner again, probably resembling a confused tennis match spectator. “There was a misprint on the results board,” she said, as casually as someone mentioning the weather. A MISPRINT. My entire existential crisis, my mathematical calculations for academic survival, my friend’s solidarity in failure – all based on a clerical error.
The examiner, this woman who’d probably dealt with hundreds of students accepting their fate without question, looked at me with something that might have been… respect? “Young lady,” she said, “you have a tremendous amount of self-belief. Most students in your batch scored single digits and just accepted it. The fact that you didn’t give up and came here to check, that’s a good quality. Keep that intact as you go through life.” And suddenly, my Rs 100 felt like the best investment I’d ever made.
The examiner saw something in my stubborn refusal to accept defeat that I didn’t even recognise in myself at the time. While my entire class was busy forming a support group for shared failure, I was out here playing detective because something inside me just wouldn’t let me believe I was that incompetent. It wasn’t arrogance, God knows I had plenty of legitimate academic failures to keep me humble. It was something deeper. A quiet, persistent voice that said, “This doesn’t add up, and you know it.”
Fast forward to now, and I find myself thinking about that “young lady” a lot. Life has a funny way of chipping away at your armor, doesn’t it? Rejections, failures, moments when you second-guess every decision you’ve ever made, they all leave little dents in your confidence. Sometimes I catch myself accepting things I shouldn’t accept, staying quiet when I should speak up, or worse, not trusting my own instincts when they’re screaming that something isn’t right. But then I remember that girl who knocked on that office door despite being nervous. The one who refused to go down with the ship just because everyone else was already swimming.
Self-belief isn’t about being right all the time. I’ve been spectacularly wrong about plenty of things (like thinking that cryptocurrency was “the next big disrupter” or that Sun Risers Hyderabad will finish the IPL 2025 season by going into the playoffs). It’s about trusting yourself enough to question the results when they don’t match your efforts. It’s about being willing to spend Rs 100 and fifteen days of anxiety to find out if you’re delusional or justified. It’s about knocking on doors even when your hands are shaking. That “young lady” in the examination office? She didn’t just have tremendous self-belief, she had the courage to act on it. And maybe, just maybe, it’s time I started channeling her energy again. Because sometimes, the board is wrong. Sometimes, you really did score 36 and not 06. And sometimes, the only person who can fight for your truth is you.