The biggest rat trap.

everything is a trap.

We laugh at rats. We watch them run headfirst into a trap and wonder how they could possibly be so foolish. How do you look at a mechanism specifically designed to lure you in and not realise what it is? How do you watch another rat fall for it and still walk into it yourself?

And yet, every year, millions of students do exactly that. We call it competitive education. The cheese is a college seat.

The trap is everything surrounding it.

From the moment we enter school, we are handed a simple equation: Good grades lead to a good college. A good college leads to a good job. A good job leads to a good life.

Questioning the equation is rarely encouraged. We are simply told to run.

Run faster. Study harder. Sacrifice more.

The students who hesitate are called lazy. The students who question it are called unrealistic.

And so we run.

Not necessarily because we want to, but because everyone else is running too.

That is the genius of the trap.

The rat is not attracted by the mechanism itself. It is attracted by what the mechanism promises. Students are not obsessed with examinations.

They are obsessed with what examinations promise.

Security. Respect. Stability. A future.

The college seat becomes the cheese. The exam becomes the path. And somewhere along the way, we stop asking a dangerous question:

Is this actually what I want? Not what society respects. Not what pays the most. What do I want?

Society creates the trap first. The exam is just the gatekeeper.

Many students choose medicine because it is respected. Many choose engineering because it is safe. Some spend years preparing for careers they never truly desired simply because they were taught that certain degrees are worth more than others.

Society creates a hierarchy of professions and then acts surprised when everyone fights for the top few spots. They tell students that some careers are respectable and others are backups. Then wonder why millions compete for the same handful of seats.

The problem is not merely the exam, it's the stigma society attaches to it.

Even if the examination system were perfect, there would still be frustration, outrage, and disappointment. People look at the yearly chaos — paper leaks, court cases, normalisation debates, reservation debates, re-exams, rank inflation, coaching factories — and are shocked by the outrage.

How could there not be outrage?

When lakhs of people are trying to pass through a door designed for a fraction of them, every decision about that door becomes explosive. When lakhs of students compete for limited opportunities, someone will always be left behind.

The real issue is the belief that only a few paths lead to success.

As long as society treats a doctor or engineer as inherently more valuable than a psychologist, designer, writer, researcher, teacher, artist, entrepreneur, or countless other professions, the competition will only grow.

Students are not trapped by examinations alone. They are trapped by the idea that their worth depends on the result. The tragedy is that even the winners lose something.

Years spent chasing a single score. Hobbies abandoned. Interests ignored. Curiosity replaced by strategy. The spark that made learning enjoyable slowly traded for survival.

The lucky few may get the seat. The unlucky many may not.

But both often emerge exhausted.

Perhaps the solution is not to abolish competitive exams. Perhaps it is to stop building society around them.

To stop treating a handful of degrees as golden tickets. To stop measuring intelligence through a rank list.

Because a degree does not create a life.

People do.

• rini