She’s Giving NEET. I Survived JEE. Somehow We Found Each Other.

On walks, gossip, the things we talk about on long evenings, and the quiet fear of watching someone you love finally get to leave.

“we disagree on so much but still manage to stay together “

I have very few friends. I’m saying this upfront because it matters. It’s not a complaint it’s just a fact I’ve slowly made peace with. I’m not good at keeping people. I’m too much sometimes, and I make mistakes, and somewhere along the way I’ve lost people I genuinely liked. So when I say I have very few friends, I mean it the way someone says it who has counted and recounted and arrived at a number smaller than they’d like.

And one of the best ones maybe the best one right now is a girl who is, as I write this, somewhere in her room, probably reading a biology chapter for the third time this week, trying to crack NEET.

Her third year of trying. Three years of her life handed over to an exam. I know exactly what that looks like from the inside, because I did something similar for JEE. Three years. Engineering. Computer Science. My father’s plan for my future, not particularly mine.

About 22 lakh students sit for NEET every year. Around 15 lakh for JEE. These are just numbers until you’ve been one of them until you understand that behind each of those lakhs is a teenager who gave up something to be there. Friendships. Social media. Calls. Evenings. The slow ordinary texture of just being young.

I know because I gave those things up too. In 11th grade, I broke a friendship with a girl from my school. We used to talk for hours on the phone the kind of calls that don’t really go anywhere but feel essential. And then I stopped. Not because something went wrong between us, not dramatically just because I was giving too many exams, drowning in preparation, and every hour on a call felt like an hour I didn’t have. So I let it go. Just like that.

That’s what competitive exams in India do to you. They don’t just take your time. They take your emotional range. You stop being a person with a life and start being a person with a target. And the strange thing is you agree to it. You agree because the alternative feels like failure, and failure in this country, at this age, in these exams, feels like something you will take a lot of time to recover from.

“It was quite hard doing nothing other than studying for two years. No social media, no friends, no real contact with the world outside. Just books and the inside of your own head and the quiet terror of not being enough.”

That was tough time , JEE was the only one thing i used to think after waking up , The first thought in my mind was to be “ will i crack it , what if i couldnt crack it , will i get a good college , what if i didnt got a goverment college and my father had to spend a lot of money on my education “ , All these thoughts straight in the morning .

But I came out the other side with time . Into engineering, into a college I’m still figuring out, into a life that doesn’t quite fit the shape I expected. My best friend is still in it. Still preparing. Still carrying all of that weight every single day, and she does it with a kind of quiet dignity that I genuinely respect.

We met through our mothers. As embarrassing as that is to admit, it’s the truth. Both of us were dragged into the same social orbit, doing the stiff formal walk-and-talk thing that mothers insist on, both bored, both pretending not to be bored. And then at some point we stopped pretending. Something cracked open and we just started actually talking .

We opened up to each other and started discussing topics that felt a little uncomfortable at first shared our secrets, said the unsaid things, and somewhere in between all of that, we found each other.

We are very different people. I want to be clear about this because I think it’s important it’s not a case of two similar souls finding each other. We are different in almost every way that matters.

She is the obedient one. The kind of person who still hugs her father good morning and means it. She talks to her mother not just when something needs to be said, but just talks, the way people do when they actually enjoy each other’s company. She is close to her family in a way I find myself quietly envying every time she mentions it.

When she told me she hugged her father, I sat with that for a second. Because I realized it had been over a year since I had hugged mine. Not because of a fight. Not because anything terrible happened. Just that’s how it is with us. I tease my mother more than I properly talk to her. I have fun with her, in my own way, but real conversation? Real closeness? That’s something I watch my best friend have and feel the distance of.

She has big aims. She is genuinely ambitious the kind of ambitious that isn’t loud about itself, just steady and certain. She knows what she wants. MBBS. A good college. A good life. She has a plan and she believes in it.

On the other side of this friendship is me someone who got into engineering because my father thought it was the safe option, who doesn’t know yet what they want to do, who isn’t sure they even like what they’re studying, who asks themselves some version of “what is the point of this” more often than is probably healthy.

She is optimistic. This is the one that gets me the most. Her emotional baseline is hope. She gets sad she does, she’s human but she always finds her way back. She doesn’t leave hope behind. My week, by contrast, goes: a few days of feeling completely hollow and pointless, a few days of being okay in a flat, unremarkable way, and maybe one day where something feels genuinely fine. She has better ratios than me. And her optimism both comforts me and occasionally drives me up the wall, because I am not wired that way and I cannot always tell if she’s seeing something I’m missing or just refusing to look at the hard parts.

We talk on walks. Long ones. About an hour each time, sometimes more. Good for health, after all she is going to be a doctor and then we spend forty-five minutes gossiping and I think about how the health part might be secondary.

The conversations cover everything. Preparation updates. Exam stress. Family things. Boys — always boys, eventually. She scolds me about boys. Calmly, carefully, the way she does everything, but clearly. She points out where I go wrong and she is, I have to admit, almost always right. I know she’s right even while she’s saying it. I just nod and probably go back to making the same mistakes later, because that’s the kind of person I am and we’ve both accepted this.

We talked once genuinely, seriously about what it would be like to be a single mother. Not as a joke, as an actual conversation. She said she’d want a boy. I said I’d prefer a girl. And then we both got confused about our own preferences and started second-guessing our answers and laughed until it stopped making sense. That’s the kind of thing we talk about. The range is absurd and I love it.

She gets excited sometimes about things other people are doing. She’ll come to me “did you see, this person got an internship in another country, this other person is already doing research” and I can see the spiral beginning. The comparison. The measuring of her own life against someone else’s timeline. I know that spiral. I live in it too, just about different things. So I tell her what I wish someone would tell me more often: everyone is living a different life. You cannot hold yours up next to theirs and expect the shapes to match. She listens. She nods. She probably goes back to it later. We both do. But I keep saying it anyway.

She is fascinated by IIT. By the idea of doing cool, meaningful things, research, discovery, being somewhere that matters. There’s this brightness in her when she talks about it, and I don’t want to dim it just because i dont feel so excited and optimistic about things .

She is excited about college. Genuinely, completely, purely excited the kind of excitement that hasn’t been touched yet by what college actually is when you’re inside it. New friends. Study groups. Hostel life. Learning things properly, the way she’s always wanted to. She talks about it like she’s been waiting her whole life for it, and in a way, after three years of this, maybe she has.

I understand that feeling. I had it too. Right before my first semester started, I had all of it the anticipation, the imagined friendships, the idea of finally being somewhere I chose. And then the semester started. The workload arrived. The stress settled in quietly and didn’t leave. The brightness I was carrying into college slowly got used up on deadlines and adjustments and the general exhaustion of being somewhere new that doesn’t feel the way you pictured it.

I know she is going to hostels in a few months. And I kind off hate it because then I won’t be left with any friends at all, then who would be close to me and I could spend time with. ‘

I get scared by it sometimes. Not often enough to say out loud, usually, but the feeling is there.

She’s going to go. She’s going to crack this exam, I believe that, I genuinely do and then she’s going to leave. Into a hostel, into a new city, into a new life full of new people who will become her people. And that’s how it’s supposed to go. That’s what growing up looks like. I know this.

But I also know what happens after people leave. I’ve watched it happen. You stay in touch for a while, the calls get shorter, the gaps between them get longer, life fills in the space that used to be the friendship. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s just how things go. People get busy. College especially — new friends, new routines, new versions of yourself you’re still figuring out.

And I’ve made mistakes. Enough of them, with enough of the people I’ve liked, that I’ve started to feel like losing people is something I do. Like it’s part of how I operate let something good get close enough to matter, and then somewhere along the way, something goes wrong and they’re gone. I don’t always even know where exactly.

I am excited for her. Actually, properly, genuinely excited. Not in a performing-happiness way in the way where I think about her getting into a hostel and making new friends and staying up late and studying for something she actually chose and I feel something warm in my chest. She has wanted this for so long. She has worked for it in a way that deserves to be rewarded. And I think it will be.

And I’ll be here. Slightly jealous. A little scared. Missing the walks already even though she hasn’t left yet.