In a quiet room in Vasco, a student bends over his desk, the clock ticking past midnight. His phone is on silent, his friends are out celebrating a birthday, and his parents are asleep in another town, believing that their son is one step closer to a secure future. Across Goa and the rest of India, this scene is repeated countless times. Young men and women give up laughter, leisure, and sometimes even their health in the relentless pursuit of success in competitive exams.
Competitive exams are no ordinary tests. They are doorways to a promised life of dignity, stability, and respect. They are also battlegrounds where the odds are brutally stacked. Lakhs of students answer these exams every year, and only a fraction make it through. For those who succeed, society showers praise and garlands. For those who do not, silence and stigma often become their companions. What newspapers and television channels fail to show is the hidden story, the years of preparation, the long nights, the loneliness, the sacrifices, and the heartbreak that rarely match the outcome.
The journey of preparation itself is a story of endurance. Students often begin years in advance, sometimes as early as high school, carrying the burden of a dream that is not always theirs alone but also their family’s. A typical day begins before sunrise. Revision notes replace morning walks. Coaching classes take up afternoons. Mock tests and practice papers swallow evenings. Nightfall brings more chapters to be read under the dim light of determination. The hours of study are not just hours; they are heavy with worry, Am I doing enough? Will this be my year?
For many Goan students, the journey also means leaving home. They travel to Pune, Bangalore, or Delhi, because they believe that success demands proximity to big coaching centres. For the first time, they live without the comfort of home-cooked meals or the reassuring presence of family. Festivals are spent on the phone, birthdays pass unnoticed, and illnesses are endured in silence within the four walls of a rented room. The loneliness is sharp, but they endure it because the dream seems bigger than the pain.
Sacrifices pile up in ways that outsiders rarely understand. Friends drift away as conversations narrow down to exam strategies. Football matches and beach outings, once central to their youth, are dismissed as distractions. Even hobbies, painting, music, and dance, that once brought joy are quietly set aside. A student’s world shrinks until it fits into textbooks, highlighters, and revision timetables. And all the while, a silent voice whispers, what if it still isn’t enough?
The pressure is not just personal. It is financial too. In Goa’s middle-class households, parents often trim down expenses, forgo luxuries, or borrow from relatives to fund their child’s preparation. Coaching classes, hostel rooms, and exam forms do not come cheap. Every rupee spent is a reminder to the child that failure is not an option. And that reminder, though unspoken, can weigh heavier than the thickest textbook.
The harsh truth, however, is that effort does not always guarantee results. A student may sacrifice sleep, social life, and even health, but still walk out of the exam hall defeated. Exams are relative; one student’s sleepless nights are measured against the sleepless nights of lakhs of others. Hours of study do not always translate into smart preparation. Stress and anxiety on the day of the exam can reduce months of hard work to a blank mind. And sometimes, the difference between success and failure is nothing more than an unexpected twist in the paper or a fever on exam day. For the student, the result feels cruelly unfair: a life’s worth of effort reduced to a single score.
