New CBSE Result: A topper wants to be not an engineer or a doctor but a dancer. Are parents listening?
Will Indian parents stop treating 'co-curricular activities' as side dishes which are helpful only when taken with the 'main course'?
Finally, we have a topper who wants to shine as a professional dancer in the future — such a welcome break from the crowd of IIT and MBBS aspirants!
It could not get better this year as both the toppers — Hansika Shukla and Karishma Arora, who scored 499 out of 500 — are from the Humanities.
We know this will rake up the age-old debate of how easy it is to score in CBSE, which lets you get full marks in subjects like Political Science and History, in comparison with the ICSE or other state boards, which seem to treat marks as a family inheritance.
Let's move beyond that though and appreciate how bright and colourful the situation is when Humanities students top — and want to pursue off-beat career choices.
While Hansika wants to join the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), Karishma is already a dancer and wants to follow her passion further.
We don’t know whether they would be able to do put their feet down and follow their hearts because a career choice in India is something that falls under the jurisdiction of parents — who mostly belong to a different generation of engineers and doctors, and who mostly can’t help but think that 'co-curricular activities' are okay, but at the end of the day, they are 'co' — not the curricular itself.
According to reports, Karishma, a Kathak dancer, has recently won a scholarship from the ministry of culture.
Now, in a typical Indian parental dictionary, dancing/music/painting are 'hobbies' which can be accommodated at an early age but also habits which must be weaned away as academic pressures mount.
No matter how many examples you give to them, are they actually listening?
Probably not.
Take these cases: According to reports, 25 students in Telangana committed suicide in the last 10 days after the intermediate (Telangana state board) results were announced.
There have been reports of massive technical glitches which led to erroneous results. But of course, given the huge pressure, the candidates felt embracing death was a better option than repeating a year.
We should hang our heads in shame.
Let’s focus on India’s coaching capital as well.
About 19 students committed suicide in Kota in 2018. And in Kota, it's just the fear of not making the cut that is killing these students.
The count was 7 in 2017. That we have been even keeping a count of how many students committed suicide in Kota is the abysmal pits itself.
But we are actually ready to dive deeper.
All, apparently, in the pursuit of marks.
Therefore, even more reason to celebrate these two toppers, and to hope their pursuit of a life less ordinary will help them top. Again and again.