For those protesting the NEET leak

I gave my second attempt at NEET in 2019. Couldn’t qualify the year before. Had high hopes that it’ll work out, but my results didn’t match the OMR released. I was devastated, and somehow, despite everything going okay during the exam, my results were always significantly lower than when I tallied them with the OMR. Despite the low marks, I still somehow qualified for admission to a government college as a general candidate, but when I reached the university for final admission and verification, I was told my name wasn’t in the list. My parents and I didn’t know what was happening, and after being humiliated at the university, we were told it was probably a cyberhack and to leave. I never figured out why my admission didn’t go through, but I couldn’t continue wasting years on this endeavour so after another attempt in 2020, which I messed up because of COVID, I finally gave up and shifted to another field. I knew it wasn’t my fault in my heart, but no one believed me. My parents were humiliated, I heard taunts from relatives, and my peers ended up years ahead of me while I was just starting. Last year, I applied for a fellowship out of India, and mentioned how I wanted to reform the education system in my country given my own experience with the lax security and corruption. I was rejected, and the feedback I received from a reputed UK university where I’d applied for the fellowship was essentially that they thought I was projecting my failures on the system and that my proposal had no substance given that I didn’t have any proof except for my own experiences of these allegations.

So personally, seeing the reality of the education system in India, especially NEET, come to light this year has been vindicating. I’ve always felt like a failure since I’d failed, since I couldn’t make sense of things, but it’s always been there. Maybe that year there were only a few people like me affected, maybe I was just the unlucky one. I’m certain the issues which are coming to light only now have always persisted in this country, and I’m so so grateful to whoever revealed it, to whoever protested, to whoever took cognisance of this, because it set me free from the constant gaslighting I was under that it was all my fault. Due to this, I can finally move on.