'JEE still haunts me': Viral thread exposes India’s trauma-tied coaching and competitive exams culture

A deeply personal thread by X user Ankit (@kindofknowwhere) has gone viral for its unfiltered account of the trauma tied to India’s IIT-JEE exam culture, particularly among lower-middle-class students from smaller towns. His posts touched on family estrangement, financial ruin, and suicides in his hometown, reigniting the debate over academic pressure and systemic failure.

A haunting decade after JEE

“Ten years later and JEE still haunts me,” Ankit wrote, opening a thread that struck a nerve across social media. Recalling his teenage years in Bokaro, Jharkhand, he said that failing to crack the IIT entrance cost him not just a seat, but silence from his entire family for three years, except for his mother.

“Not their mistake,” he added. “They sacrificed everything for me. Expectations were inevitable.”

Ankit’s story reflects the stakes many small-town students face. “In Bokaro, Jamshedpur, and Ranchi,” he said, “we lose 2–3 students to suicide every week. Kota gets all the media, but here, it’s just poor people trying to escape poverty.”

He recalled dozens of families selling ancestral land to fund IIT coaching. One memory stood out: a classmate being pressured by faculty to take a drop year after already paying ₹75,000—money his family no longer had. The boy wept, knowing there was nothing left to give.

“If you're from a well-off family, JEE is just a test,” Ankit wrote. “If you're not, it consumes your entire life. You leave home at 16, live in windowless hostels, eat terrible food, queue outside second-hand bookshops, cut off from friends, family—and carry a crushing weight of expectation.”

Dehumanised, Desensitised

In one of the thread’s most jarring admissions, Ankit confessed to a disturbing numbness: “I’m desensitised to students dying over these exams. It happens every year, and I barely react anymore.”

He described how most of his neighbours ran PG accommodations for coaching students, treating them like “cattle,” feeding them scraps while using the profits to build larger homes elsewhere.

His school, he said, enrolled 500 students each year solely for JEE prep. Commerce and the arts were practically nonexistent. “Now they’re building sheds outside for new JEE hopefuls—spaces that used to be occupied by loan sharks and banks.”

He ended with a line that encapsulated the psychological permanence of the experience: “You might win or lose JEE, but you never forget it.”

Ankit’s posts sparked an outpouring of emotion and reflection on X.

“Seventeen years on, and I still feel I should’ve taken a drop year,” wrote one user. “We’ve normalised dehumanising kids in the name of exams,” added another. “They’re just told to forget living and survive instead.”

A more philosophical take read, “Exams like JEE are zero-sum. They shouldn't define lives. Success has many paths, life constantly gives you chances if you increase your ‘luck surface area.’”

But not everyone shared Ankit’s forgiving view of family expectations. One user countered, “‘Not their mistake’? It is their mistake, piling impossible dreams onto you and getting angry when their fantasy falls apart.”