Failed in CA Final, as usual...

You work hard for the CA examination. You are overwhelmed with the surmounting expectations bestowed upon you by relatives and friends. But you like it basically. Therefore, you feel good about yourself and keep working to achieve your target. You appear for the exams brimming with confidence and wait for the result.

You fail.

It comes out as a shock and the first reaction is a denial. It is absolutely impossible, you argue, that this could not be true. You had imagined yourself being a CA and rejoiced at the thought of it, and therefore are unable to absorb the reality that stares at you right in the face. You failed and you are unable to comprehend the reason behind it.

The world keeps on asking you for whether you’ve passed or failed, and you feel the compulsion to tell them, unwillingly, that you failed. While you are still busy figuring out exactly what went wrong, you are burdened by the plethora of suggestions directed at you.

“You might have missed out on the presentation part,” they say, “Or you should improve upon the revision of practical questions”. You are forced to accept the hundreds of suggestions and are expected to behave sanely while defending yourself, however meekly, inside your heart of hearts. No, I did not make any of the mistakes these people point out, but I failed nevertheless.

Eventually you get over with this failure, reluctantly and helplessly. It is okay to fail. In fact, you go on to tell yourself that failure is good in life. This feeling has humbled you and taught you that everything is not as easy as it seems in dreams. Suddenly, your respect for CA increases. You feel the need to study hard next time and pass it. You aspire to show the world that you can do it.

So once again you set out to the task; once again you study with a renewed level of energy and confidence. It is okay, you reassure yourself, that I should fail at least sometimes; only then I would understand the value of what I’m going to achieve. So, with your heart full of hope and happiness, you give your examination and wait for the result.

This time you understand better. You’ve been to the failure zone once and you know how it felt. But this time you expect to feel victory. And therefore you earnestly look forward to your result.

However, second time now – you fail.

The memory of the previous failure comes crashing down at you. You had thought that you would get over it, but it comes back at you with a renewed level of force to break your resolve. It seems as if the whole world is watching you when you failed in this shot. You feel like shouting at them and telling everyone that you did not deserve this. There has obviously been some mistake.

You feel like running away from it. You feel like rejecting it outright, in a desperate hope that time could somehow reverse itself. You don’t want to face all the humiliation that comes your way. This cannot be true. You had never failed in your life; and though you could have expected some change for a tough exam like CA, but two times in a row: you were definitely not ready for it.

And so you cry your heart out. You want to shut the world around you. You want to run away from people who stare at you – it feels as if they are piercing you with hot iron rods. Why can’t they stop asking for my result? I failed, alright! For God’s sake leave me alone now. But you’ve been in this space before. You know how it feels. You know how those few days of extreme gloom will mount over your life. The world looks at you as if you have killed someone.

You get over it, eventually. It is easy for someone to say that, but those few days after you fail are spent like walking through inferno. And although you come out and face the world, in your heart you still cannot fathom why you failed. You had done the best you could; you had identified all your mistakes and errors, and you had honestly worked hard to achieve it. Why then did you fail?

Your well wishers tell you to “try harder next time”. You look at them as if their face is a puzzle in itself. You want to tell them that you would gladly ‘try harder’ if you know exactly what went wrong! But you decide against it. And so you move on ignoring all the advices like ‘try harder’, almost amusing yourself that trying harder is as easy as travelling in a Mercedes car with a chauffeur without knowing the way.

This time you look at your books and you feel repulsive towards them. You turn the pages of your notebooks and you feel the urge to go away from them – as far as possible. You come across all those notes you had taken for yourself, those little tricks and shortcuts you had written for your exams, and you ironically start laughing at yourself.

You don’t want to admit it, but you feel like an idiot. It is as if you’re chasing a speed boat while swimming in the ocean, or running across the desert in the hope of finding a non-existent oasis. You look around for some source of comfort. You want to cry on someone’s shoulders. You want to justify your stand – you did not deserve this. It is cruel and unjust that you have to do this again.

Unwillingly, lethargically and without rejoice – you start studying again. You want to hope; but are finding it tough. Hope does not die, but now it has joined hands with apprehensions. You are not certain anymore; you are not confident of getting through. You feel like shooting in the dark, and you know that it gets darker with every single attempt. But you pick up your bow to give it one more shot. Maybe, you try to fool yourself, maybe this time I shall get through.

So you cling on to that one shred of light in the darkest night and move on again. There is no joy in the studies now. You feel like you’re doing something which you did not deserve. You were forced to do this, ruthlessly and cruelly. And therefore, every single minute spent with those books feels like a punishment. This is not your world, this is torture. You crave for the comfort of a mother’s breast or a friend’s hug. You crave for someone to give you hope. You crave for what belongs to you.

You pass through the piles of shit with the desperate hope of finding your lost jewel. You appear for those exams again, and you wait for the result again. You had thought that the waiting would be okay, you’ve been through this before. But nothing prepares you for the level of anxiety that tortures you from within. And this anxiety now comes with fear. A gripping, shaking and tormenting fear rips through you as you check out your result.

And, third time in a row – almost as if you were expecting it – you fail.

You cannot decide whether to laugh or cry. Laughing might come eventually. And crying might come eventually. But what you dread is the numbness that engulfs you while you wait to decide on the appropriate reaction. The truth is too hard to absorb, too big to swallow, too heavy to endure; but it is the truth nevertheless: you failed.

There are many motivational quotes in the market, and they sell in bulk after the CA results feast. They say that failure is the key to success; they say that you should keep trying for the best is yet to come; they say that every failure is just a discovery of another way that won’t work, and they say a lot of other things. But what they don’t tell what you really need to know.

They don’t tell you why it is okay to suffer even after doing the right thing. They don’t tell you why you are expected to win the game when your opponent makes the rules and he is the umpire too. They don’t tell you why God wants you to lose when you believed in him for the whole of your life. They don’t comfort you.

All these motivational words are a scam. They are meant to torment and torture. They only remind you of what would have been the right thing to say if you were living a normal life. They tell you to keep throwing the ball at the stumps, but they never tell you that the stumps will be moved after you throw the ball.

And so, you failed again. This time, you’re not even complaining. You know that life is unfair. People may come and find out some logic to justify the atrocities, but there is none. You accept it on the face of it, and you are mature enough to not even attempt explaining this to them. Perhaps this is a journey a man must traverse alone. One can talk about it, try to feel it, or write about it like I’m doing, but one can never know it, understand it and accept it.

You do not seek solace in the fact that someone will come and help you out. God is too busy sorting out the injustice he created, and men are too busy trying to prove that life is just. Life is unfair. I have known it for some time now.

I passed my CA exams in first attempt with, as some would say, ‘outstanding marks’. But I stand here today and admit it: I was lucky. I say this because I have seen a number of people who worked a thousand times harder than me and still did not succeed. And I do not say this to make anyone feel better. I say this to comfort myself.

When somebody succeeds in life, it feels good to take all the credit and boast off about their skills. However, with time one realizes that he survived the sinking ship only because he was closer to the life boat. Therefore, now that I travel back to the shore in my life boat, I look back at the sinking ship and the horror of that loss shrouds over me.

A result in CA exam is by no means a measure of your success or failure. For an exam that has the respect of being the ‘most difficult’ among all, the CA exam does a very bad job of sorting out the good and the bad ones. I do not say that all those who have failed actually deserved to pass, and neither the vice versa. But there are a lot of Type-I and Type-II errors that make it completely unreliable.

If you passed the exam, I say with all my humility – be proud of yourself but also appreciate that you were lucky. If you failed in the exam when you know you deserved it – we are your culprits. There are many among the pass-outs who stole from you what might have rightfully belonged to you. It is indeed sad that you cannot do anything about it but curse your fate.

Guilt may encumber the pass-outs or they may remain indifferent, but the regret will never leave those who failed. It will haunt them for their lives. I say it is unfair and unjust. Question is - how will you fight injustice?