Congratulations and Consolations

 Aha. Aaj CLAT rejults waala day hai. With the very first online format and a rather difficult paper, this is where the suspense ends.

For those of you who’ve made the mark, congratulations! Our job is done now. We’re glad to have seen you to this juncture. We hope we’ve helped you. Not merely by bumming up your CLAT scores, but also by giving you a tiny taste of law school life and the legal world, something we had set out to do at the very beginning. Now you’re going to be in our place. Don’t hesitate to do the same for your juniors.

Yeah, that’s all you get to read. Go gloat about how intelligent you are for the next five years.

For those of you who haven’t cracked it, I have a lot more to say.

I had the privilege of being taught by Diwakar Kishore, who was once one of Bangalore’s favourite CLAT trainers, apart from being an alumni of NLSIU. On what I believe was my 7^th day of CLAT coaching, he changed my perspective on the exam with a half-minute speech. No, he didn’t try to encourage us, not in the slightest. He said something like – “So here’s the deal. 25,000 students will be writing the CLAT this year. If you want a rank in the top 100, you’ll be competing with 250 people per seat. Let’s say a hundred of these aren’t interested in studying for the exam. That still leaves you with 150 people per seat. Assume two-thirds of them don’t deserve to get through. You will still be competing with 50 people for every seat. Your chances of getting in are very, very remote.”

And that was it. Bare  fact. There’s no guarantee that you make it anywhere. Brilliance doesn’t give you a sure shot. Hard work doesn’t give you a sure shot. It’s simple logic, the kind you use in syllogisms. The fact that the people in the best universities often deserve to be there does not indicate that everyone who deserves to be in a good university is in one.

It does not matter if you don’t make it. Your failure in one exam is indicative of nothing. Keep these in mind:

Getting in is, indeed, a tough thing. Of Diwakar’s hypothetical 50 people, you need to make the 1^st rank to get into a tier one college. Come 2^nd and you may be down by a tier. Come sixth, and you’ve barely made a decent college. Come tenth, and you haven’t made it anywhere. At this juncture, you are still in the top 20% of whom we had considered the deserving candidates.

But don’t let this be the test of your intelligence. There is practically no way that the quarter of a lakh people can be accurately be ranked on their ability to be lawyers through just 200 questions. There will always be some who lose out. This time you have. That does not prove your stupidity.

Shit happens. It’s a bad time for shit to happen, but it does for everyone some time or the other. Yes, you have been unlucky. But this is not the end of your world. Good things and bad things will continue to happen to you. Keep calm and carry on.

A great NLU isn’t everything. No, I’m not saying that being in a place like NALSAR isn’t a truckload of fun. It is. But there is a world beyond colleges like this. There are billions who have lives just as brilliant, if not more so, than ours; and they may not have been educated in a conventionally ‘prestigious’ university.

You can do well wherever you want. There was never a rule, and especially not in the legal sphere, that one needs a top-college tag to make it big in your careers. Yes, I don’t deny that Amarchand and AZB will possibly prefer to mine the top tier colleges for their newest minions every year for the near future. But what does that prove? The lives of those who join those glorious sweatshops is no better than those of the rest of us. In fact, most people who make it there only end up leaving in a few years, looking for greener, less stressful pastures. And then that is where the division ends. Don’t let your college be an excuse for you to not do well. This is not the end of your shot at success, this is only the beginning. 

There are always alternatives. Monga is possibly the brightest guy in our batch. He was an NTSE scholar who showed considerable academic potential from the very beginning. And like all people of that ilk, he was dumped into the IITian making machines of the country. After three unfruitful years in Kota, he decided to write the CLAT with no preparation, simply as a side-option. He still didn’t make an IIT, but he got to NALSAR. There are more like him. Aditya Vikram, our batch topper with near-perfect scores was studying to be an engineer. Debarpan Ghosh, an engineering aspirant before he came to us, was All-India Rank 62 in the CLAT and All-India Rank 1 for a prestigious nationwide English (Hons.) entrance despite not making any major engineering college. You might just be like any of them. Maybe law isn’t your thing. Maybe you’ll find your love someplace else. If there is something else you’d like to pursue, go for it.

You can always give yourself another chance. If you’re still unsatisfied with how your results have been, go change them. Take a drop. Study like there’s no tomorrow. Remember what your distractions were the last time, and weed them out.  There is never any shame in skipping a year, as long as you make the best of the time you’ve lent yourself. The ‘dropper’ tag wears off as soon as you crack the exam. And while taking a drop’s a tough thing to do, it’s not impossible. Scores of people making the top colleges do so after dropping. Many of the smartest people from my batch, and that’s not a term I use lightly, took a year off before coming to Hyderabad. All you need to do is focus.

But whatever you decide, remember:

Do not do something drastic. Like killing yourself. Leaves a bad taste in the mouth. And there’s a lot of blood and crying people and stuff. Avoid. But if you must, why don’t you mention us somewhere in your will? Please?

Pranav Agarwal,
Batch of 2016 – NALSAR