The Curriculum Is World-Class. The System Is Child Abuse.

Every month, I talk to thousands of educators, academy founders, and operators. Those conversations act like an unfiltered think tank, and I end up learning a massive amount about ground realities. I'm not a frequent writer, but every once in a while, things bubble up and I need to put pen to paper.

The NCERT Paradox

Let's start with something slightly controversial: the Indian syllabus itself is actually brilliant.

When I was in school, I resented it. I used to stare at my textbooks thinking, "Why on earth am I learning trigonometry when I'll never use it in my real life?" But as you grow older and speak with seasoned thinkers, you realize how thoroughly engineered NCERT really is.

From the foundational biology of human systems to the geopolitical fallout of the Battle of Waterloo, it builds an astonishingly solid layer of general knowledge. Taken purely as an informational framework, it is arguably GOATed (Greatest Of All Time).

So if the syllabus is so well designed, why are our kids drowning?

The Fear of Raising a "Loser"

Let's call a spade a spade: this is the hyper-competitive era, and parents are terrified of raising someone who falls behind.

I understand that fear intimately because on paper, I was that kid. I scored terribly throughout my academic years. The only subject I genuinely loved was History, yet even there, poor spelling kept my marks down.

Today, that anxiety has spiraled into obsession. Kids are ferried across multiple coaching institutes, foundation batches, and subject tuitions all week long. In those rooms, individual teachers evaluate a student's entire worth based strictly on performance in their 45-minute period. That doesn't just steal childhood — it dismantles self-worth.

NSG Commandos with 20kg Backpacks

Look at a ten-year-old child walking out the door in the morning. Strapped to a 20kg backpack, they look less like a third-grader and more like an NSG commando heading out on a patrol.

They are ten years old, yet they juggle deadlines that rival corporate managers:

By the time they step foot in their home, the daylight is gone. No park. No running around. No unstructured play to explore what they actually care about.

And here's the daily irony: every single school teacher acts as if their subject is the supreme discipline. They assign an hour of homework with zero awareness that five other teachers just made the exact same demand on the same day. (And funny enough, even after all those childhood English coaching classes, I still make silly spelling mistakes. Life goes on.)

None of this is really any one person's fault. Every parent wants their kid to be a topper, a sports captain, an artist, and a coder — all at once — because the world keeps telling them that's the bar now. But somewhere inside that well-meaning ambition, we forgot to ask the kid what they actually want. Those little humans have dreams of their own, if we ever gave them the room to have any.

Closing This Page (For Now)

So no — I'm not here to trash NCERT, or Indian education as a subject. If anything, it might be the one thing we've quietly gotten right. What needs the audit is everything built around it: the six-teacher tug of war, the tuition-after-tuition treadmill, the idea that a ten-year-old's whole worth fits inside one 45-minute period.

"Education in India is GOATed. The system delivering it isn't."

I don't have a five-point fix for this, and I'd be lying if I pretended I did. But I think the first step is just saying it out loud — which is really what this whole "Last Page" thing is for.

The Punchline

Looking back at that kid who scored single digits, who got scolded more times than he can count, and who sat through years of extra English classes only to still fumble spellings on the first draft — I have to smile a little.

Because that "failure" went on to start a tech company. And today, I spend my days building the software that hundreds of academies actually run on.

So when I talk to teachers and academy founders now, my compass isn't just code or margins. It's that kid in the fourth row, carrying a 20kg bag, quietly wondering if he's stupid simply because he doesn't fit the standard mold.

"He wasn't broken. The mold was."