my best friend and i had a sort of a contest on who will attend the most competitive exams. she was aiming for medicine, so turns out there are a lot more medical entrance exams than engineering. i gave them all because i didn't know what i wanted. gave even law entrance exams at some point.

it was kinda cute giving the entrance exams of christian hospitals/universities..... they would have a 'moral' component, where you would be quizzed about your views on abortion, given a few hypothetical situations where you as a doctor might have to prescribe contraception and the correct answer would be to promote abstinence.

i was also JEE obsessed, so i'd prepped pretty damn hard for that. i went to the screening exam, finished it in an hour and a half (the exam was three hours), and as it turned out, got scores that were one or two marks below the cutoff for being eligible for the mains. i remember telling my JEE sir that i finished it in an hour and a half, and he went all 'hayn?'.

finally turns out i got reasonably good scores in some engineering entrance exams, and cleared one or two medical entrance exams as well. so i thought a lot about becoming a doctor and all, but then decided i dont like the sight of blood and went into engineering instead. my best friend on the other hand got good scores in her 12th boards, better than me, which had caused her to become this gloating bitch for a while, but then her medical entrance scores were worse than even mine, and i wasn't even trying.

so relations soured between us for a while. then she had to get medical entrance under a costlier seat bracket. her parents were the most unsupportive jerks i have known. they did a bunch of hijinks after which she felt terrible spending so much on her education, and ended up picking a bio-related engineering branch.

somehow our friendship's survived to this day, more than a decade later. she's a successful biochemist and im an engineer. we dont talk of the brief time she gloated over me and i ended up owning her, though.