Kota’s coaching centres are full of teenagers hunched over problem sets, chasing ranks and admission letters. Gunja was neither a student nor a teacher. She was a mother sitting in the back of her son’s online classes, notebook open, trying to keep up with concepts she had never studied in her life.
Gunja is a homemaker with a B.Ed degree. Her background is in the humanities. Physics and mathematics were subjects she had not touched in years. But her son, Gunjan, could not attend classes on his own anymore due to poor eyesight. Someone had to sit through them for him.
Gunjan had moved to Kota in 2023, from Sitamarhi in Bihar, to prepare for JEE Advanced, which he was targeting for the 2024 cycle.
“I grew up in Sitamarhi, Bihar, where opportunities and resources are limited compared to big cities,” he says. “From an early age, I understood that education was the best way to change my future.”
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He wears spectacles with a power of 9.5. Studying was never easy for him, and Kota added its own pressure. His vision made the long hours harder, he says, and adjusting to a new city made it more difficult.
Then, months before his exam, Gunjan lifted something heavy and was diagnosed with pneumothorax, a collapsed lung. He was bedridden for nearly three months.
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“Instead of spending long hours studying, my priority became recovering,” he says. “I had to stay in bed and follow medical advice.”
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That is when Gunja stepped in. It was not something she had planned for. Her first concern was her son’s health, but she also knew he could not afford to lose hope or momentum while he healed. So she began sitting in on his online classes herself, listening the way a student would, so he would have something to return to once he was back on his feet.
She was not trying to master JEE-level physics or mathematics. She needed her notes to hold up. Whenever a concept confused her, she asked the teachers to go over it again, sometimes more than once, until she was confident she had captured it correctly. Physics and maths gave her the most trouble, she says, since much of it was entirely new territory. But she kept going because she knew her son was depending on what she wrote down.
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Day after day, Gunja built a new routine: logging into class early, filling notebooks through the lecture, then spending the evening reorganising her handwriting into clean, usable study material for Gunjan. It became mechanical after a while, a daily discipline she rarely broke.
The exhaustion was real. There were days, she admits, when it wore her down physically and emotionally. But she measured her progress in smaller units. The moment she saw her son studying confidently from her handwriting, working his way back into his preparation despite the illness, she knew the effort was holding.
For Gunjan, watching his mother take this on was overwhelming in a different way. “It was deeply emotional,” he says. “She attended classes, made notes, and helped me continue learning when I couldn’t. Whatever I have achieved today belongs to her as much as it belongs to me.”
Even flat on his back, his goal stayed close. “The dream of studying at IIT Delhi never left my mind,” he says. “My mother’s constant support and faith in me gave me strength.”
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Recovery was one battle. Catching up was another. Missing weeks of classes and then trying to rebuild that lost ground, he says, was mentally exhausting in its own right — he had to trust that consistent effort, applied slowly, would eventually close the gap.
Gunja is candid about what carried her through those months: one thought, repeated daily, that she should do everything possible to help her son reach his goal, and that an illness should not be allowed to decide his future if she could help it.
Having sat through Kota’s coaching system herself, quite literally, she has her own reading of the city that produces so many of India’s engineers. She calls it disciplined, competitive, and well-resourced, with experienced teachers who know how to push students.
But she is equally firm that the pressure needs a counterweight. Students, she says, need emotional support from their families just as much as they need academic guidance. Without that balance, the demands of a place like Kota can tip too far.
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Gunjan says the illness reshaped how he thinks about success altogether. “I learned that success is not only about intelligence but also about patience, perseverance, and the people who stand by you during difficult times,” he says.
Gunja’s message to other parents watching their own children go through Kota’s grind is simple — ranks and marks matter, she says, but they are not the whole story: “Sometimes, simply standing beside your child and giving them confidence can make the biggest difference in their journey.”
The wait ended on June 10, when JEE Advanced results were declared. For a household that had spent months measuring progress in notebooks and bedside recoveries, it was the moment everything else had been building toward.
Gunjan had made it through, cracking IIT, and in every sense that mattered, his mother had cracked it right along with him.