After six years of living with the same fifty-one people 24/7, you stop thinking of them as classmates; they become your brothers. However, as the admission season ended, I noticed that some of our classmates stopped texting in the group chat. They didn’t join video calls, or even see group messages. After asking around, I found that they hadn’t yet been admitted to any university. Thus, they isolated themselves. Out of a feeling of shame, they left us, their friends who had turned into brothers over 6 long years.
In Bangladesh, like in most South Asian countries, prestige and reputation are incredibly important. It’s pretty much the goal of every college student to go to BUET, DMC, DU – the great Bangladeshi rat race. And not getting in makes you worthless by default. This is what happens when luck doesn’t favor: these students ostracize themselves, out of shame, out of a lack of self-worth, out of the anxiety that they have been labelled as failures by their parents. From the aunt next door who asks you, “Kothay poro baba?” to your friend’s father who wants him to be a doctor just because the father himself couldn’t become one, Bangladeshi adolescents struggle with the idea of success. “Ki kore tomar gorbo hobo ma?” I was in 12th grade when I heard the line. Staring at my grades, I had no answer. I’m not sure I do now. Millions of Bangladeshi kids don’t either.
From the aunt next door who asks you, “Kothay poro baba?” to your friend’s father who wants him to be a doctor just because the father himself couldn’t become one, Bangladeshi adolescents struggle with the idea of success.
I remember once, after SSC, I went to my hometown, Barishal. Since childhood, I’d been celebrating my Eid there. All our cousins would meet together, and we’d have the time of our lives catching up. This time, I went to a cousin’s house for a visit. For some reason, she hadn’t been coming to meet us. We’d always been great friends. Indeed, we hadn’t met in a long time, but she should meet us, right? Upon asking my aunt, I found out the reason behind her absence. She wasn’t sick. She had obtained poor marks in her SSC exams. She didn’t want to show her face.
It is surprising how such feelings of insecurity often stem from the influence of our parents – our support systems. My sister is going to take her SSC exams this year. She’s studying a lot, but like any human, she isn’t excelling in every subject. I remember my father trying to motivate her, saying, “If you don’t do well in the exam, it’s okay.” “That’s good,” I thought. He continued, “If you get a GPA 3 or 4, we’ll just accept that you did your best, and it wasn’t in your capacity to get a GPA 5.” Capacity? What does he mean by that? Don’t get me wrong, my father is an amazing man. I’m sure he was saying these things in her best interests. Were these words supposed to comfort her? Hearing that you’re unable to get an excellent grade is supposed to comfort someone?
Think of your friend’s father, who pushes his son to become a doctor because he didn’t have the chance. He isn’t being cruel. He is grieving in his own way – trying to achieve something that he once failed to achieve. The regret, or perhaps sometimes even the shame, never left him. The pain never left him. It just changed hands. One generation’s wound becomes the next generation’s burden, wrapped so carefully in love and expectations that the child cannot differentiate between the two. We don’t teach our children that failure is unacceptable. We show them over time through our words, the language we use to love them.
One generation’s wound becomes the next generation’s burden, wrapped so carefully in love and expectations that the child cannot differentiate between the two.
When I greet an older person, the first question is almost always “Kothay poro?” We’ve built this entire social grammar that denotes the most important thing for an adolescent being their academic placement. The teenager who gives out iftaars to the poor, the responsible event organizer, the brilliant musician – none of that matters. The question has only one good answer, and everything else is silence. We need to stop making this the only question worth asking. Even success doesn’t always free you. A batchmate of ours recently got admitted to Northwestern University in Qatar — in one of the best journalism programs in the world. While we celebrated, I overheard an elder say “Bideshe gese” in that careful, half-praising tone. The unspoken message was clear: if he were truly talented, wouldn’t he have stayed and secured a seat in BUET or DU? It was never really about success or failure. Instead, it was about whether you belonged to the specific list they had made long before you were old enough to have any say in it.
In the end, the cost is silent. My friends didn’t just miss group calls; they felt like they didn’t belong. My cousin didn’t just miss our Eid gatherings; she sat inside while the rest of us laughed outside, separated not by walls but by report cards. Nobody told her to stay inside. Nobody had to.
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