Time and time again, I have underestimated Indian cinema and its TV shows. I thought them to be substandard as compared to the cinematic masterpieces that Hollywood has to offer. However, one Indian TV series turned this entire narrative on its head.

One day during summer vacation when I was bored out of my mind I instinctively started scrolling through the endless catalogue of TV shows on Netflix. I was looking for a slice-of-life show with a premise I could relate to. I found all that and more in an Indian TV series "Kota Factory". 

The show revolves around the lives of high school students preparing for the toughest engineering exam in India. To understand this show's brilliance, you need some background information on the subject matter. 

Due to the immense difficulty of the exam, it is the perfect opportunity for students to exhibit their academic talent. Achieving a high rank in this exam opens doors to the top engineering universities in India named the "Indian Institutes of Technology" (IIT). Admission to any one of the universities from this group will surely change a person's entire life trajectory. 

Having this sparkle of a dream in their eyes, over a million students embark on this almost unsurmountable journey in search of a more prosperous future. About three hundred thousand of these bright-eyed students move to an Indian city, Kota which is by far the biggest "coaching hub" for such aspirants. There, they spend their junior and senior years of high school in preparation for these exams. This place is where the protagonist "Vaibhav" studies for the exam throughout "Kota Factory".

Vaibhav is one of those millions of optimistic students who take the exam every year. With high hopes he comes to Kota, to secure a spot in an IIT but soon he realizes that achieving this seems more delusional rather than ambitious because approximately only 10,000 students are accepted into an IIT from a pool of around a million. This means that a student has a devastatingly meager chance of 1% of getting into an IIT. To put this into perspective, the likelihood of getting into Harvard in 2024 was 3.59%. With this comparison, you can comprehend the hopelessness of the whole ordeal. 

This cutthroat competition means that students have to study so hard to achieve their goals that most of the time their mental and physical health are severely jeopardized. They study diligently for the next 2 years in this extremely stressful and depressing environment with the constant dread of failing the exam looming over their heads like a sword. While this may seem depressing enough, the final nail in the coffin is hammered on the result day when the sword finally swings on the heads of 990,000 students and their worst nightmare manifests into a reality. 

The very purpose of the Kota factory is to expose the psychological turmoil that around a million students go through every year. During the show's 3 seasons, we see Vaibhav face the adversities that a student aiming for an IIT goes through. I believe that the show throughout is extremely entertaining and thoughtful but the ending of this show cements it as something extraordinary. 

When Vaibhav finally takes his exam near the end of the show, I felt some of the uneasiness that Vaibhav did but I was pretty sure that he would pass the exam because that's how the story usually goes right? The protagonist will surely achieve his goal which he worked so hard towards, right? Well, I sure was quite convinced of this but when Vaibhav saw his result, I was as stunned as he was. He had failed.

In hindsight, I was pretty naïve to think that all would work out in the end. Reflecting back, this was the only conclusion to the show that could have worked. But why is that? Why would it have ruined the show if Vaibhav had succeeded? Well to answer that we must first understand what a good ending is.

 A good ending must be a conclusion to the story that is true to the main theme. What that means is that the ending should not be in direct contrast to the message that a story is trying to propagate. In this instance, the story's purpose is to expose the soul-crushing reality of Indian students preparing for this specific exam. Arguably, the most disheartening thing that these students face is the almost inevitable failure. This is because if we succeed in the end then all the hardships that we've bore would be justifiable and we would have no regrets but when we are faced with failure at the end, then that would truly be heartbreaking and exacerbate the already immense mental and physical exertion which is proven to be pointless in the end.

Therefore, the writer wholeheartedly acknowledged this sad reality and drove home the point, that he remained true to the initial message that started the story in the first place. The writer's objective was to shed light on the depressing life of these Indian students and his concern was with those 99% of students who failed the exam, not the 1% who ended up passing it. Therefore, the mouthpiece of the show, the protagonist was grouped in with the latter category because the true objective of the show was to showcase the grim reality of these students.

 In this way, a TV show that you've probably never heard of perfected its finale and by keeping this rule in mind, you can do it too.