The Day We Had an Exam in “Failure”
It was just another school day.
New class, new notebooks, same nervous excitement.
Then our teacher walked in, smiled, and said something none of us expected:
“This year, you have a new subject… Failure.”
We laughed at first.
Some thought it was a joke.
But she turned to the board and actually wrote it down.
FAILURE
And suddenly… it didn’t feel funny anymore.
Wait… how do you even study that?
A few weeks later, exams started.
Maths, Science, Hindi… all normal.
Then came that paper.
No long questions. No definitions.
Just one line:
“Write any three failures in your life.”
I stared at the paper.
Failures?
Do I even have any?
And if I do… am I supposed to write them?
For the first time, it wasn’t about right or wrong answers.
It felt… personal.
The strangest result day ever
When results came, everyone rushed to check their marks.
Maths—fine.
Science—okay.
Failure—
0 out of 100.
Everyone.
Zero.
Now people were confused.
“How can everyone fail… in failure?”
That quiet moment when it clicked
I went home and kept thinking about it.
Not angry. Just… curious.
“Why would they give us a subject like this?”
And then slowly, it made sense.
We weren’t being tested on how much we failed.
We were being tested on whether we even noticed our failures…
or learned anything from them.
And honestly?
Most of us hadn’t.
Something changed after that
After that day, things felt a little different.
Getting something wrong didn’t feel like the end anymore.
Messing up didn’t feel embarrassing.
It felt like… part of the process.
Like maybe:
- Not getting selected
- Scoring low marks
- Making mistakes
…wasn’t something to hide.
It was something to understand.
If failure was really a subject…
I think most of us would fail at it in the beginning.
Not because we’re bad.
But because no one really teaches us how to deal with it.
We’re taught how to win.
Not how to lose.
But here’s what I’d write now
If I got that same question again—
“Write three failures in your life”—
I wouldn’t sit confused anymore.
I’d write them.
And maybe, for the first time…
I’d actually learn from them.
In the end, it wasn’t about marks
It was never about getting 100/100.
It was about understanding one simple thing:
Failure isn’t the opposite of success.
It’s part of it.
