"Like a 23-year-old machine learning engineer based out of Florida, who started his JEE preparation as early as Class 8, because his peers had started as early as Class 6. The engineer says he was so engrossed in his prep that he ignored basics such as good hygiene, good grooming, or even making friends."

Wow, this is insane. For all the kids in the world who are doing this sort of thing, JEE or Gaokao style 1-in-100 pass rate, keep some things in mind:

- When you're older, you will appreciate your school friends more than any others. They're the only people whose parents have fed you. You know their life stories. You're each other's support network. Today, my friend from school lost his dad. I drove right over. We phoned another classmate who had the same thing happen to him the week before. I don't know what people do if they don't have these kinds of relationships.

- Very few people will pass, but everyone can learn the material. You can learn the material (Machine Learning, civil engineering, linear algebra, etc) to a high standard, and still forgetting one little thing will make you not be top 1%. We can't all be top, but CAN all understand the knowledge that people before us have discovered.

- When you leave university, there are no more exams. If you optimize your whole life towards passing exams, you will suddenly come to a point where somehow you will be judged on things other than finite, concisely answerable questions. Both open ended questions like "how should we design this system" and more vague ones like "how do we all work together".

- To even have a chance of passing a 1% bar, you need a fair bit of privilege. You're likely to have come from a better off, stable family. You also need some luck at that level. The simple fact of the examiner deciding to include a topic that is fresh in your mind could be the difference between passing and failing.

- You're not actually learning things when you study for an exam of this high a bar. You're memorizing tables, because if you don't happen to have that trigonometric identity in your head, you won't pick up that marginal point. Or you memorize constants that in any real life situation would be a lookup in a book. Or you memorize proofs so that you don't have to spend valuable exam time actually thinking.

- Even after you pass through the eye of the needle, you will not feel that special. I went to a top, world-famous uni, and people were mostly ordinary. I'd say half of my higher level math and physics classmates from high school would have done just fine. I didn't think there were many especially smart people there, maybe a few reasonably hard workers. But none of the John Nash in A Beautiful Mind kind of striking genius.

- It's turtles all the way down. What's natural after you pass this exam is that certain businesses will present their hiring pipeline as the next step. Don't buy their crap. There's just more and more filters, and the ones in the corporate ladder are brutal. There's no official exam result, and very few places in the next round of musical chairs. Someone is bound to pass every single hurdle, but it won't be you.

- This style of exam belongs in math contests. I used to enjoy those in high school, and framing it as an extracuricular allows the people who don't want to compete to opt out. It's totally fair to have a high bar in a math contest, and it's totally fair to ask unintuitive questions like that IMO question with the windmill. In the end it's a bit of extra exercise for the brain with low cost of failure. You don't have to feel bad if you get a math contest question wrong.

Finally, I think the real problem is that India is a huge country that really ought to have more spaces. If you're at a point where over 100 kids are competing for one space, you can add some spaces and get more engineers out, without compromising quality. Making extra lessons for people to pass doesn't increase the number of spaces, the majority of the effort of crawling over your cohort is wasted.