Two contrasting news reports, within days of each other, throw up questions about the high price of academic ambition. On May 29, Ronita Jana topped the Madhyamik examinations, becoming the first candidate from the city in 13 years and the second girl to do so. Three days later, Toya Chatterjee, first among girls in the 2002 Madhyamik, committed suicide at her IIT Kanpur hostel. A bio-engineering student, Toya had failed to clear two of her papers and had lied to her father about having graduated. When he reached Kanpur to be present at his daughter's graduation ceremony, she couldn’t bear the humiliation of having to break the news of her failure to him. She killed herself.

Press coverage of board examination successes has reached a frenzy over the past few years, to be matched in intensity only by the equally feverish rise in top scores, which keep breaking records of earlier years. Ronita got an astounding 798 out of 800. I found a photograph of a young Toya, flushed with the success of her Madhyamik results, in The Telegraph’s archives. To make headlines as a role-model for students — especially girls — to emulate, and then to succumb to the pressure of just having to keep it all up, is a frightening crisis of aspiration.

The media hype around top-scorers also raises the question of their subsequent, and fast, disappearance from the limelight. An email to my list of contacts asking them to name the toppers in their year and a look at The Telegraph’s archives revealed that at least seven toppers, out of around 15 who took the ICSE and ISC examinations across Calcutta schools in the past 10 years, went on to study engineering at the IITs. At least four of them are doing their masters or PhD in American universities. And this was just skimming the surface. Seven people, of both the state and Delhi boards, responded to a questionnaire I had prepared. Of these, five are either settled in the West or studying there.

The tragedy of Toya’s suicide raises, not for the first time, alarming questions about the manner in which the lives of students, and children, are constantly being shaped by emerging global processes. The ‘modern’ child learns early to engage in a very adult battle for capital accumulation that reflects the structure of globalized, capitalist societies.

School education in India is becoming increasingly implicated in a hysteria of performance-based, marks-driven learning, as opposed to learning for knowledge acquisition. “Any system, school or otherwise, follows a code. And codes are meant to be cracked. Toppers know how to crack the system,” says Barnik Chitran Maitra, who topped both his ICSE and ISC examinations from La Martiniere for Boys. He rejected a scholarship from MIT to tread the IIT-IIM trail, and now speaks with the erudition of the successful business consultant — in terms of data sets, codes and motivational stock phrases.

Significantly, a majority of my respondents left school with only a vague notion of what they wanted to do — nothing beyond the pressing desire to continue pursuing the proven markers on the success trail (the IITs, the IIMs, professional courses rather than the ‘general stream’). Their schooling appeared not to have guided them in any way when they were making their career choices. Their decisions were always steered by ‘acceptable’ parameters of success.

All these members of the smart set concede that the pressure to top was always present, always very high. In many cases, this pressure was “self-exerted”, a result of “healthy competition” among batchmates. Samudra Dasgupta, ISC topper in 2002 in the science stream from St. James’ School, and in his last leg of a masters at Harvard University, speaks of the unerring, but not overbearing, support and encouragement of his parents. Others echo this, making a significant point about the need for neutrality from at least one quarter in an atmosphere of unrelenting competition.

A curious, and dangerous, observation was of state-board toppers consistently speaking of time for non-academic pursuits being in short supply throughout school. Rituparna Sen, who teaches at the University of California at Davis, and came first among girls in Madhyamik in 1991, says “there was almost no play in my childhood”. When asked whether childhood is getting lost somewhere in this mad scramble to grab opportunities, she remains non-committal, but admits that her three-year-old daughter who is growing up in the US has a very “different” childhood from her own. “I like hers more,” she says. On the other hand, the Delhi-board stars who corresponded with me have had dazzling, multi-faceted extra-curricular interests, and many continue to do so. Shayak Banerjee, the ISC topper in science from St. James’ School in 2001, played tennis and football in school, had a band at IIT Kharagpur, and has one now in Austin, where he also plays first-division football when he isn’t working on his PhD at the university of Texas. “I rarely spent time in the classroom,” he writes. Like many others, he agrees that the school system alone, without the pressure of private tuitions, suffices for academic success in the board examinations, but not much beyond. He adds that he “had no complaints about the syllabus” because he was “studying outside [it] anyway”. Most agree, though, that stereotyping does little justice, but prefer not to be quoted when they see state-boarders as being “dry, boring” or “holed up”. Samudra makes a bold observation when he says that much of the profiling of toppers as being too drearily ‘academic’ is “done by losers who don’t have the dedication or focus to work hard enough”. But how hard is hard enough? This is where the fine line between overwhelming and stimulating pressure lies.

Of what use was their school-leaving examination top-score, if it did nothing to further their future ambitions? “It will always be on my résumé. Prospective employers value consistent performance highly,” states Samudra. I suspect they just couldn’t help it — they had to top. I noticed the same ruthless zeal to ‘outperform’ in all the men and women I wrote to. This “dedication and focus” set them apart from the average or even the above-average.

They’re an inspiring lot. Some of them are even so humble as to admit that ‘topping’ was purely by chance. For many of them, having multiple interests helped keep their sanity in the final years of school that are a whirl of competitive examinations and specialized training. Too many mentioned continual pressure to perform, too many of them saw that pressure as an added impetus to better themselves. Perhaps that’s why they succeeded. But along with these sunny success stories, there is the glaring silence of the many cases of burnout — bright students so accustomed to succeeding that the first indication of being outdone, or proven second-best, is enough to demolish whatever fuels their relentless pursuit of accomplishment. In this void also lies Toya’s untold story.

There are distinct truths about the process of growing up today. With the luxury of a modern childhood comes greater conditions placed on the lives of children: greater expectations, a sharper distinction between the good and the not-good-enough, the need to inculcate a stronger sense of competitiveness. For every success story are the many failed dreams, of those who have given up because they couldn’t go on, or because they couldn’t go on winning.