Dear Student,

Obviously, you are a good student,  having cleared CPT. You will probably remain a good student.

Somewhere, after CPT may be something changed for you. Too much facebook? Too much mobile? Falling in love (instead of rising) and losing focus on study? Some family problems? Find out what changed between CPT and IPCC. Try to correct that. Have the self belief that you can do it because you have done it.

One of the worst thing to deal after failure in exam is the feeling of lagging behind the friends and colleagues. You want to hide inside your house and not socialise. Try to come out of the house. Face the friends who went ahead. In short, try to act normal, as you would have when you celeberated your CPT success. Hard, but essential. This will help you in being peace with yourself and become normal. Your true friends and family members will stand by you like a rock. Those who mind, do not matter and those matter, do not mind.

There are phazes to go through in any unfortunate event like failure in exam, in getting job, in losing job, in losing promotion, in relationship, in failing to marry ones loved one, in having child, in having major accident and even in death of  someone close.

The first phase is onshock and depression (why me?), second is acceptance and third is recovery or normalcy. Do not try to bye-pass any phase - you must go through each. May be you can speed up the phaze of depression and acceptance. Please remember you must feel bad, cry and depressed when an unfortunate event happens. It is all part of getting to normalcy.

As someone who has gone through the stress of exams and facing the tough exam of life, I can very well tell you that there are many of us who would trade failure in exam for losing someone dear or for break up in relation. Life is a bigger exam, much much bigger exam than you can realise at this stage, and there is no syllabus or prescribed text book or scheduled dates of the exam. It tests you every possible day and more often than not, we fail in these tests and, I can assure you, often one does not feel any less than you are feeling today.

It is how you treat the setback, including the exam failures in earlier years of life, that make you successful or failure in life. Failure is going to catch up with everyone, including your frieds who raced past you in IPCC (CA, but after 7 years of marriage, and no child. CA but divorced. CA but abnormal child CA but wife having terminal disease.)

You will not find even a single human who has not met with a crushing failure in life. How you deal with it will separate you from the losers. You fail, not when you do not pass in exam, but when you fail to rise and try to succeed like the industrious ant.

They say lightly that behind every successful man is a (weeping) wife. But more seriously, behind every successful man, lies a series of failures/ setbacks and the saga of how successfuly he overcame them to emerge victorious.  There is not a single stock market magnet who has not been wiped out atleast one time, but learnt from his mistakes, did not blame the circumstances or other humans and dealt with the setback like a man. 

Often dealing with failure is a lone battle because unlike success which has many relatives, failure is often orphaned. But atleast after exam failure, you have chance to regain what is lost,  can we get back someone who leaves us for heavenly abode, for no fault of us??!

That is what life is all about. Life does not follow a manual of procedure. It throws many pleasant and unpleasant surprises. It is all about how you tackle the unpleasant events. There is always a soft option of running away from dealing with the setbacks.

Love,

Ankur