I remember sitting in a coaching center in Delhi years ago. Everyone around me was obsessed with one thing. Cracking the IIT JEE. We spent lakhs of rupees and years of our lives chasing that single goal. So when the Rishabh Khaneja IIT story explained itself on my feed this morning, it made me stop and read. Here is a guy who actually sat in the exam hall, knew the right answers, and deliberately chose the wrong ones. It sounds completely insane to any Indian parent.
You study for years. You burn the midnight oil. Your parents sacrifice their savings. And then you throw it all away on purpose. Why? Because sometimes the only way to escape a path you hate is to burn the bridge completely. I've talked to countless students who secretly wished they could fail just to end the misery. Rishabh actually did it.
The reality of the Indian engineering dream
Engineering is a religion in India. You're told from childhood that getting into a good college is the only way to secure your future. We expect our kids to get into an IIT, land a high-paying job, use their salary to pay bills on UPI, and keep their shiny degrees safe in DigiLocker. It's a set script. But nobody asks if the student actually wants to write code for the rest of their life.
Rishabh Khaneja faced this exact situation. He was smart. He knew the syllabus well enough to pass. But he also knew what passing meant. It meant a guaranteed ticket to a life he didn't want. He looked at the engineering colleges and the corporate grind that followed. He decided to opt out in the most drastic way possible.
This isn't a story about giving up. It's a story about taking extreme measures to protect your own sanity. Think about the pressure in places like Kota. Students spend 16 hours a day solving physics problems. The mental toll is massive. We see the news reports every year. The stress is literally breaking kids. Rishabh saw that future and said no.
For decades, society has treated the entrance exam as the ultimate filter. If you clear it, you're set. If you don't, you're a failure. But what happens when the smartest kid in the room decides the game itself is rigged? That's what makes this story so fascinating. It flips the entire narrative on its head.
How the exam hall rebellion happened
Most of us would just take the exam, fail normally, and then argue with our parents. Rishabh took it a step further. He sat down with his paper. He read the questions. He figured out the correct answers. And then he carefully filled in the wrong bubbles on his OMR sheet.
Honestly, I find this level of dedication impressive. It takes a lot of nerve to intentionally sabotage your own test when you know the right answers. He didn't leave the sheet blank. A blank sheet could be blamed on panic, running out of time, or illness. Marking the wrong answers was a clear, calculated message. He made absolutely sure he wouldn't clear the cutoff.
- He studied the material thoroughly over the years.
- He understood the core concepts well enough to identify the correct options easily.
- He intentionally selected the incorrect options for every single question he solved.
- He eliminated any chance of accidentally passing or getting waitlisted.
- He walked out of the hall knowing his engineering dreams were dead, on his own terms.
I tried this once with a mock test in school just for fun. It's actually harder than you think. You have to actively fight your own brain to pick the wrong option when you know the right one. (I know, sounds complicated. It's not, but it requires serious focus.) Doing it in the actual JEE main exam? That takes guts.
Quitting the corporate rat race
The story doesn't end at the entrance exam. Rishabh eventually found himself in a corporate job anyway. That's how the system works in India. Even if you dodge engineering, you often end up in a cubicle doing something you don't care about, maybe staring at Excel sheets all day. But his rebellious streak didn't die.
He quit. He walked away from a steady paycheck to chase happiness. He chose the arts. He now leads his own life on his own terms. You can find many similar stories in our startup explainers section, where people leave comfortable tech jobs to do what they actually love.
We often measure success in rupees. A package of 20 LPA is considered good. A package of 50 LPA makes you a neighborhood legend. But what happens when you wake up at age 35 and hate everything about your day? Rishabh realized this early. He traded financial security for mental peace.
Working in corporate India can be brutal. Long hours, toxic managers, and the constant fear of layoffs are the norm. We've seen massive job cuts recently across major IT firms. When the stability of the corporate world is an illusion anyway, chasing a passion starts making a lot more sense.
"I didn't want to live a life designed by someone else. Marking those wrong answers was my first real act of independence."
That quote might not be verbatim, but it captures the exact sentiment he shared online. People on LinkedIn and Reddit are debating his choices right now. I spent an hour scrolling through the Neet_india subreddit today. Some call him foolish. Others call him brave. I think he just knew what he wanted and didn't care about societal expectations.
What this means for students and parents
This whole situation is a massive reality check for the Indian education system. We're producing millions of engineers who don't want to be engineers. They just want a job. And now, with AI automation writing better code than most junior developers, that standard career path is looking very shaky.
Think about the sheer volume of engineering graduates India pumps out every year. We're talking hundreds of thousands. A large chunk of them are unemployable because they never wanted to learn engineering in the first place. They crammed for exams, forgot the material the next day, and scraped by with bare minimum passing grades. It's a colossal waste of human potential. Rishabh's choice to fail early and pursue the arts means he isn't taking up a seat someone else might actually want. He completely bypassed the zombie-student phase.
If you're a parent reading this, take a step back. Look at your kids. Are you forcing them into a box they desperately want to escape? Rishabh had to ruin his own exam just to be heard. Don't make your kids do that. Listen to them before they have to resort to sabotage.
And if you're a student, know that there are other options. You don't have to follow the herd. The internet has opened up thousands of new ways to make a living. You can learn video editing, write content, build products, or become a creator without a formal degree. We cover a lot of these alternative paths in our career guides.
The traditional path is breaking down. Degrees from prestigious colleges don't guarantee a stress-free life anymore. They just guarantee you a seat at a more expensive table. Rishabh saw through this. He realized that true freedom meant defining success on his own terms, not on the terms set by some coaching institute in Kota.
The changing face of Indian tech
The tech industry is changing rapidly. The days of joining an IT service company and hiding in the bench for six months are over. Companies want people who actually care about the work. They want problem solvers, not just people with a degree from a top tier college.
In today's creator economy, having a unique voice and a passion for your craft is infinitely more valuable than a reluctant engineering degree. Indian startups are now hiring people based on their portfolios, their code repositories, or their design profiles. The obsession with the IIT tag is slowly but surely fading in the real world, even if parents haven't caught up yet. The tech landscape in cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad is filled with successful dropouts and non-engineers who just know how to build good things.
And let's talk about the financial aspect. Parents think spending 15 lakhs on an engineering degree is a safe investment. But if the kid hates the job and quits after two years, that money is basically gone. Rishabh quitting his corporate job later shows that the desire for a fulfilling life eventually wins out over the sunk cost fallacy. He saved himself decades of misery by making a hard pivot.
Rishabh understood this intuitively. He knew that forcing himself through four years of college would only lead to burnout. He saved himself a lot of time and money by failing early. And by moving into the arts, he tapped into a side of his brain that engineering would have completely crushed.
We need to talk about this more openly. There's so much shame attached to failing an exam in India. Relatives will ask questions. Neighbors will gossip. But failing on purpose? That breaks the entire social contract. It forces everyone to confront the fact that the prize might not be worth the race.
We've created a culture where passing an exam is more important than learning a skill. That has to change. If more students start questioning the system like Rishabh did, maybe we'll finally see some real reform in how we educate our youth.
Moving forward
So where does this leave us? The Rishabh Khaneja story is making waves because it hits a nerve. We all know someone who was pushed into engineering against their will. Maybe that someone is you.
His decision to pursue happiness over a corporate paycheck is something many people only dream of. He's now doing work that he finds meaningful. He doesn't have to pretend to care about quarterly targets, performance reviews, or client deliverables.
If there's one thing to take away from this, it's that your career is a long game. A single exam doesn't define your life. Even the biggest, most hyped exams in the country are just tests on a piece of paper. You have the power to write your own story, even if it means picking the wrong answers on purpose.
I really hope this story gives some kid out there the courage to have an honest conversation with their parents. It's better to have a tough talk now than to spend the next decade miserable in a cubicle. For more stories on how technology and careers are evolving in India, check out our latest news coverage. The world is changing, and the old rules simply don't apply anymore.
