Exams & Stress
"Go study." "Tom I have math exam." "My mocks gave it in the bum." "We have boards." "Screw boards." That is the cycle. Every single time.
The Constant Battle
The defining tension of Shaurya's life right now is the collision between building and studying. He is trying to develop LockIn, operate Simplifly, research Raly, plan AI+Frnds events, and attend co/Build on Fridays -- but he also has a math exam tomorrow. Every teenager who is trying to do something beyond the standard school path knows this feeling. The schoolwork does not pause because you are debugging a SwiftUI layout or negotiating a B2B deal.
The irony is not lost on anyone: Shaurya built LockIn, an app designed to fight doomscrolling and help people focus, while simultaneously struggling to put down his own projects long enough to revise for physics. Palash texts "Go study" like a reflex. It has become a meme in the friend group because everyone knows the response will be "yeah yeah" followed by three more hours of coding.
The Stress Circle
It is not just Shaurya. Palash gets it -- he is going through the same exam cycle on the other side of the border. Prisha Agarwal gets it -- she and Shaurya built an entire Tuesday call ritual around surviving exams together. The school crew at Jebel Ali are all in the same boat. During exam season, the group chats transform into stress support groups. "Did you study?" "No." "Same." "We're cooked." That exchange happens in some variation every exam week across multiple chats.
The shared suffering is genuinely comforting. When everyone around you is equally stressed, equally behind on revision, and equally convinced they are going to fail, it normalises the anxiety. You are not uniquely unprepared -- you are just a teenager with too much going on, like every other teenager with too much going on.
ICSE Boards
The ICSE board exams are a different beast entirely. The pressure comes from every direction: from school, from parents, from yourself, from the knowledge that these results will follow you. And then you have to sit in an exam hall and answer questions about geography when you have been coding until 3am the night before.
The boards era intensifies everything. The group chat messages get more urgent. The "we're cooked" energy escalates. Prisha's classic 11pm "Tom I have math exam" text represents the universal board-season panic. The Tuesday study calls become more frequent. Dr Frost math practice sessions become a survival tool rather than a supplement.
Yet somehow the grades stay up. "My average is 99% im chilling" was said at the Nasa reunion without irony. The system works -- study smart, build when you can, sleep enough to survive. It is not elegant, but it produces results.
How He Copes
The coping strategy is pragmatic rather than graceful. Study enough to not fail. Build enough to make progress. Sleep enough to function. Lean on the subjects that matter for the pilot dream -- mathematics and physics -- and accept that the rest is a box to check. The Tuesday calls with Prisha provide structure. The group chats provide emotional support. The knowledge that everyone else is equally stressed provides perspective.
The real coping mechanism, though, is the building itself. When exams are done and the pressure lifts, there is always something to go back to -- a feature to ship, an event to plan, a product to iterate on. School is temporary. The work is the constant.
See also: School Life | Palash | Prisha Agarwal | LockIn | Nasa Reunion | School & Education