This April, I completed 25 years in education.
25 years is long enough to watch trends rise and fade. Long enough to see institutions change, exams change, student behaviour change, and even the language around education shift. And long enough to understand what you truly believe and what you don’t.
I started in 2001, almost by accident. Education wasn’t a plan. It was supposed to be a short phase between jobs, something to do until I found a more “normal” career. But the work surprised me. Students called me “sir” with genuine respect. And at the end of the day, you went home feeling you had actually mattered to someone. That feeling stayed. I never really moved away from teaching after that.
Over the years, I have worked across marketing, sales, operations, academics, and management. Each role taught me something different. They showed me how the machinery of education works, how programmes are built, how students are reached, how products are shaped, and how systems quietly influence outcomes.
But through all of that, one identity stayed constant. I was a teacher. That part never felt borrowed or performed. It felt like home.
Also read: From 70 to 95 percentile in CAT VARC
Many students today know me only through VARC, and some only through VARC1000. But that is not where I began. I started with QA and DILR, and taught them for nearly 15 years. That phase shaped my understanding of learning. It taught me that students do not improve just because content exists. They improve when confusion reduces, when complexity becomes visible, and when something that looked random begins to show structure.
That idea stayed with me when I moved more seriously into VARC in the mid‑2010s. What drew me in was not that the section was easy. It was that it was often misunderstood. Too many people treated VARC as something driven by instinct or language comfort. Students were told to trust their gut, skim faster, and develop a feel for it. I was never comfortable with that. Not because instinct is useless, but because it avoids the real issue. VARC was not being respected for what it actually was.
Over time, I became convinced that VARC could be taught with far more rigour than people assumed. Not as a collection of tricks, but as a discipline. There was a method here. There was a process. What looked ambiguous could often be clarified. What students called “vague” was usually unclear reading, fuzzy thinking, or poor option handling, not some mystery built into the exam.
That belief changed how I taught. I found myself asking sharper questions. What exactly breaks when a student reads a passage? Why does a wrong option feel convincing? Where does comprehension end and projection begin? What is genuine skill, and what is noise pretending to be skill?
In time, those questions led to VARC1000.
When VARC1000 began in 2019, it was just a supplement course. But the intention behind it was simple. I wanted to build something that treated VARC seriously. Not as a side act. Not as a section, students somehow “pick up”. I wanted a structured way into the section. It grew over time, but the core idea stayed the same. Serious students deserve more than slogans. More than “read more and it will happen”. They deserve a system. That idea has shaped all my work in VARC.
I do not believe improvement comes from collecting tips or shortcuts. I do not believe confidence comes from motivational lines. Students value clarity more than spectacle. Serious learners do not need to be dazzled. Good teaching is not about sounding impressive. It is about making the learner stronger.
As I complete 25 years, I do not feel as if I am closing anything. To be honest, I do not see myself “retiring” from this in any real sense. I think I will work till death. Hopefully, carry this way of teaching into other exams as well.
Simply put, I want to keep doing what has always felt most natural to me: Teaching.
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