“Every red light on the road was making my heart race”: 61 km, two exams, and a father’s X post that raises tough questions

On Sunday, Shailendra Sharma turned to X to describe what he and his daughter went through in a single afternoon, two national-level entrance exams, two different centres, and a 61-kilometre stretch of Delhi-NCR traffic in between.

His post wasn’t written like a complaint at first. It read more like disbelief mixed with exhaustion, the kind that comes only after you’ve lived through something and are still trying to make sense of it.

“Ever since this morning, my daughter and I have turned into ‘Exam Warriors’!” he wrote.

First stop: IISER exam, morning tension

The day began at 9 AM with the IISER Aptitude Test (IAT), held at a centre near the Delhi-Haryana border. The exam went on till noon.

Once it ended, there was barely any time to pause. No breather, no slow exit. Just a rush outside the centre where hundreds of students were trying to leave at the same time.

Sharma described it vividly on X: “As soon as the first exam ended at 12, my daughter burst out of the crowd with the same urgency as passengers rushing for a connecting flight when their plane lands!” By the time they managed to get past the congestion and reach the main road, it was already 12:55 pm.

The 61-kilometre stretch that changed everything

What came next was not part of any exam syllabus. The second exam, CUET, was scheduled between 3 PM and 5 PM at a centre near the UP-Delhi border. The distance between the two centres was around 61 kilometres.

Google Maps showed an estimated arrival of 2:18 PM. Entry closed at 2:30 PM. That left almost no room for delay. “In that situation, every red light on the road, every halted traffic jam, was making my heart race faster,” Sharma wrote. Delhi-NCR traffic, already unpredictable on a normal day, became a constant countdown in the background.

Reaching just in time

They finally reached the second centre at 2:12 pm. The relief, as he described it, came only after his daughter walked through the gate.

“Only when my daughter went inside did I finally breathe a sigh of relief!” he wrote on X.

For a moment, the exam pressure shifted from academic preparation to something far more immediate: simply arriving on time.

Beyond one family’s experience

Sharma’s post quickly resonated online, not just for the journey itself, but for what it pointed toward. He also referred to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s book Exam Warriors, saying it talks about preparing for exams and handling pressure, but doesn’t speak about situations where exam schedules themselves collide in real-world conditions.

His larger question was simple: when multiple national agencies already have access to applicant data, is it not possible to coordinate exam dates better and avoid such overlaps?

A larger issue under the surface

What Shailendra Sharma described on X is not just a story of one rushed afternoon. It quietly reflects a system many students move through every year, where preparation is only half the battle and logistics often decide the rest.

If multiple national agencies already collect applicant data, why does coordination between exam schedules still feel so fragmented? Why should students appearing for different competitive tests on the same day be left to navigate traffic, distance and rigid entry windows on their own? And at what point does the system begin to account for the lived reality outside the exam centre, not just inside it?

These are not new questions. But each exam season seems to bring them back, unchanged, waiting for clearer answers.

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