I went to Conduct an Exam — Dharamshala Felt Like a Different Country Entirely

Of all the places I visit to conduct exam, Dharamshala is the one I still think about the most. Mountains on every side, the air noticeably cleaner and could feel the fragrance in the air whics is something obvious when you are coming from Delhi. It’s the kind of place that makes you stop and just look around for a minute before you remember why you’re there. This is the fourth stop in my five-part series on travelling across India to personally conduct exams for students I’d only ever taught online, and of the places, this is the one that turned into something bigger than just an exam. 

I travelled to Dharamshala by bus, reaching a day before the exam on the 22nd. It was my first time in Himachal Pradesh, somewhere I’d wanted to visit since my college days without ever quite managing it. Stepping off the bus and seeing the place for the first time, it genuinely felt like nowhere else I’d been in India. On the exam day, when Jyoti ma’am (founder of Global Sai Education) asked me how I was feeling after arriving, I told her it felt like I’d landed in a different country altogether.

The exam was on the 23rd, and I set out early to reach the institute by 9 AM — though Google Maps had other plans. It kept looping me around the area instead of actually taking me there, and I eventually found my way with Priti ma’am’s help. By the time I arrived, the students were already there and the teachers were all set to help me run the exam.

There was a short delay before we could actually begin, for a few operational reasons, but that gap turned into one of the better parts of the morning — just sitting and talking with the students and the institute’s teachers before things got formal.

Like all the other places, the exam here was split into two sections. Once everything was in place, the room settled into that particular kind of quiet an exam brings anywhere — pens moving, the occasional page turning, a few students reading a question twice before committing to an answer. By the time the second section wrapped up, the room looked a lot more relieved than it had two hours earlier.

Once the exam wrapped up, we sat down to check the answer sheets together, and results were ready about an hour later — fast, considering there were 70 papers to get through. Out of those 70 registered students, 54 had passed, which is the kind of number that feels good to say out loud. We went straight into the certificate ceremony without much of a gap, calling names one at a time, and I handed each certificate over myself along with Jyoti ma’am. The place was a lot louder than it had been during the exam a couple of hours earlier, which felt like exactly the right way for that shift to happen.

After the ceremony, the teachers arranged a short tour of the city with someone from the institute, and we visited the War Memorial and the HPCA Stadium — a nice, unplanned way to close out the day after the exam.

The War Memorial was close to the GSE institute. The memorial was built to honor and keep alive the memory of the martyred soldiers from Himachal Pradesh who sacrificed their lives in the wars since independence, from the 1947-48 Kashmir operations through to 1971.

The HPCA Stadium was a complete change of mood, a cricket ground ringed by the snow-capped Dhauladhar range, one of those grounds people compare to Adelaide Oval for how close the mountains sit behind the boundary. There was no match on, just the visitors and the views.

I went back to the institute the next day to talk about the next batch before leaving Dharamshala, and that’s also when I found out that a local outlet, Rozana Himachal, had published an article on the program. Seeing our work covered in local news was a nice surprise to end the trip on.

Before heading to Delhi, I also made time to see more of the city — Bhagsu Nag Temple, the walk up to Bhagsu Waterfall, the Dalai Lama Temple and the Tibet Museum, and McLeod Ganj. It turned into one of the most memorable stretches of this entire trip.

I remember thinking, somewhere in the middle of all that sightseeing, how strange it is that people travel to places like Switzerland when somewhere like Dharamshala exists right here in India. One more stop after this — more on that soon.