Apparently I Talk About Pizza Too Much: Notes From Ranchi

This is the first post in a five-part series. Over the course of this exam season, I travelled to five states to personally conduct final exams for the digital marketing batches I’d been teaching online — sitting in the same room as students I’d only ever seen through a Google Meet grid, watching them finish a course they’d signed up for months earlier. Ranchi was the first stop, and also the first exam I’d ever conducted in person since I started teaching. Here’s how that day went.

My flight to Ranchi had a long layover in Kolkata — the first time I’d been there, though most of what I actually saw of it was the inside of the airport. I kept meaning to step out and see something of the city, but the layover timing didn’t really allow it, so it stayed a place I passed through rather than visited.

The Ranchi batch had been taught almost entirely online, through Google Meet, in partnership with Mary Vandana Computer Institute on Old HB Road in Kokar. Mr. James Nayan Toppo runs the center there, and he took care of the visit end to end — picking me up, making sure the room and the students were ready, and generally making a long travel day easier than it could have been.

The exam was set for 11 AM, but students started arriving from 9. That gave us close to two hours before anything official began, and I spent most of it just talking to them in the room — the first time meeting most of them in person after months of only seeing faces in a Meet grid. Nothing structured, just conversation while people trickled in. Some asked about the certification and what it could do for them, a few just wanted to know what it’s actually like doing this full time.

One of them brought up something I hadn’t noticed about my own teaching until he said it out loud: “Do you like pizza so much? Because you always give the example of pizza while teaching.” I genuinely hadn’t realized I did that until that moment — apparently it had come up in enough classes to become a running joke among them before I’d even landed in Ranchi.

The exam itself had two written sections and one practical. In the gap between finishing the written sections and starting the practical, one student told me, “Your voice is so cute.” I didn’t have much of a reply for that one, and we moved straight into the practical.

Once all three parts were done, everyone sat around waiting on results, and that’s when a different student mentioned he’d looked up my YouTube channel, because he said he’d felt personally connected to the classes even though they were fully online. I told him I didn’t actually have a channel yet — that I’d let him know when I made one.

The results came back fast, within about an hour, mostly because a couple of the institute’s own teachers pitched in to help check papers alongside me.

Of the 77 students who’d registered for the batch, 33 passed. We ran the certificate ceremony the same day, right after the results were in, and I handed each certificate to the students myself, one name at a time.

By the time the ceremony wrapped up, it was late afternoon and time to move on. Mr. James Nayan Toppo dropped me at the bus stand himself before I left for the next state, which was its own kind of send-off after a day like that. Four more stops to go — more on the next one soon.