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In 2001, Arjun Jain arrived at his JEE centre in a Home Minister's car. The car belonged to the father of his schoolmate, and an armed guard accompanied him.
But inside the examination hall, privilege did not change the outcome.
"The paper does not care who drops you off," Jain wrote in a LinkedIn post reflecting on the experience.
He could attempt only a few questions and knew he had performed badly.
For two years, Jain had bet heavily on the exam. He had given up hockey, quizzes and debates to focus on studies. When JEE did not go his way, his backup plan was another year in Kota. His family could not afford it.
So he joined RV College of Engineering in Bengaluru to study computer science.
And that decision changed everything.
At RV College, Jain began exploring computer science beyond his classroom. He pulled research papers from IEEE journals and started reading about the field on his own.
"A year in, I gave the JEE one more shot from my hostel room," he recalled in the post.
He secured rank 3,363 and finally had an IIT seat. But there was a catch: Petrochemical Engineering at IIT-BHU.
Jain turned it down.
He had already completed a year of computer science and did not want to start over in a branch he did not want. He chose to finish his degree at RV College instead.
As he put it, "I already had one paid-for year of computer science, and just three years left before I could start earning." Starting over meant more time and fees for a course he did not want.
That decision would eventually take him far beyond the IIT he had once wanted.
Jain went on to pursue a PhD in Computer Science at Saarland University, graduating summa cum laude, followed by postdoctoral research at New York University's Courant Institute.
At NYU, he worked with researchers including Yann LeCun and Chris Bregler on deep learning and human pose estimation. His research appeared at major conferences including ICLR, NeurIPS and CVPR.
His work also moved into industry. Technology emerging from his research led to Perceptive Code, a venture whose intellectual property was later acquired by Mercedes.
Then came Apple.
In 2015, Jain worked as a senior researcher on Apple's Project Titan team, working on computer vision and sensing systems for vehicles, including driver and occupant monitoring.
In 2016, around 14 years after his first JEE attempt, Jain joined IIT Bombay as an assistant professor.
The irony was not lost on him.
"Fourteen years later, IIT Bombay calls. Not with a rank. With an offer to teach," he wrote.
He was now teaching computer vision to students who had cleared the exam he had once failed.
Jain taught at IIT Bombay for several years and mentored two PhD students. One of them, Rishabh Dabral, later became a professor and group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where Jain himself had trained.
"But the symmetry stuns me: my student teaches where I trained, and I taught where I could not study," he wrote in his post.
Today, Jain is the founder and chief scientist of Fast Code AI and has also held academic and AI research roles.
His own summary of the journey is striking: "The exam decided where I started. It had no authority over where I ended."
For students staring at an unwanted result, that may be the part worth remembering. An entrance exam can decide an immediate opportunity. It does not have to define the limits of a career.
Disclaimer: This story is based on a social media post. The details, including figures, background, and outcomes, have not been independently verified by India Today. The article is intended for informational purposes only, and readers are advised to exercise their own discretion before drawing conclusions or making decisions based on the content.
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