Ensō Guild

The ice clinked against the glass, the only sharp sound on the balcony. Below them, the lights of Gurgaon stretched out like a chaotic circuit board, pulsing with the traffic of ten thousand people trying to get somewhere faster than the person next to them.

Arjun leaned back in his chair, exhaling a cloud of smoke that drifted into the humid night air. He looked tired. Not the physical tiredness of a workout, but the deep, bone-weary fatigue of a man managing high-stakes outcomes.

"He got a ninety-eight," Arjun said, breaking the silence. "In the mental Math Olympiad. Ninety-eight."

Kabir, sitting opposite him, didn’t look up from his tea. "That’s high."

"It’s the highest in his batch. The tutor says his processing speed is off the charts. He can multiply three-digit numbers in his head faster than I can type them into my phone." Arjun swirled his drink, a faint smile playing on his lips. "It’s impressive, Kabir. You should see him. It’s like watching a machine."

Kabir finally looked up. He set his cup down gently. "A machine," he repeated. "That’s an interesting choice of words."

"It’s a compliment."

"Is it?" Kabir asked. "Since when is 'machine' the aspiration for a human child?"

Arjun frowned, sensing the shift. "Don't start with the philosophy. We live in the real world. The entrance exams don't care about your soul. They care about speed. If Rohan can solve the paper ten minutes faster than the kid next to him, he wins. That’s the game."

"I know the game," Kabir said, leaning forward, his voice dropping an octave. "And I’m telling you, you’re training him for a sport that is about to be cancelled."

"What does that mean?"

"Arjun, look at what you’re celebrating. You are celebrating that your son can mimic a calculator from 1975. You are paying fifty dollars an hour to train him to do something that a three-dollar chip can do in a nanosecond."

Arjun scoffed, waving a hand dismissively. "That’s a reductive argument. It’s about discipline. It’s about synaptic connections. It’s the 'Gym' for the brain."

"That is the lie we tell ourselves to justify the misery we put them through," Kabir countered smoothly. "Think about it. What is he actually learning? He is learning an algorithm. Carry the one, drop the zero, move the decimal. He is following a script. If you ask him why the algorithm works, can he tell you? If you give him a problem he hasn't seen before, can he solve it? Or does he freeze because he doesn't have a script for it?"

Arjun hesitated. He thought about the homework session last week. Rohan had breezed through twenty division problems. But when a word problem was phrased slightly differently—requiring logic rather than just calculation—Rohan had thrown his pencil down in frustration. 'We haven't done this type yet,' he had cried.

"The system demands it, Kabir," Arjun said, his voice softer now, less defensive. "You can't blame the parents. If I tell the school to teach him 'slow logic,' he fails the term. The paper has fifty questions and sixty minutes. Speed isn't a luxury; it’s survival. We are just adapting to the ecosystem."

"I know," Kabir acknowledged. "And I don't blame you. The System is designed to filter, not to educate. It uses speed as a proxy for intelligence because speed is easy to measure. Grading a thousand kids on 'original thought' is almost impossible. Grading them on 'who got the right answer fastest' is much easier."

Kabir gestured to the city lights below.

"But the world isn't school, Arjun. In ten years, when Rohan is entering the workforce, nobody is going to ask him to multiply 345 times 12 in his head. AI will write the code. It will do the analysis. The 'How' will be free."

"So what’s left?" Arjun asked.

"The 'Why,'" Kabir said. "The ability to look at a mess of data and find the pattern. The ability to sit with a problem for three days, not three minutes, and not panic. We are teaching them to be calculators when we should be teaching them to be mathematicians."

"There’s a difference?"

"A massive one," Kabir smiled. "A calculator gives you an answer. A mathematician asks a better question. Arithmetic is just literacy—it’s knowing the alphabet. Mathematics... that is literature. It’s the poetry of logic."

Arjun stared into his glass. The ice had melted. "So, I’m spending a fortune to make him obsolete."

"You’re spending a fortune to make him efficient at the wrong things," Kabir corrected. "You’re polishing the brass on the Titanic because the Captain told you shiny brass gets you a promotion."

Arjun let out a short, dry laugh. "Okay. Fair point. But the ship is still moving, and I can't just jump off. He still has to pass the exam next week."

"He does," Kabir agreed. "But don't confuse the exam with his education. Let the tutor teach him to pass the test. You need to teach him to think."

Arjun looked up, his curiosity piqued. "And how exactly do I do that?"

Kabir leaned back, picking up his tea again. "You start by making him comfortable with being stuck."