Why do students flock to Kota for coaching year after year despite its contested reputation?

Retiring rooms at railway stations in India are an undiscovered comfort. For people used to hotels, the retiring room can be an abomination; the railways’ legacy of carrying millions of people and the associated reputation of a lack of hygiene precedes it. But these retiring rooms are a well-kept secret; they are very well maintained, with clean sheets and clean bathrooms and are available at a fraction of the price of a hotel.

Most of these retiring rooms are on the first floor of the railway station, the staircase to it mostly lies in plain sight, but the millions of passengers passing by it every day tend to ignore it, their next destination beckoning. But when you stay on the first floor of a railway station, you can stand on the balcony overlooking the entrance and watch the hundreds and thousands of people enter and exit, each caught up in their own agendas, most in a hurry, some lost.

The view from the retiring room in Kota, Rajasthan, was sprawling; the station had a huge entrance flanked by banners containing photos of teenagers who had cracked the notoriously difficult IIT-JEE or NEET, entrance exams to the country’s premier higher education institutes, and the...

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