Kota Factory: Jeetu bhaiya is also a product of this ‘factory’ and he’s finally accepted it isn’t producing winners

The kids in Kota Factory were sold a dream in their early teen years. The dream, they were told, had a simple approach – go to Kota, ‘crack’ IIT to get a high-paying job, and you will be sorted for life. The kids bought into it because every adult they knew around them was vouching for this. And thus, they volunteered to get placed on an assembly line to chase the idea of success that was fed to them. But little did they know that the three-step success plan they were sold, actually meant nothing.

This season of Kota Factory has actually been the most mature, and not because we saw Vaibhav, Meena and Uday grow up, but because this time, we saw Jeetu ‘bhaiya’ grow up a fair bit. Jeetu was always one of those characters whose overt optimism frequently bordered on toxic positivity but this time around, it felt like he had gotten sick of those WhatsApp-forwarded positivity quotes that he had been doling out for years. We saw him seek help and introspect about matters that make us who we are, as opposed to what we end up doing. Much like Vaibhav, Uday and Meena, Jeetu also bought into this IIT dream once. He went to IIT, made a load of money, got a career he thought he loved but when he saw someone dying because of that very dream, he found himself drowning in front of his framed engineering degree inside his house, which is starting to rot, in a city that’s swallowing his core. He did everything by the book but when he needed a raft, he realised that the factory that ‘made him’ doesn’t have a fire exit.