Book Review: Gift of Confidence: Miracles Can Happen Easily by Rohit Narang

To many this book may sound another warts and all self-help book for boosting confidence in life. Well, you need to think again. As the title suggests, it is aptly right to say that once you gain confidence, well then no miracle is impossible for you. To take the things further, let us clear that this is a fiction book based on a student’s plight to study fruitfully to clear the world’s toughest exam CA.

Our protagonist Pancham is a CA final year student. The story starts with a failure. He, much contrary to his parents and self-expectations, has failed in the CA exams. It was his first attempt. He feels the heat of the pressure all the more as everyone in his family had cleared the exam in first attempt. He is depressed. What should he do now? Try harder or commit suicide. On a depressing side, he thinks of suicide. For a change of mind and heart, his mother sends him to a nearby Gurudwara.

In Gurudwara, he stumbles upon a smiling man, who sounded strange and weird to Pancham. Despite that Pancham wants to talk to him. When Pancham says that he has failed first time in life, the smiling man says that can’t be true. Pancham feels offended. The smiling man further probes Pancham whether he was able to stand on his feet first time when he was a child. As a matter of fact, this is a reality check for Pancham! People often fail in life but they hardly acknowledge it.

Pancham returns home furious and cursing that smiling man for making fun of his situation. Pancham is good at heart, introvert, and altruistic too, but he doesn’t know how to rise out of the depression of failure. To handle failure is an art, and he needs to learn it to succeed in life.

Learning walking as a child example seems to be of some value to Pancham, thus he goes to find that smiling man again. Next, we see that the smiling man’s name is Vandit Ji. Pancham gets affected by his charismatic and placid personality. Soon they both get into student-teacher kind of bonding.

Vandit Ji mentors Pancham for preparation with some useful insights and philosophy. Among all his lessons, the stand-out points are, like studying for learning than scoring grades, accepting the failures, learning to laugh at one’s mistakes, etc.

But the question is why Vandit Ji is mentoring Pancham for CA exams. Is he a teacher or saint or somebody else? If you delve deep into the story, it will get disclosed that why Vandit Ji is a better option than the best of best coaching class. Is it possible to clear CA exams without going to coaching classes? Is Pacham putting his faith and caliber at risk?

In this book, Pancham has been represented as a typical student aiming for clearing the exams. But when we see Vandit Ji, we get to know that exams are beyond grades, rather one should enjoy the learning process and learn the topics in such a way that one is explaining the concept to others. Another prominent aspect of the book is to focus on solving the problems given in the exam than counting grades.

The characterization of Vandit Ji is simple yet powerful. We see the mettle of his confidence tested when he goes to play lawn tennis match with one of the arrogant students, who happens to be some sort of a champion.

The book is a treasure trove for CA students. Though the primary focus of the book is building confidence but under this umbrella many useful aspects have been covered that seem very relevant to the student community. Written in simple and lucid way, this book by Rohit Narang is going to make your heart light and prompt you to go ahead in life with penchant of confidence. For students, this book is a must read. Well-written and well-edited, the story moves at a brisk pace with valuable lessons.