It was well past midnight when my phone started to glow. Not a call. Not an alarm. WhatsApp, erupting in all caps, nervous jokes tumbling over each other like we were already panicking and nothing had even begun yet. We had signed up for the National Case Competition on a whim—barely acquaintances. No plan. No strategy. Just a link someone had forwarded into a group chat, and three people who said “why not” without really thinking about what came next.
I remember the first case document landing in our shared folder at 11:58 p.m. on a Tuesday. I stared at it. Heart loud. Somewhere out there, over 340 other teams were doing the same thing: opening the same file, reading the same brief, each one believing they had something the others didn’t. I wasn’t sure whether we did. But I knew one thing: we were going to find out.
Round One: Strangers in a Google Meet
The first round was a filtering stage. Over 340 teams submitted detailed case solutions; only a handful would advance. Our case centred on financial literacy barriers in India: why millions of people, especially in semi-urban and rural regions, remain excluded from even the most basic frameworks of personal finance. We had to analyse the problem and draft a preliminary strategy that was both feasible and impactful.
That sounded manageable on paper. It was not.
The three of us had never worked together before. We had different instincts, different tolerances for conflict, and very different ideas about what “good” looked like. One of us wanted to anchor the entire strategy on behavioural economics research; another felt that was too academic for the
judges; the third (me) kept pushing for something more grounded in India’s specific financial infrastructure gaps. Arguments stretched deep past midnight. Research papers cluttered every shared screen. At one point, a single call lasted four hours and ended with two of us barely speaking.
But something shifted during that chaos. The kind of shift you only notice in retrospect. We stopped presenting our individual ideas and started actually challenging each other’s thinking. There’s a difference. Presenting is showing; challenging is caring. When someone cares enough to tear your argument apart, it usually means they’re invested in getting it right. We went from three people with a deadline to three people with a shared stake. That is when we became, tentatively, a team.
We submitted our solution at 3:47 a.m.
Then came the silence. Days passed. An email arrived, and it looked, at first read, like a rejection. We sat with that shadow for two long days. Talked less. Doubted more. Then a rumour surfaced through mutual connections: a team with our name was on the shortlist. We scrambled back to our inboxes and read the email again, more carefully. The word “rejected” was in the subject line of a different email altogether. The actual result? We had made the top 25 teams in India.
That mix-up, that strange, almost absurd near-miss, changed something in us. The two days of doubt had a purpose. They reminded us what it felt like to lose it. And once you feel that, you fight differently.
Round Two: “Are You Sure You Want to Compete Like This?”
Round Two was a different creature entirely. No anonymous submission; no quiet inbox wait. This was a live presentation, judged by a panel of industry professionals, with only five teams across India advancing to the finals. The pressure had a different texture now. Expectations had a name. Teachers intercepted us between classes. The phrase “that’s the team that got selected” started following us around corridors. Pride can be a gift, but it can also be a trap. If you’re afraid of letting people down, you start playing not to lose instead of playing to win. Those are very different games.
We sought advice from a senior teacher who had mentored students through similar competitions. We showed her our slides, feeling quietly proud of the structure we’d built. She looked at the deck for a while. Then she looked at us. “This isn’t ready,” she said flatly. “Are you sure you want to compete like this?”
There’s a particular sting to honest feedback when you were expecting validation. It lingers differently. But it also cuts to the core of something true, and the truth was: she was right. We went back. Rewrote. Restructured. Rehearsed the pitch out loud until the words stopped sounding like words and started sounding like arguments we actually believed in. Sleepless nights returned, familiar by now and almost welcome.
Hours before the submission deadline, a technical error locked us out of the upload portal. Genuine panic. The kind where your stomach drops and your hands stop working properly. After twenty minutes of troubleshooting, we realised the only way through was a premium subscription to the platform. There was no time to debate the absurdity of it. We paid, we uploaded, we exhaled.
The live presentation on Zoom was nerve-wracking in the specific way that live things always are: you cannot control anything after you press start. But the judges were thoughtful. One noted our clarity of communication and said we showed genuine creativity under pressure. Another pointed out that our financial projections needed tightening, fair criticism, and we knew it, but called our strategic framework solid. We came off the call not knowing if we’d advanced, but knowing we’d given it something real.
The email that came next is one I will not forget. “Congratulations. You are among the top five teams in India. See you at the finals.”
For a few seconds, no one said anything. Then everyone said everything at once.
The Finals: A Five-Star Hotel and a Tightrope
All expenses paid. That was the line in the confirmation email, and it hit differently than I expected. Flights, accommodation, food. The practical weight of the competition had been ours for weeks: every late night, every rewrite, every technical crisis paid for in sleep and anxiety. Now the logistics were handled, and that freed something in us. We arrived at a five-star hotel in a city that felt like it was hosting a different version of our lives. Marble floors. Chandeliers. A pool where deadlines briefly dissolved.
But the mentors gathered us that evening and didn’t let the luxury linger too long. Their feedback was honest and targeted. The finals would be judged by people who had built companies, shaped policy, and sat in boardrooms where decisions with real stakes got made. “Your story is good,” one mentor told us. “But good stories don’t win. Compelling ones do. Know the difference.” We rewrote again. Third time. Fourth time. We stopped counting.
The morning of the finals, the venue was everything the hotel was not: sharp, corporate, electric. Media teams moved through the crowd. Other finalists moved through in suits, each carrying the particular composure of people holding something fragile and pretending they aren’t. The event opened with pitches from the other teams. Every one of them was good. Some were very good. I remember watching one team present and thinking, with a clarity that surprised me: we have to be better than this.
Then they called our name.
What Happens When Your Mind Goes Blank on Stage
We stepped onto the stage, and my mind went blank.
Not metaphorically. The pitch that I had rehearsed until it lived in my muscle memory simply wasn’t there. I could see the slides. I could hear the room. I could not find the words. There is a particular terror in that moment, not the abstract fear of failure, but the real-time experience of it happening, second by second, in front of people who had flown across the country to watch.
My teammates stepped in without hesitation. No signal, no prompting, no visible break in the presentation. One of them picked up exactly where I had stalled and kept the momentum. The other filled a gap I hadn’t even registered until it was already covered. We exchanged glances. Small ones. The kind that don’t need words because the weeks behind them have already said everything.
This, I think, is the part of the story that matters most. Not the preparation, not the research, not even the strategy we had built. It was the fact that when one person failed, the others didn’t hesitate. That kind of trust is not manufactured in a single late-night session. It accumulates quietly across the rejection emails and the four-hour arguments and the technical glitches and the teacher who said, bluntly, that it wasn’t ready. You don’t build it. You earn it. Slowly, and not always gracefully.
We stepped offstage, breathing hard. The judges disappeared to deliberate. The room grew very quiet in the way rooms do when the outcome of something significant is genuinely uncertain.
What a Case Competition Actually Teaches You
Looking back across the arc of this competition, what strikes me is not the business acumen it demanded, though it demanded plenty. It’s something else. Something harder to put a name to.
The financial literacy problem we analysed throughout the competition is a real and documented challenge in India. Despite the country’s rapid economic growth, a significant portion of the population remains outside formal financial systems. Low awareness of investment instruments, insurance, and debt management continues to leave households vulnerable to economic shocks. Our case asked us to draft solutions. We did. But the more important education was the one happening in the background of every call: how to disagree productively, how to perform under pressure, how to lean on people without leaning too hard.
There is a version of competition that is purely extractive. You compete to win, you win or lose, you move on. But there’s another kind where the process rewires something in you. Where the pressure, rather than crushing you, reveals structural flaws in how you think and how you work. The case competition did that for me. It exposed my tendency to hold my own position too tightly in early-stage collaboration. It taught me that the best idea in a group rarely belongs to a single person; it belongs to the friction between people.
The initiative I had been running alongside the competition, Udaan, a financial literacy programme aimed at making economic concepts accessible to young people, had felt up until that point like a personal project. Something I believed in, but believed in somewhat quietly. The competition forced me to move beyond the theory of it. To stop thinking about financial literacy as an idea worth exploring and start treating it as a problem worth solving. The shift sounds small. It isn’t.
The Moment After
The lead judge cleared her throat. The room, already quiet, seemed to pull itself even tighter.
I won’t write what came next. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because by that point in the story, something in me had already stopped needing it the way I did at the beginning. The outcome matters. Of course it does. But the story of this competition does not live in that final
sentence. It lives in the 3:47 a.m. submission, in the misread rejection email, in the teacher who told us we weren’t ready, in the blank mind and the teammates who filled it. The outcome is a punctuation mark. Everything before it is the actual story.
What I know now that I didn’t know when we signed up on a whim: pressure is not something to manage. It’s something to use. The teams that crack under it aren’t weaker; they just haven’t learned yet that the feeling of being overwhelmed and the feeling of being alive can, in the right conditions, be the same thing.
We signed up on a whim. We stopped being strangers. We made the top five in India. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I think I actually learned what it means to work toward something.
That might be the most useful thing a competition can ever give you.