Kota Factory

📖 Mental Health in the Wild 📖

In Season 3 of Kota Factory, Jeetu Bhaiya goes to therapy.

Let that sink in.

For those who haven't seen it: Kota Factory is a TVF series set in Kota, Rajasthan, India's coaching capital, where thousands of teenagers move every year to prepare for the IIT entrance exam. The show follows a group of students navigating that world. And at the center of it all is Jeetu Bhaiya, the mentor who always has the right words, the person every student looks up to when things get hard.

Season 1 captures the grind with uncomfortable honesty. The black-and-white cinematography isn't just an aesthetic choice. It's what that world actually feels like. No color, no texture. Just the next exam. Your identity compressed into a rank. Your worth measured by a mock test score. Every conversation at home, with relatives, with friends, circling back to the same question: "How's preparation going?"

Season 2 goes deeper. Friendships strain under competition. Students start realizing that getting into IIT won't fix everything they thought it would. The cracks in the system become harder to ignore.

And then Season 3 flips the lens entirely.

Jeetu Bhaiya, the rock, the guy who held everyone together, is sitting in a therapist's chair. Haunted by a student's suicide he couldn't prevent. The person everyone leaned on is the one falling apart.

This is the part that stayed with me.

We always talk about students cracking under pressure. We rarely ask: what about the people holding them up? The teachers, the mentors, the counselors who absorb everyone else's anxiety, fear, and breakdowns, and then go home and sit with all of it alone.

Jeetu Bhaiya knowing everything about how the mind works and still not being able to process his own guilt.

I went through coaching myself. Not in Kota, but in Delhi. The same grind though. School during the day, coaching in the evening, self-study at night. I remember what that pressure felt like. And watching Kota Factory put it on screen, in a way that doesn't dramatize it or turn it into a PSA, felt like someone finally got it right.

At Emoneeds, one of the things we're learning is that as we support the students we also have to support the people supporting the students. Teachers, parents, counselors. They carry weight that nobody asks about.

Kota Factory started as a show about cracking IIT. By Season 3, it became a show about what the pressure of "cracking IIT" does to everyone in the room. Not just the ones writing the exam.

If you've been through the coaching system in India, you know exactly what I'm talking about.