For two months leading up to NEET-UG, 24-year-old Arthik Gangwar had lived almost constantly inside his paying guest room in Kota, Rajasthan – grappling with test series, rank predictions, sleepless revisions, discussions over cut-offs, and constant calculations of whether one more chapter could mean one more mark. By the time he returned home to his village in Rudrapur, Uttarakhand after the May 3 examination, his body had begun giving way. All that he wanted to do was sleep, something he hadn’t done well in weeks – to recuperate, relax, and to get back to a more normal life. So when his phone started buzzing beside him on Tuesday (May 12) morning, Arthik ignored it. But the callers were persistent – one call was followed by another. And one notification ping by another. There was the batch manager from his coaching institute in Kota. Friends that he had made while studying there. Messages were flooding the student WhatsApp groups he was on. The May 3 paper had been cancelled .…