'Never Met Atheist Topper': I am a Topper and Here's Why Kangana Ranaut's Comment Belies My Reality

The first box of sweets had barely been opened when another appeared at the door, and then another, until the centre table disappeared beneath colourful cardboard boxes and bright ribbons. Every few minutes the doorbell rang again. Relatives streamed in carrying bouquets wrapped in crackling cellophane. Neighbours who had watched me grow up hugged my parents with tears in their eyes. Trays of tea travelled endlessly between the kitchen and the drawing room, emptying almost as soon as they were filled. Journalists squeezed into every available corner with cameras, microphones, and notebooks. Television vans lined the street outside, their satellite dishes pointed at the sky while reporters rehearsed their introductions before going live. Local politicians arrived with photographers in tow.People I had never met folded their hands, wished me well, and spoke as though my success somehow belonged to them too. My parents smiled through the whirlwind, trying to remember names and accept congratulations from strangers who suddenly knew everything about us.That evening, I had been declared the state topper in the Science stream in Class 12.A few months later, the Chief Minister presented me with a cheque for Rs 3 lakh, while the state's Education Minister handed me the keys to a brand-new car. Two years earlier, I had stood second in the state in my Class 10 board examinations. Those weeks remain among the happiest memories of my life; noisy, overwhelming, joyful, and just a little awkward in the way only public celebration can be. That memory came back to me recently when actor and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) MP Kangana Ranaut remarked that she had never come across an atheist topper or an atheist winner.'We Were NEET Students Once': Volunteer Doctors on Front Lines at Jantar MantarHer argument, roughly, was that toppers instinctively know their hard work is their own but that their success is not entirely theirs, that some unseen grace finishes what effort begins. It is a comforting idea. It flatters the achiever and the believer at the same time, suggesting that discipline alone is never quite enough, that every rank card carries an invisible co-author.I want to place that claim next to my own life, not as a footnote but as a direct answer to it, because I happen to be exactly the person Ranaut says she has never met. I was second in the state at 15 years of age and first in the state at 17, and through both those years, both those results, and everything that led up to them, I did not believe in god. Not quietly, not occasionally, not as a phase I was passing through. I was, and remain, an atheist. If grace really decided rank cards, mine should never have arrived.It helps to be precise about what that word actually means, because it gets stretched and misused so often that people load it with meanings it was never built to carry. Atheism is simply the absence of belief in a god or gods. That is the whole definition. It is not a belief system, not a moral code, not a claim to have solved the mysteries of the universe, and not a personality type. An atheist is not automatically arrogant, rebellious, joyless, or nihilistic, any more than a believer is automatically kind, humble, or wise. Atheism answers exactly one question: whether a person thinks a deity exists or not. It says nothing about how hard they work, how they treat people, how disciplined their mtornings are, or how they handle failure.Bolting a whole personality onto that one-word answer is where claims like Ranaut's go wrong. She is not really talking about belief. She is talking about virtue, and quietly assuming that virtue needs god as its return address.Consider what an examination hall actually measures. Nobody checks anyone's religion at the door. The invigilator glances at your admit card and your photograph, not your prayer record. The evaluator who marks your chemistry paper months later, sitting in some staff room with a stack of scripts and a red pen, has no idea whether you fasted before the exam or skipped every ritual in the book. The answer sheet is a strangely honest document. It rewards a correctly balanced equation and penalises a wrong one, regardless of who wrote it or what they believe. It has no mechanism for detecting devotion, because devotion was never part of the syllabus.'NEET Destroyed My Family': Brother of S Anitha, Tamil Nadu's First NEET VictimThere is also a simple statistical trick hiding inside a claim like Ranaut's, the kind that sounds convincing until you look at it closely. In a country where the overwhelming majority of students grow up in religious households, of course most toppers will describe themselves as believers. That is not evidence of grace at work here, it is simple arithmetic. If 90 percent of any large group is religious, 90 percent of the achievers pulled from that group will be religious too, whether or not belief had anything to do with their marks. Nobody runs the same logic in reverse. When a devout, prayerful student fails to make the cut, and thousands do every single year, nobody stands up and says their faith let them down. The explanation only ever shows up after success, never after failure, which is usually a sign that the explanation was not doing any real work to begin with.What actually decided those rank cards had nothing mysterious about it. It was the fourth revision of the same organic chemistry chapter at eleven at night, when the words had long stopped making sense and I forced myself through them anyway. It was solving the same numerical problem five different ways until the method finally clicked into place. It was waking before sunrise most mornings, not because it felt inspiring but because the syllabus did not shrink on its own. There was no miracle waiting in that room to finish a half-solved integral for me. There was only the slow, unglamorous business of getting something wrong, working out why, and trying again until it stopped going wrong. Nobody photographs that part. Nobody garlands you for the eleventh attempt at a problem you had already failed ten times. But that is the part that actually gets the marks, not anything sitting outside the syllabus.Not believing in an unseen helper did not make any of this easier. If anything it removed a cushion that other people could lean on. Every mark I scored belonged entirely to the hours I had put in, and every mistake belonged there too, with nowhere else to send the blame and nothing else to credit for the wins. Topper Muslim Student Denied Award at Gujarat School, Kin Alleges DiscriminationThat kind of accountability is uncomfortable, but it is also clarifying. It means you stop waiting for anything to arrive from outside and start paying much closer attention to what you are actually getting wrong.Claims like this also do something quietly unfair to believers themselves, not only to atheists. If success gets explained by grace, then the years of grinding preparation a devout student put in get partly reassigned to something they did not do. Their late nights, their mistakes corrected one by one, their discipline, all of it gets diluted by an invisible co-signer nobody can verify. Crediting god for a topper's rank card is not really a compliment to the believer. It quietly takes something away from them too.Perhaps we tell ourselves that success must have an invisible author because the alternative is unsettling. If hard work can sometimes be enough, then excellence is neither inherited nor bestowed. It is built. That thought is less romantic than divine grace, but it is far more generous. It means the distance between an ordinary student and an extraordinary result is measured not in blessings received but in choices repeated. There is hope in that. More hope, I would argue, than in the belief that the universe keeps a private list of favourites.(Amit Kumar is a former B.Tech student from National Institute of Technology Karnataka and state topper in 10th and 12th standard in the state of Jharkhand in 2018 and 2020, respectively. He writes on contemporary issues spanning public policy, politics, education, technology and society. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint does not endorse or is responsible for them.)

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Dear Kangana, I'm an Atheist and a Topper. No God Wrote My Answer Sheet

The answer sheet is a strangely honest document, and it has no mechanism for detecting devotion, writes Amit Kumar.

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