‘Met friends, watched football’: JEE Advanced AIR 2 cracked exam with a cool head
From perfect 100 percentile in JEE Main to AIR 2 in Advanced, Kabeer Chhillar from Gurgaon shares his preparation strategy.
JEE Advanced All India Rank (AIR) 2 Kabir Chhillar. (Source: Express Photo) “I was relaxed before the paper. I was relaxed during the paper. I was relaxed after the paper” — that’s how JEE Advanced All India Rank (AIR) 2 Kabeer Chhillar described the mindset that defined his exam preparation.
After securing a perfect 100 percentile in JEE Main earlier this year, the 18-year-old from Gurgaon followed it up with a perfect finish in JEE Advanced. He belongs to the IIT Delhi zone.
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Months before the JEE Advanced examination, when The Indian Express spoke to him in April after his JEE Main result, Kabeer had already revealed a philosophy that stood apart from the myth surrounding India’s coaching culture. “I never studied for the number. I just focused on understanding things properly,” he had said.
He described his study process less as a race for marks and more as a continuous exercise in self-correction. “If there was a silly mistake, I would analyse why it happened. What was I thinking at that time? If I couldn’t solve a question, I would ask what was weak in that topic,” he said. “That feedback process was very important.”
His father, Mohit Chhillar, an IIT Kharagpur alumnus and software engineer, had earlier told The Indian Express that the family’s guiding principle was simple: “Do it and forget about it.”
Growing up, Kabeer’s curiosity often exceeded the boundaries of the classroom. His father recalls a moment from Class 2 when a teacher casually asked students to name the second-farthest star from Earth. Instead of offering a single answer, Kabeer reportedly rattled off the 10 farthest stars he knew.
“He’s always been like that, once he gets curious, he goes all in,” his father had said.
That curiosity eventually led him toward astronomy, Olympiads, and finally engineering.
Though he was performing well in school, the family decided to send him to Kota, the coaching capital of India. The decision was not easy. His parents were initially reluctant. “When I came to Kota, my parents didn’t like it,” Kabeer recalled. “But I pushed them a lot. I felt the environment was very good. Delhi was not even close.”
In Olympiad camps, he met students from across the country and discovered that the gap between him and the country’s best minds was smaller than he had imagined.“I saw people from outside and realised that I can actually compete with them,” he said. “This exposure is very important.”
Ironically, one of the most important lessons he learned from Olympiads came from failure. In Class 11, he narrowly missed qualifying for the next stage of a science Olympiad.
“The main reason I couldn’t clear it was that I wasn’t confident enough in myself,” he said. “After that, I always ensured that I would go with full confidence in every test.”
Kabeer maintained a routine of roughly 8-10 hours of focused study and fiercely protected his interests outside academics.
Earlier, he told The Indian Express that football remained his favourite escape. He is a passionate follower of the English Premier League. He had also represented Haryana in football competitions and hoped college would allow him to reconnect with the sport.
“Football helps me reset,” he had said.
Even during his most intense preparation phase, he continued to meet friends when possible, listen to music, and follow football.
Now, he prepares for the International Chemistry Olympiad and looks ahead to IIT Bombay’s Computer Science programme, with dreams of eventually studying at MIT.
This interview was given to ALLEN Career Institute
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