A reflection on securing 2nd rank in North Delhi in 2023, and how real-world competition standards help elevate the art teaching and mentoring process.

In 2023, I secured 2nd rank in North Delhi at MCL MAAC, a moment I still think about often, not because of the placement itself, but because of what preparing for it changed in how I think about teaching. Competition has a way of stripping away everything comfortable about your own process. It forces you to ask, honestly, whether your work holds up against a standard you didn’t set yourself.

When you work alone in a studio, it’s easy to become the only judge of your own progress. You decide what counts as good enough, and over time, that bar can quietly shift to match your comfort rather than your capability. Preparing for MCL MAAC meant submitting work to a standard entirely outside my control, one that didn’t care about my usual process, my usual pace, or my usual excuses.

That’s an uncomfortable but necessary correction. I had to look at my own work the way an unfamiliar judge would: without context, without knowing the effort behind it, without the benefit of the doubt I naturally give myself.

There’s a particular kind of clarity that comes from placing second rather than first. It confirms the work was strong, genuinely competitive against a wide field in North Delhi, while also making it impossible to ignore that something, however small, separated it from the top result. I’ve come back to that gap more than once since, not with frustration, but with real curiosity: what exactly was in that difference, and what would it take to close it next time?

That question turned out to be more useful to my growth than an outright win might have been. A clean victory can end the inquiry. A close second keeps it open.

I now bring that same external standard into how I teach, deliberately. It shows up in a few concrete ways:

I ask students to evaluate their own work the way an outside judge would without explaining their intentions first, since a viewer never gets that explanation either

I introduce real competition-level benchmarks into critique, so students calibrate against the field, not just against their last piece

I treat a strong-but-not-perfect result as more instructive than a comfortable success the gap is where the next lesson usually lives

I push students to submit work to real audiences and real evaluations, not just studio feedback, as early as it’s productive to do so

A classroom can become its own comfortable bubble, just as a solo studio practice can. Standards that come only from an instructor, however experienced, still exist inside a relationship the student can eventually predict and, without meaning to, start playing to. Real external benchmarks, a competition, a jury, an exhibition, don’t know the student and don’t grade on effort or improvement. That’s exactly what makes them valuable.

It’s also, I think, one of the most honest forms of encouragement I can offer: not telling a student their work is good, but helping them build work that holds up when I’m not the one judging it.

MCL MAAC 2023 wasn’t the beginning of my teaching practice, but it sharpened something in it, a preference for real standards over comfortable ones, in my own work and in how I guide students through theirs. It’s a lesson I keep returning to, and one I try to pass on early: the goal was never to be the only judge of your own progress. It’s to build work that can stand up to judges who owe you nothing.