You've been reading The Hindu every single morning for six months. You've made notes on every major policy change, every international crisis, every budget allocation. You can recite GDP growth figures and list the outcomes of the latest G20 summit. Then you sit in the IIM interview and the panel asks you about the recent farm law protests.
You freeze. Not because you don't know about it. You read three articles on it just last week. But when the panel member leans forward and asks "So what do you think was the actual economic impact on small farmers in Punjab specifically?" your mind goes completely blank. You mumble something about MSP and minimum support prices and you can see their faces change. They've heard this exact answer seventeen times today.
Why This Happens to Everyone
This happens to almost everyone. A candidate on Reddit described it perfectly. They said current affairs was their Achilles heel. They prepared for an entire year, read newspapers religiously, joined Telegram groups for daily updates, but in the actual interview they couldn't explain anything beyond surface-level facts. They didn't convert a single decent college.
The Real Problem: Recognition vs Retrieval
The problem isn't that you don't know current affairs. The problem is how you're preparing for them. You're optimizing for recognition when interviews test for retrieval under pressure. Those are completely different cognitive processes.
Recognition is what happens when you read a headline about farm laws and think "Oh yes, I know this." Your brain recognizes the topic. It feels familiar. You assume you know it. Retrieval is what happens when someone asks you to explain it from scratch with no prompting. Your brain has to reconstruct the information from memory with no cues. That's infinitely harder.
Reading newspapers trains recognition. Interviews test retrieval. That's the gap that destroys candidates.
The RAM vs Hard Drive Problem
Think of it like your phone's RAM versus its hard drive storage. Reading articles loads information into short-term recognition memory. You can access it right now while it's fresh. But it doesn't get saved to long-term retrieval memory unless you actively practice pulling it back out. Two weeks later, when the interview happens, that information isn't accessible anymore because you never practiced retrieving it.
Here's what makes it worse. IIM panels don't ask you to recite facts. They ask you to have opinions, make connections, defend positions. They might ask "The government claims the farm laws would have increased farmer income. Opposition says it would have destroyed them. What's your take and why?" Now you're not just retrieving information. You're analyzing it in real time under pressure while three professors stare at you waiting for you to say something intelligent.
What Actually Works: Active Retrieval Practice
Most candidates prepare by reading and highlighting and taking notes. That's passive consumption. What actually works is active retrieval practice. Close the article. Don't look at your notes. Now explain the farm law controversy out loud to an empty room as if you're in the interview. Can you do it? Most people can't. They realize immediately they don't actually know it as well as they thought they did.
The Illusion of Knowledge
This is called the illusion of knowledge. Reading something makes you feel like you know it. Testing yourself reveals you don't. The gap between those two states is massive and most candidates never discover it until they're sitting in the actual interview watching their dream college slip away.
The Fix: Spaced Retrieval Practice
The fix isn't reading more newspapers. The fix is practicing retrieval. Every time you read about a major event, close the article and try to explain it out loud. What happened? Why does it matter? What are the different perspectives? What's your take? Record yourself if you have to. You'll immediately notice where your explanation falls apart, where you're just repeating buzzwords without understanding them, where you actually have no opinion of your own.
Then do it again in two days without looking at your notes. Then again a week later. This is called spaced retrieval practice and it's the only method proven to move information from short-term recognition into long-term retrieval memory. It's uncomfortable because you'll fail repeatedly before you succeed. But that failure is the actual learning mechanism.
The Candidates Who Actually Convert
The candidates who succeed in IIM interviews aren't the ones who read the most. They're the ones who practice retrieval the most. They've already stumbled through explaining complex topics ten times in practice. By the time the panel asks them about inflation or foreign policy or startup regulations, they've already had that conversation with themselves multiple times. The interview is just performance at that point.
Why AI Mock Interviews Work for Current Affairs
This is exactly where mock interviews with an AI become valuable. You can practice retrieval on any current affairs topic daily. The AI asks you unpredictable questions. You have to retrieve and explain and defend your position in real time. It's retrieval practice at scale. Some candidates do this fifteen or twenty times before their interview. Others skip it entirely and hope reading newspapers will be enough. The conversion rates tell you which approach works.