Around him, aspirants were scribbling nervous, circular answers. Arjun paused. He didn’t panic. Instead, his mind mapped a flowchart—exactly the kind Nitin Singhania would use. He saw the chain: RBI raises repo rate → commercial banks hike lending rates → small borrowers in the informal sector, already squeezed, flee to moneylenders at exorbitant rates → investment stalls. The answer wrote itself, clean and logical.

“Stop suffering,” she said, without looking up from her notes.

That night, Arjun opened the book with skepticism. He expected the usual: dry definitions of fiscal deficit, complex tables of index of industrial production, and paragraphs that seemed designed to induce sleep. But as he read the first chapter, something strange happened. He didn’t just read about inflation—he felt it.