Malvika Raj Joshi doesn't have a 12 certificate but has made it to the prestigious MIT.
17-year-old Malvika Joshi's journey from Mumbai to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology or MIT is nothing short of remarkable.
Focused on her interest in coding, she opted out of school four years ago and was home-schooled by her mother.
MIT took her in on the basis of her performance at the International Olympiad in Informatics, an annual competitive programming competition for secondary school students, even though she had not formally completed class 12.
Her achievement has brought into focus the lives of home-schooled children and their parents who made these unconventional choices.
Shahaan and Shahen Pardiwala (right) are home-schooled but do not have time to waste.
"From an outsider's perspective, home schooling is like a really long vacation because you don't have to go to school but it depends on what your perspective is," said Shahen Pardiwala, who has been home-schooled for the last three years.
Home schooling for him and his 10-year-old sibling Shahaan has been anything but sitting idle at home. They have their own YouTube channel, they blog, script, act and even shoot their own short films all without the long hours of school planning their own projects and fixing their own deadlines.
There is no fixed format of how their day looks. It's a mix of self-appointed tasks and assignments that they tackle at their own pace combined with play and leisure.
"The boys in my building say, you are so lucky you can grow your hair," says Shahaan, "you don't go to school, but I study. I finished the portion for children my age in just 9 months. They took much longer."
Shhivpriya Harlalka says she wanted education to be stress-free for her children.
In spite of being out of a formal schooling system, when Shahen took his class 10 exams, he topped the Mumbai division as an external candidate with 93 per cent. His mother Sonnal Pardiwala explains why they chose to home-school the boys.
"We are not rebels, we are not anti-school. We are not even against academics. Only the way that we would like academics to be pursued is different. School was really not serving the needs of our children and we wanted them to be stress-free," she said.
That's also what motivated Tusshar Harlalka to opt out of school two years ago. He's used this time to focus on his passion: martial arts, dance and acting. There were initial hesitations for the family, but the changes they saw, convinced them that they should continue with home-schooling.
Tusshar's mother Shhivpriya Harlalka said, "People would say I am mad. I'm spoiling my child's future by making him sit at home. But I've seen him become more responsible. We have also come closer as parent and child. I'm so happy that he's doing what he loves to do."