This is a message from one of teachers of Indian students, who won gold at Physics Olympiad. I taught JEE physics for years. That paper breaks strong kids in three hours. This exam (International Physics Olympiad) is five hours of theory and five hours of lab work,* and these five did close to perfect scores on it. The "International Physics Olympiad" is the world championship of school physics. It was the 56th edition, held in Bucaramanga, Colombia,from July 5 to 12. 381 students from more than 85 countries.* Every one of them the best physics student,btheir country could find.bIndia sent five kids. All five came back with gold. Their names are Kanishk Jain from Pune, Riddhesh Anant Bendale from Indore, Rishit Garg from Dwarka (in Delhi), Shresth Suraiya from Mumbai and Svarit Joshi from Ahmedabad. That clean sweep put India at "Joint World Number One", tied with China, Russia, Kazakhstan, South Korea and Taiwan. Those are countries that pour serious money and national pride into science education. We are standing level with them. Now here is what the exam actually was - two papers each, five hours long. The theory paper had three problems. (i) One on the thermodynamics of para-magnetic cooling. (ii) One on the photoionisation of ozone. (iii) One on the dynamics of electron positron pairs. The experimental paper was another five hours in a lab, working through heat transfer and thermodynamic processes in fluids. That means you get given equipment you have never seen and you have to design your own experiment, take your own readings, handle the errors and reach a real answer - nomultiple choice, no shortcuts, no pattern recognition. You either understand physics or you sit there for five hours. HBCSE says the Indian students were near perfect on theory and excellent on the practical too. Now, this was India's 27th appearance at the IPhO. Across all those years, about 44 percent of Indian students have won gold, 41 percent silver, 10 percent bronze. In the last ten years, every single Indian student has come home with a medal - 62 percent gold, 38 percent silver. Not one kid has gone and come back empty handed in a decade.* Five golds in one year has happened only twice. This year and in 2018. So who built this? The programme is run by (HBCSE), the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education under (TIFR) Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, which sits under the Department of Atomic Energy. They run the whole funnel - a national exam, then a national Olympiad, then a brutal selection and training camp and out of everyone in the country, five kids get on a plane. The team was *led by Professor Anwesh Mazumdar of HBCSE-TIFR and Dr Leena Joshi from St Xavier's College, Mumbai. The scientific observers were Professor Ananda Dasgupta from IISER Kolkata and Nisha Kelkar from Gogate-Joglekar College in Ratnagiri. Yes, Ratnagiri, a college in a coastal town in Maharashtra. This is public education doing something the private coaching industry could never do on its own. An olympiad paper does not have a known type. There is *no shortcut chapter. There is no formula sheet that saves you. You have to sit with a problem you have never seen and think. That is a completely different muscle. And a government funded centre has been quietly building it in Indian teenagers for 27 years. So yes, be proud. Loudly, HBCSE also shared that around 64 percent of India's olympiad medallists go on to do a Ph.D. But only about 32 percent of medallists end up settling in India. I do not say that to spoil the moment. These kids owe the country nothing. They earned every option they have. But it should tell us something. - We are excellent at finding this talent. - We are excellent at training it. - We are still not great at giving it somewhere worth staying. Congratulations, Kanishk, Riddhesh, Rishit, Shresth and Svarit. This is one of the best things an Indian did this year and most of the country will never hear about it.