Exam Time !

Believe it or not, my favourite time of the college year is the exam time!

Yes. Call me a nerd, call me a geek, but I love the exam time.

There is so much more to it than just trying to cover the humungous syllabus, and scoring some decent marks. It’s almost like a festival of its own kind. And whether you like it or not, you HAVE to be a part of the celebrations!

Apart from the usual ritual of last minute note-taking, there would be the calling up of all reliable “sources” to get enough study material, discovering new syllabus almost every hour, and the settling in of the kind of nervous excitement, that makes even the biggest couch potatoes (not me of course) rush to various study groups with big stacks of paper, carefully lodged in their hands. The usually empty canteen tables, would now be buzzing with students of all different shapes, sizes and hairstyles - thin, fat, round, square, hexagonal and even a few with wigs! The steel table that once lay naked, would now be covered with cups of hot chocolate and coffee, amidst countless sheets of paper, lying confused everywhere! It’s like a scene right out of an 80’s spy thriller where, a team of intelligence agents would be gathered around a table, racking their brains trying to break the code and eventually, solve the mystery. Well, in a way, studies are sort of a mystery. To me anyway.

The mighty stairs, that once used to bear the burden of a thousand feet, climbing up and down every day, now humbly serves as a seating arrangement for girls and boys, who could be found talking to each other with the sort of excited look on their faces, that you would usually expect to see when a wife tells her husband that he is going to become a father! There would be emotions ranging from being surprised to being anxious. Sometimes a sweet and wonderful discovery. And sometimes not such a pleasant one. And of course, nervousness. Oh you know the feeling...right? The one where the only string of expression running through your mind is like – “Holy shit! This much is left??” or “What do I do?? What do I do??” or something like - “WOW! I have no idea what I just read!!” This is usually accompanied by trembling legs, shaky hands, increased heart beats, sweaty foreheads and in some rare cases, uncontrollable release of gases due to nervous tension building inside. All this is a part of the celebrations you see.

The night before the exam is the most fun though. For once, you are allowed to lock yourself up in your room and not get disturbed at all! You can do anything inside!!! But, of course, its your exam the next day. So all you can really do, is study and revise, rather than do “other” stuff. But if you are like me, you would anyway continue to do all that “other” stuff. Calls to friends, just to check on how they are doing, are again a common practice. Its funny how these supposed to be short calls, sometimes, unexpectedly turn into surprisingly long conversations that have nothing to do with the following day’s exam! Which, in a way, I think, is wonderful! I mean, the peace and quiet of the night time, the topic of conversation, which is mostly irrelevant, but still interesting and the whole point of having it right before the exam sort of creates a fond memory, which when you recall later, definitely puts a smile on your face! :-)

And of course! The best part!! Writing the exam itself! It’s really quite amazing how a simple piece of paper can bring about so many different expressions on so many different people. Some of us are excited. Some of us are nervous. But most of us are just plain confused and bewildered and really have no idea about absolutely anything! If you ask, this is what goes on in most of our minds when we go through the question paper –

Q.1 Oh fork! I am screwed!
Q.2 Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!
Q.3 Damn it! I know this!!
Q.4 What the fork is this???
Q.5 This doesn’t make any sense! Why am I even trying to answer this???
Q.6 Hmmm...
Q.7 Zzzzz....zzzzzzz...zzzzzz.....zzzzzz.....
Q. 8 Zzzzzz....snorrr......zzzzz.....snorr......
Q.9 Huh!? What?! Oh yeah...where was I??
Q.10 La Di Dum Dum...Fala Di Doo Doo....Rum Pum Pum...(all this, while drawing cartoon figures on the question paper)

After handing over the answer sheet to the invigilator, its a common practice for us to discuss each and every question with friends and unsurprisingly enough, we realize that each one of us have written answers that aren’t even remotely close to the actual correct answer. Sometimes they don’t even belong to the same subject!
After a quick analysis of the paper, what usually follows is the practice of most of us just lingering around talking about unimportant things, yet again, until later, when it would hit us that we had another paper to give next day. Yet another night of stupid talk on the phone follows. And the same routine would continue.

You see, this is why I absolutely love the exam time. There is so much that keeps on happening everywhere around us. We see so many new things. We do so many new things. So much life in every character. There are moments, of course, when people would get fed of their studies and totally give up. And that is when the most mundane topics of discussion come up, which seem to make more sense than book studies. And that’s when we discover something absolutely ordinarily new about life. Sometimes it’s big. Sometimes it’s small. But as long as its you who discovered it, it makes you happy. And happy is all you can ever want to be, isn’t it?

I’d like to make two very important points now.

1. I like orange juice in the morning, and
2. I really don’t know how to end this topic.