Testing times..

The mise en scene- 26 and a half hours of cramming, 9 hours 28 minutes of telexing, 200 odd pages Photostat‘ing’, 0.0394 inches nails (or less)…the macabre phantom of exams, the only time of the semester I feel, even remotely, “academic”.

I hardly attend classes. Half of my notes is crammed with facts and figures from The Economic times and The Hindu. The other half, a la chat-room archive. Doing experiments in the lab, I consider an insult to my creativity. The maximum I’d do in a lab is tailor [as in verb] the observations. I’m the topper only by serendipity. By accident!

At 2:30 am this Monday, I was poring over G.J Tortora’s Anatomy and at 3:45 am, I was learning the different steps to plot a root locus. On any other day, at ‘this’ time, I’d be reading or re-reading Forsyth or Robert Ludlum or P.G.Wodehouse.

From Angina pectoris and Myocardial Ischemia conditions, Cardiovascular Mechanics and Prosthetic heart to Master Slave JK flip flop, Asynchronous and truncated Counters to Probability, Cauchy’s integration to Virtual reality and Haptics to Computer Organisation, DBMS to Bode- magnitude and phase plots.. It is all, now, in the noggin, sectorwise, well taken, clearly sorted out. Boy, I feel SHARP!

The competition, the marks, the drive, the one night stand, the groggy head [borrowed word], the tumid eyes, amma's eternal nagging,the outlandish question papers, the mystic expertise in writing epic size answers, assuaging the invigilator for that extra 1 minute; it is all so BEAUTIFUL, still and all. I have excluded ‘knowledge accrual’ on purpose. Competition…4 semesters down, 4 more to go…the contest for survival is “still” extremely severe and mutually confrontational..Come November 21^st..Its Armageddon time!!

P.S: Insomnia is a virtue.