I was cleaning my shelf today, to clear all the accumulated junk , when I realized it takes little time to shelve old text books ( with each one evoking few seconds of some kind of reminiscence ), next comes the school stuff, which I cant get myself to throw away etc etc.. finally I’m left with a pile of unclassified stuff, old computer sheets-new computer sheets, calculator user manual, data sheets and graph sheets -which appear miraculously now that I don’t need them, all in a steep mound in the center, staring at me and I usually stare back completely at loss. It’s the same with emotion , you can always put away well defined ones, others keep flying around.

I’m done with exams, fifth set of semester exams to be precise. It’s not some great thing to be blogging about on new year’s eve, but well that’s what just happened to happen, thanks to my flawed choices, many many years ago (yea, feels like a long time). These exams taught me a lot in the worldly sense. Idealism which amma routinely drilled into me, absolutely forbidding me to learn only the ‘revision question’s which some of the teacher’s generously gave for the final exams, instead making me learn the entire syllabus (including all the hindi poems) ,guess this bout of idealism lasted out its course till today or sorta till yesterday, when I made this elaborate plan on ‘smart studying’. It is an open secret, the mantra of sticking to the syllabus book and living by it, atleast on the night of exam. This brahma sutra like mantra, is not taught in classrooms, it is realized by dunderheads like me after two years of plain stupid -ness and blaming oneself for not working hard enough. There is an other vital secret to this whole process of swaggering out of the exam hall and lamenting about the two marks you might lose cause you messed up the labeling in a diagram, it is then that people like me would shiftily walk out of the building thinking about exponentially decreasing graph of marks, self esteem and self worth- that is pschyoanalyse the paper, always, not yourself during those precious three hours. it always pays off.
Digressing from the hot topic of my mark sheets, exams have a nice routine to them. I could sleep blissfully till eight in the morning, amma would double check my blanket cover thinking I had been mugging all night and thinking this early morning sleep is very important, she would shoo everyone away. Then of course I would spend the rest of the morning planning elaborate schedules for the day, messaging friends to check ‘how- much -they -have- finished-and –what –units-they –doing’, slightly panicking when they have seemed to be making rapid progress , this increasing my normal attention span of one hour . Alarm clocks would of course play truant on the morning of the exam. Cursing myself, I would wake up to see it was already seven and a half- hour left to catch my bus. Maximum mugging capacity would of course reach its peak in the bus, since it’s a routine favorite of mine to procrastinate everything to the bus-time.
Also ,S and I almost helped airtel and bsnl post respectable financial results by dissecting authors (text book one’s) and making elaborate plans to file RTI’s , day dreaming about our vacations, sometimes even talking about how certain author’s have the audacity to dye their beards. This helped me build my resilience to the world in general.
I should make a mention of ernest o doeblin in this regard, it was he who inspired this post. If you think this post is a marked piece of creativity, you can always borrow my copy.