So it was a monumental decision of my life......whenever I wonder what has robbed me of my mental peace and stability......the answer is simply one!!! Two years of my tryst with PCMB (Physics, Chemistry, Maths, Biology)...Mission IIT...that’s where I longed to belong or to put it more straight, was lulled into believing that this was the place where I longed to belong !!!
Dec'99
Monu , that me , enters Pariwar Apartment in Flat 1-C and meets the likes of Sanjay Bidasaria , Neelkamal Jaiswal and Alok Chandra Maurya...they convince him that its damn easy or lets see realistic to think of cracking the IIT JEE ........this coupled with the newspaper reports (Careergraph..The Telegraph) of IIT+IIM being an awesome combination...did fetch some annual salary of Rs 1 crore ......... and the usual skepticism of a practicing CA (my mamaji) who encourages you to go for anything but a CA course...... (P.S. So disgruntled are we with our professional lives that today even I would discourage the typical advice seeker from joining the CA course...... "CA mein scope nahi hai!!!" the old adage that the grass on the other side is greener hits the nail on the head
And this strange thought of "Commerce mein scope nahi hai " ...landed me up in Class
11A.....and seriously in deep trouble...for I spent the next two years battling hopelessness and disappointment ...to an extent that it left a scar on the mind for life....and this was while I knew all the way that I was made for Commerce...had taken up Accountancy in Class 9 and scored fantabuluous results...a score of 99 in the first term when everyone else scored les than 80...so much and so was my command over Commerce that I had once told Anshul that tum 2 years Commerce padhke mere paas aana...I would still be knowing more than you .....And this was actually proved in the first month at St Xavier's College Calcutta in Aug-Sep'03....
April'01
When I entered Science , I donno what mania struck me in terms of collecting books from people ...to the extent that I went to places like Rishra to buy books and be handed free books..that really completed April and May .....Met a host of people for this exercise ...Garg, Kharkia, Bansal, Mishra etc....... Can’t forget the pain with which I used to take Rs 1000 from Mummy and go to College Street and have the hard earned money go down the drain ...........For two years I just kept experimenting with books..Anyways!!! (P.S. This false illusion that there would be mysterious book which would finally be a kind of panacea is grossly incorrect and when I studied my CA courses, I made sure I was never studying more than one book)
Simultaneously, I was waiting for the bumper ICSE results. which would catapult me , like the Mirajur Rehmans and Sunil/Prakash Muthuswamis of the world, to an era of glory and fame.......IIT preparation would start just after that ......momentum apne aap aa jayega...when I had visited NICS Laketown and the person asked me what I was expecting ..I uttered “at least 95%"...my exams had gone really well ....when the results came at May end, I was shattered ...shattered not because the results were bad...92% aggregate wasn’t bad at all...but just because I came 2nd in School by a margin of only 2 marks and let my cynics say "Tum top nahi kiya "..This was one of the worst realisations of my life...that the Sumits and Rahul Singhs had, in their hearts of hearts, never wanted me to top...the happiness in their eyes spoke for itself.......
The ICSE results just spearheaded the downward spiral!!
June mein Sumit finally left Science even after much of my convincing! He infact went on to say that I was, in my selfish interests, wanting to have him stuck there amidst failure and disappointments ....and I was left alone
Sanju Bhaiya...the sole person on whom I had pivoted all my hopes..... Gave a lot of gyaan.........apne basics thik karo...IIT kuch nahi hai ....apne aap ko kabhi underestimate nahi karna chahiye.....self esteem thik karo.....IIT apne aap ho jayega ........nothing is impossible in this world..etc etc
June mein I joined R.N.Singh .....another tryst with the fake world......he gave false assurances that IIT is nothing and by simply joining his Rs 400 per month tuitions (Dutta Pal Choudhary Physics and some Calculus book) and probably also taking the Rs 1000 Special Classes (where he would solve S K Goyal for IIT Screening and H C Verma), I could crack the great exam ...it was such a shock..I met the Parag Guptas, Ashwinis and Anants of the world ...and who can forget R N Singh's son ...the illustrious Vivek Singh!! R N Singh simply cheated me ...he did sums which simply weren’t to be done in the initial phase and I used to just copy them and come home with a rotating head!!! Kya karta?? school and R N Singh immediately thereafter for 5-6 hours ......mera toh dimaag kharab ho gaya ...what the hell was I doing there ...R N Singh simultaneously gave a lot of misguidance about school...that either prepare for school or for IIT ...both couldn’t happen and I started ignoring school exams ..He even convinced me of absenting for a few days ......school jake kya hoga??
In the midst of all this, school @ Don Bosco really started becoming a pain!!! The philosophy of the school administration was really clear and misplaced " We do not coach people for the IITs" ...They continued their adamant ignorance of the compelling need to make life easy for people aspiring for the IIT and instead screwed them all the more......every subject went into a mess !! Maths : George Joseph , a psycho ...a Poornima Sanyal for Physics ,a Sarkar for Chemistry, a Polachan for English, and my fault was that I depended on these scoundrels to give me guidance.......only in hindsight I realize that if these people had that mettle in them , would they have settled for a static school teacher's job ?
I flunked School exams badly........Physics especially "17/80 in theory and 16/20 in Practical"...............and this was after spending nights studying till 12 pm , the toughest sums in Bhatnagar ......in the false hope that I was also simultaneously preparing for IIT ....same hopeless was the situation in each situation :).......I ignored each of the subjects.......... Biology, Chemistry, English, Hindi, Maths......."IIT ke liye padhein yaa ISC ke liye?" The final verdict of the report card was " You have failed in 3 subjects ...You must work hard to get a pass certificate!" Besides Physics, I had failed in SUPW and Moral Science. It was heart shattering because for 8 years I had continuously stood first in class and here was I being mocked at by all and sundry.......people who reveled in my decline
R N Singh continued fooling me till September ...when I finally put my foot down that this man was cheating on me ...to showcase the strength of his skills..he used to say that "dekho Vivek toh kar leta hai?" and it really lowered the self-esteem..........Only later I was told that Vivek Singh was a dumb-ass as ratified by his performance in exams ...........he used to copy the solutions from the books which his father had bought for him
Back to the IIT fiasco..Post the disastrous school results
Ab kya karein ...came Kailash Kumar Jhas and Anuj Agarwals into my life ....they had performed quite well in the school exams and that gave them an aura of confidence....
At this particular juncture of my life, I experienced failure for the first time and that truly shattered me...From being a topper, I was reduced to being a non-entity in DBL.....and became a laughing stock......."kya hua....something is wrong?”...asked Ashish Mishra, with so much alacrity in his heart....and I said “No ...I was preparing for IIT , so didn’t study for the school exams !!! " ...while this would be spelt confidence if I would have been progressing well on the IIT front; it made me feel even worse because I knew how hopeless was my situation ..
I started to play by Kailash's and Anuj's dictum...joined "Joint Sir...who used to teach for West Bengal Joint Entrance"...and Shyamal Sir for Physics..He would at least clear the concepts!!! So i was reduced to copying derivations from the Board; how the formulas were originated!!! Would this be asked in the IIT-JEE??? I often asked...”Of course not "would be the instant reply...but at least basics toh clear karo.....what frustration I used to experience!!
This turn of events increased my hatred for Don Bosco Liluah...the school was instrumental in ruining the IIT aspirations of its students ...forcing them to attend school for 100% days and teach stupid Board Exam stuff ....English and Hindi poetry .....Stupid experiments in the laboratory etc......
I encountered frustrations of the highest Quantum.....and this got translated into my stand-offs with Father Siby Vadakel...The Vice Principal...the bastard who made life hell for me (and host of other students/parents till he was sent off from DBL)
I got a series of parent calls which made the situation all the more precarious...it was insulting for me to take my parents to school and face the bitter words from the maniac....and the pretexts were so frivolous
a) I had a fight with Ravi Sikaria ...the first in class boy ...who got jealous of me because i was preparing for IIT and he was stupidly focussing on school exams which even he knew were futile...So i called him “chutiya nandan" in one of the fights ...he said “nandan means son...matlab u have called my father chutiya "...what nonsense was that!!! When the Principal saw me, it was me whose hands were on his collar and so only my parents were called!!!
b) I didn’t sign the diary for absence from school immediately after morning assembly and waited for the lunch break......what nonsense Mr Siby ...i had done this on the instructions of Mr Richard Gomes ...but here was a situation where I was victimized at every plausible departure from rules
c) Got an excellent article published in The Telegraph on Children's Day...My Siby got infuriated because I had not reduced the article to an unofficial Vote of Thanks for the Salesian community... instead of the exciting events, I should have laid focus on this Father cutting the ribbon and that Father coordinating the prayer and so on!!
I really lost my nerves because the bastard dragged Papa Mummy into the mud and insulted them...now my staying at home became all the more torturing because everyone started feeling that I was really at fault...that I was not studying, had infuriated the school authorities and I made life hellish and insulting for family members
That was self-doubt at its nadir ........I wondered what was I doing and why??
I slipped into severe bouts of anxiety and for the first time in my life started talking to myself in public like a maniac...and addressing myself as a Mr Failure who was responsible for all this fiasco ...people who caught me doing so laughed at me ...I also started taking homoeopathic medicines for this from Dr Sanghamitra Hom ...who was more researching into me and Mummy instead of treating us!!
In Dec'09, I spoke at an Elocution Contest in school where again people mocked me because I hurt their ego, asserting that I had scored four 90s and two 95s in ICSE without paying for needless tuitions...Ansul Goel said that I had chased people for Sir Allapat's notebook (the legendary English Literature tuition teacher from whom practically everyone in the batch except me had studied)!! Had I been in the normal state of mind, I would have fought back saying that anyone but a fool would not ask for a notebook whose questions were , by a miracle/sheer corruption, exactly the same as in ICSE Board exams ...but in the state I was in, I accepted defeat instantly ...to become again a butt of jokes...
Siby Vadakel pulled me out of the Sports Drill practice and made me stand in the Sun alone for hours ......his man had made a firm resolution that he would ruin my academic career and humiliate me like anything!!
The same situation confronts me even today in 2009........dealing with people with authority ..Power Corrupts and Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely !!! Unless you oil their machinery and display fake outward marks of respect and awe for them. that they really are great ... they really are going to make your life hell
btw Siby Vadakel, an absolute tyrant, just hit the headlines in June 2010 for harassing students in DBPC...woh kabhi nahi sudhrega ...
Jan 2002 and I spent the New Year praying to The Almighty that maybe the calendar year ahead could have something positive in store for me.......but nothing really happened ...at the strict instructions of family , I stopped studying for IIT and started to study for School Terminal Exams....My promotion to Class 12 was at stake.....I met the likes of Prateek Gupta, Nitin Garg, Ashish Lohia....these people scored well in school exams and also got through IIT Screening in Dec'09 ......wow yaar .... but you know what ...they were pseudo IIT aspirants , for their first focus always was school exams ...and IIT always was a balancing figure for them...ho gaya toh thik hai..nahi toh koi nahi ...( I had grossly overestimated the IIT Screening thing....only to realize an year later that even Harish Agarwal could have cracked it )....
Nitin Garg ko khud toh kuch shayad nahi pata tha, these people knew how to fake those airs of self-confidence....as if they are really going to make it ...Go to them for guidance and they'll mock you ...Nitin was such a bastard that he exchanged his old Bhatnagar for my new one ..And I was stupid enough to relent in the hope that in return he'll guide me properly...sadly, this never happened
I cleared Class 11 school exams with average results...what an year it was ...my encounter with hopelessness, despair and the "What if I don’t get into IIT ?" mania ..."kya hoga mera?" ....this eventually snowballed into a depression of unparalled magnitude
But you know what , the worst thing was that even if there was no school, it would have been just the same !!!! In Calcutta, there was no proper institutional mechanism like the Bansal Classes or FIIT-JEE to coach you for the IITs and at that time there was such a wide disparity between IIT and ISC syllabus. IIT was nothing but an enigma...there was no defined syllabus ...and unless you had that inborn flair for the subjects, to crack it without systematic coaching was impossible...people in Kota were spoon-fed with IIT problem solving strategies and here were we who would just get overawed by the enormity of the task at hand and slip into a " humse yeh sums nahin hoga?"
When I met people who asked me whether I knew where I was headed, I had no definite answer but just a sorry face .......but of course , something better was surely in store for me......When I look back on such events today, I realize that out of sheer destiny or turn of circumstances or otherwise, i have been stuck up in stupid things Science, Articleship @ S.B. BIllimoria , Divya Ghuwalewala (my boss at ITC ),ITC Gurgaon and now Tata Steel....but there is always an exit option after some time and something better and rocking ...Commerce, Industrial Training @ITC, Kaustuv Goho, my freelancing activities in Calcutta and who knows what’s in store after Tata Steel !! So depression mein jaane ki jagah, just wait for your time to get better!! A new opportunity surely does arise yaar and we have to patiently wait for it instead of feeling stuck!!!
I was so aghast with the turn of events that I stopped studying for a few days in March...started going to Mamaji's office...which intensified the gravity of the matter..... People thought I was running away from studies and it was told to me categorically that there was no place for me at Mamaji's office.......
All this while I was solving the IIT Mathematics sums in the M L Khanna book, jointly with Kailash and Anuj...the beauty about IIT sums were that all I would gather from them was a sense of mesmerisation.......an sense of awe and also a feeling of desperation.......I could never, in the most optimistic of scenarios, hope to solve these by myself...and therefore it increased the sadness.....
Whether with each passing day, I was moving one step closer or backward...I didnt know! and thus I woke up each day with a further diminished sense of self esteem...more because I had always felt so responsible to my family in terms of performance , that I felt so ashamed of myself that I was belying all their hopes......there were financial repercussions of this fiasco... after IIT , I had no other real option ..Because I didn’t have the money to go to Bangalore --> Rs 4-5 lacs ...maybe BITS Pilani was an option but again it was mired in deep doubts...95% in PCME was too far fetched an idea !!!
Apr'2002
Officially in Class 12 but the depression grew stronger by the day...it was more than a year that had passed with the IIT fiasco...that I was heading nowhere...and at a loss of words when any friend/relative/neighbor asked me what exactly I had in mind !!! Just like the question people ask me about a job staying in Calcutta .........it’s really a tough thing to swallow all that humiliation and put up a brave face and say ...."I am going to do something constructive with my future...Just hold on!!!!" But then resilient as I always was ...I never could say die...I as always would have come up with another reason to feel happy.......
I took a long break from studies.....this unplanned stupidity wasn’t anyways leading me to IIT and I was deeply stressed out ....so I spent May'2002 away from books ...broke off the ties with Kailash & Co ...there was really no point solving M L Khanna with them, they used to demoralize all the more...If I were to do it ..I would do it all alone...at least not with them...because each time I spent an hour with them, they through their negative talk used to rob me of all self esteem...Kailash & Anuj were alike ..mein bhi chutiya ..tum bhi chutiya ...toh kya darna !!! They had no clue where they were headed but had that duniyadaari wisdom to fake confidence and assure the world around that they were comfortably heading for the IITs this year...and its so important .....being honest about your failures
I joined a Chemistry teacher called Dhruva Chakravorty for 3 months @ an exorbitant Rs 600 p.m...He used to teach at the Keshav Memorial School in Howrah AC...Opposite Kings Road...I used to meet people from all walks of life...all desperate to get into IIT...some with real talent like Rohan Paul...but with no clue of how to go about it...we weren’t that fortunate to have any proper IIT preparation infrastructure ...and were lulled into believing that by shelling out 500 hundred rupee notes to pseudo IIT teachers, we could make it ..........Dhruva Chakravorty was such a rascal.......remember how desperate the situation would become when he would mesmerise us in a packed dingy classroom with the Organic Chemistry "Reaction Mechanisms" ....and I used to simply copy the sums and come home and stare at them...
I had lost the race...no one had bothered to put the basics in place and i am cent percent confident that merely by getting mesmerised at the hands of these pseudo IIT teachers, IIT mein mera nahin hota..So I quit him.......
In the midst of this...there were some sweet spots in school , for a change...the fact that I was targeting BITS Pilani somehow compelled me to study for school exams ....and pay attention in class........I had Ms Guha as my English teacher and donno why but have always respected her ...and my English was always amazing at school level......she asked us our marks in English in class 11 exams and while I had scored the highest marks in English Language, obviously since i was least bothered about Literature, I scored just some 50-55 in that. She was surprised ..."Why?" and I said “Mam I want to study for IIT ...am not here to study English plays and poems and stuff!!” ...
I secured 2 gold medals in Nature Fest - an inter school Competition conducted by our Nature Club......1st in Creative English and 1st in Dramatics.......I played the lead role of Manab Roy, the scientist ..In a one-act play.....this had a salutary impact on my self-esteem
I was a member of DBL's Dramatic Club...we decided to organize an Inter School One Act Play Competition...... right from giving it the name "Abhivyakti" - expression of an individual’s talent to designing the Invitation Card
Be an absolute critic!!
Write Reviews!!
Surrender Yourself to a Saga of Emotions!!
As DB Auditorium plays host to Abhivyakti’02!!
Represented school in a Creative Writing Competition in Don Bosco Park Circus and Modern High School and performed very well!!!
Represented school in MathWorks 2002 @ IIT Kharagpur ...this trip of 2 days was amazing ...firstly because I got to meet Partha ...a fantastic friend for life and secondly because we two went around IIT hostels and met people, so many of them, who had actually made it to the hallowed portals of the IITs ...AIR 25, 67, 321, 546 ..So many of them......we asked them what exactly they did to get such high ranks ...and surprisingly they really didn’t have any special strategies...while a lot of them were form Kota...Bansal Classes or FIIT-JEE Delhi, there were also people from far off villages in Bihar who had made it based on their sheer determination !!After this, I was at least sure about one thing...that IIT was about Physics, Chemistry and Maths sums and nothing more, not about anxiety, desperation and the stress as we were led to believe by people around.....If you solved those sums correctly, you would have made it !! There was no magic formula ..........as I had been searching for........but surely then these people had that natural flair for these subjects as I had for Accountancy and that makes a tremendous difference
On my return to Calcutta, we were also given a career counseling session by Mr P K Mallapa, a Chartered Accountant .......Ernst & Young and now the CFO of a defense firm ...........wow...I asked him. Sir if I become a CA, will you recruit me...he said...Of course!! This was my first distant hope that I could get an opportunity to get out of this mess through the CA course!!
I got so confident that people around really started envying me...i wasn’t doing anything great about IIT...just lulling myself into believing that I was .......although it was a false hope...hope it was and I had needed it badly !! So merely by going through past IIT questions, Physics Today, Chemistry Today , Maths Today etc , I was creating a false sense of self-belief ...and throwing attitude to the Kailash Jhas and Anuj Agarwals of the world ..I really was enjoying that stint!! Even Sumit Agarwal, for a moment thought I'd make it ...and regretted his decision to quit Science at such an early stage!!
I stayed aloof from the rest of the world for 6 months like this only...I was neither preparing for IIT nor for ISC ...just chasing stupidity ...there was no concerted plan of action...probably because in my hearts of hearts I knew that there was no hope on the IIT front ...I had banked heavily on some handwritten notes of mine for ISC..i thought they would suffice...I also took the last 10 years Solved Papers by S. Chand for Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics....and was so happy that I was in command of ISC......didn’t factor in the possibility that just by learning the principles embedded in the questions of 10 years, I was merely de-risking myself to the extent of just 50-60%........were these Board people fools to just repeat the 10 years???
Again in English, I had relied on Gems Guide book, never even opening the actual text book for poems or short stories (Selected Short Stories) or the play "Loyalties”!!!
If this was not enough, I didn’t even have a Biology text book for Class 12...and i was thinking of appearing for the Board Exams
I again didnt study for the ISC stuff in December.....leave it naa...I'll manage...that was the last month where I had some sort of a mental sanity !!
I was in such a precarious position ...and it was logical that there was just some trigger in the waiting for the journey downhill..........that happened in Jan ‘03...to the extent that I really lost my nerves!!
Chemistry Pre-Board exams in school and the questions weren’t set to my expectations...I had just studied Ms Sarkar’s notes superficially and S Chand ISC Chemistry (10 years) ........could not solve many questions ..It was a Saturday ...same thing happened on Monday @ Maths ....and on the English exams eve...I stayed awake the whole day.....donno what exactly happened but this was the final trigger!! I slipped into extraordinarily high levels of stress!!1 could read the book anymore!!! My school pre-boards were a disaster!! I thought I’d fail in them!!
Add to that the incident of discussing the past 10 years with Harish...having spent the last 1 year studying just Bhatnagar, Chugh and Saha&Saha ..He was actually in a much more comfortable position...IIT toh woh sirf fake kar raha tha!!! he sensed in a while that I knew nothing and like a true businessman, thought it wasn’t prudent to waste time on me anymore ...but I like a stupid dumbass kept on chasing him as the Messiah for ISC.. And he ditched me completely...to the extent that when I went to his house for 2-3 days, he and his mother started looking at me with disgust of the highest magnitude ....as if he was well on his well to get into BITS Pilani with a 95% in PCME and I would flounder.......
By this time it was certain that I wasn’t going to crack IIT; BITS Pilani was the last hope as it was an iconic brand and somehow through the turn of events in Jan'03, I was thoroughly convinced that I wouldn’t make it to BITS Pilani as my ISC preparation was all screwed up!! And we didn’t have the financial capability to afford an Rs 4 lacs Bangalore Engineering stint!! So where would I be headed!! Suddenly I found myself staring at a blank wall!! Ab kya hoga and it was a feeling that was so natural to come to you after 2 years of desperation about this IIT fiasco!! I was so damn hopeless that I threw the book around!! What the hell was this!! Someone studies for 2 years only to become a victim of the system!!
I simply couldn’t concentrate on books anymore!!
English literature had been something I had ignored all the while and suddenly found it difficult to come to terms with the reality that I didn’t knew anything and that my supposedly magical handwritten notes simply weren’t enough ......they'd test a thorough knowledge of the text and put up extracts as well to examine a student's understanding ! And here was I who had never opened these textbooks in 2 years and in a time span of just 2 months, it simply wouldn’t suffice!!
I slipped into absolute hopelessness...I used to read a book for 1 hour, try to recollect it and was all blank ......." Mummy humko kuch yaad nahi ho raha “...Was my standard refrain......? Actually it was a total loss of self-belief!! I had screwed up my 2 years and was staring at total disaster ...No way would I make it to the IITs, BITS Pilani ka doors closed ho gaya tha...for that I should have studied for ISC properly over the last 1 year ....which i hadn't in the "IIT ke liye padhna hai....I didnt take up Science to score 95% in ISC Boards but to get into IIT " theme ...uske baad Bangalore mein jaane ka paisa nahin tha and Bengal mein private engineering colleges mein padhke hina bhi kya tha...anyways I hate the Bengali scheme of things in the first place....they are a stupid class of people just stuck up in aein (laws) and stuff. They feel they are too culturally superior to everyone, have a taste for literature and music which bestows upon them a demi -God status and that they aren’t meant for slogging!!!
"So ab mera kya hoga?" ...each time I've slipped into depression, it’s just this statement which overwhelms each and every thought process of mine.....
It was unrealistic for me to expect from myself that suddenly in Feb'03, I'd decide to master those poetry, stories and plays and attain the levels of excellence which people had taken 2 years to attain......If the Sumit Agarwals and Anshul Goels of the world knew the poetry, stories and plays better than me, it was simply because they had cumulatively bettered their understanding of the text....just like the Income Tax Act, which I did later ....it was not attributable to any exceptional intelligence on their part ........!!! I couldn't blame my mental processes for my lapse in performance ...it was more a strategic blunder. Driven by a mix of factors...both within and beyond my control....
I would fail in ISC...I thought and that I wouldn’t appear for the exams...I had fallen to such depths of self-doubt that even 40% was seeming a distant possibility ....and in that desperation , it was unrealistic to expect my brain to register new stuff ...I simply couldn’t memorise ......and so imagine my plight where after studying for an hour, I get down to write a paragraph on what I have studied and I fail.....and with each such incident, the negative impact on the self-esteem gets compounded !!! That Mummy got pulled into all this is my worst failure in life. She couldn’t see me sobbing in front of my books!!!
It did emerge at that point of time that I would surely shift to Commerce but that was subject to clearing ISC, which seemed such a distant possibility!! Hanu Bhaiya bole ki unka ek friend hai St Xaviers mein Alumni mein...woh karva dega ...Tinku hiya bole ki unke MBA college mein there were many people who shifted to Commerce after Class 12 and so i had no reason to feel desperate ..........
My mom stood by my side all throughout Feb'03.....she also knew that I was honest in my intentions and had been simply cheated by the system.....her comforting words were all that took me through this!!!! But I couldn’t meet her eye-to-eye!!! So much and so that I left a note that I was running away from all this inspired by the protagonist in the play "Loyalties”) and simply surrendered!!!
Till today cannot forget the horror on my Mom's face.........you can't ever imagine what goes on inside a Mother's mind when her son refuses to face the situation and escapes from reality!!!!
Sunil Mamaji mere ko 10 minute bole ki how shameless I was ...How could I do this to my Mother !!! If Science has screwed it up, then in the worst case what would happen...I'll fail in ISC Science and I'd enroll in Class XI Commerce !! and agar padhai nahin hoga toh business karenge !!! he said he'd take guarantee that i earn Rs 10,000 a month form Bellilious Road -fitting business !! But the bottom-line was that I couldn’t escape from hard work!! Paristithi toh aise hi upar neeche hoti rahengi .......Agar mehnat se bhagega , toh fir kuch nahi ho sakta
That was the inflexion point in that saga of events !!! I was dead determined that I had a point to prove !! But had got stuck because of the ISC-IIT dilemna !! Although it was very late, I would make some great efforts to put up my best show in ISC....
Took a mild sedative to get a good sleep......something which i had been deprived of since two years !!!
When I used to wake up, would feel so fresh and energised that I , for a moment , forgot all that had happened...but time had run out of my hand..ISC English Literature was just 4 days away and i was still unprepared with the 15 poems, 15 short stories and Loyalties - the monumental play...
Sumit came to my rescue on Saturday ...he suggested two smart moves...
a) to get over the fact that I wasn’t able to memorise anything....it wasn’t required at all ...he reminded me of the days when I used to appear for exams just with a vague idea and score the highest marks...once i read something, I could roam around and then try to recollect the points ...this really worked
b) in two days, studying all the 15 poems, 15 short stories and Loyalties - the monumental play was impossible...as far as the poems and stories are concerned , this was the last year for these books and only the remaining 3 poems and 3 stories would be tested as otherwise their inclusion in the curriculum would have been unjustified !! SO I just stuck onto that
The strategy worked.................when I came out of the exam hall on Monday, I surely was confident, I wouldn’t fail
Tuesday was English Language...Sumit again came to get my Grammar right...Imagine the mental agony you undergo that a much acclaimed writer wonders whether he'll be able to draft a 20 marks essay in ISC English I exams .....I stared at my past articles published in newspapers and school magazines and wondered whether I'd be able to manage anything in my ISC exams .......But again I attempted the entire paper !!!!!
Now that English was over I just had 2-3 days for each exams....My entire February was spent in agonizing over my inability to study English Literature .......and now I had to face Chemistry , Physics, Maths, Biology and Hindi.......I did that with poise....my only target was to attempt as much of the paper as possible...
Worthy of mention is my Biology paper because I didnt want to appear for it!! I had no textbook of the subject...when I appeared in the exam hall, people were surprised......I said I just came to give attendance :)
ISC exams being over...it was time to move ahead in life ....I would be shifting to Commerce....probably Umesh Chandra College!!! But before that, I had a point to prove!! Like a coward, I could say that i wouldn’t appear for the Engineering Entrances as they had turned irrelevant but I did..............
AIR 7264 in AIEEE (State Rank 108)
Rank 3101 in West Bengal Joint Entrance
Ranks good enough to get me into at least a decent college .......but I had other plans
Finally the ISC Results day came.......I was prepared for anything .......Contrast it with my ICSE expectations of “nothing less than a 95%” .........now I just wanted to pass in all subjects
As the results sms unfolded ...I was in tears
English ---> 90
Hindi ---> 94
Biology ---> 83 (Highest in School in an exam which I gave just for attendance)
Maths ---> 88
Chemistry---> 80
Physics ---> 78
87% in Best of 5 subjects .........
God's Delays are not God's Denials ...Life would begin on a fresh note ......who knows ..If luck permits .....At the hallowed portals of St Xaviers !!! Mom and I were equally in tears!!!
