In what seems like an eternity, and at the same time a whisper of the wind, I am nearing the last set of the much hallowed (read despised) occasion of the end-semester exams. Very soon, most of us would be done with the anxiety of last-minute preparations for good. No more night-outs for academic reasons, and no more visits to the maggu junta of the batch (no offense intended). Which takes me back to the first end-sem I appeared in, the night of what was to become a habit of laundering time when you needed it the most!
It was a cold, dreary, november night, when the chirping of the crickets was no longer audible in the intermittent shouts of dayaaa, inki maa, kya kya padha rakha hai yaar, Dude, I am f***ed! No other subjects begs more wails of mercy than Maths, and that too MA 103, which complicated things like limits and basic calculus irreparably, and for ever. It is true that at first, all freshie year courses appear to rehashes of all that we had mugged during the hellacious years of making it through the JEE. Believe me (I fall in the majority of those below 8), nothing is farther from the truth. They say that nostalgia often brings back memories of those little mistakes that you committed long back, and this was a glaring one. If the first MA lecture isn't shocking enough, the tepid tutorials and the myriad of hostel activities (H3...H3..) makes it impossible to pay any attention to the long derivations. A special mention here to the genius who conceptualized the I.K. Rana textbook, which in reality is more like a loose-bound set of cheap printouts, supposed to serve as reference to God-knows-which-part of the course. Of course, naive as we are when we set foot here dreaming of cracking the top position, the book is religiously bought and then dumped in a corner of the small 1x2 room, which makes us endure first year as refugees from a happier place. Ok, back to the end sem.
So to all those like me who were on the edge when it came to breezing through the course (a polite euphemism for desperate to pass the course), the end-sem preparation was the be-all-end-all of the world. And just as we learn to take things seriously at IIT in our later years, the pre-endsem break, which is totally useless by the way and serves no purpose than to play football from 5 to 11 and chat mindlessly about the cruelty of having to give an endsem in the first place, had been spent doing nothing. So, at t-12 hours, notes were xeroxed, tutorials were arranged and off we set to learn the nuances of epsilon-delta. For the Biswas kids, these were times when a prof showed more mercy on his subjects and thought twice before awarding a fail grade (unlike the now notorious courses like IC and MA105, where the number of those failed is more than those awarded and AA and AB combined). Still, nervousness set in quite early and to chill our heads, some wingies came up with the glorious idea of playing cricket in the front lawns, something we had never done in the entire 1st semester. It is rightly said, the mind conjures brilliant ideas when challenged to a deadline! So, at t-6 hours, we sit down again and realize that the syllabus is more than the mental capacity of 3 of us combined. And to our horror (and to the delight of all who scorned at the idea of playing before an endsem), the genius who came up with the idea of 'relaxation' had gone to sleep after finishing the course a day back. So the invectives grew louder, and coffee was gulped like Marv gulps scotch in Sin City. What shall we do?
Then one of the three musketeers had an epiphany and promptly went to bed! I was having my first taste of swollen eyes and what excess of caffeine does to your system, and the other loyal soldier was rubbing his head while cursing me and 10 other students in a periodic manner. At t-2 hours, we decided it was best to trust in God, and lay our heads down for a short nap, which was to be broken in exactly 5 minutes by the bustle of wingies running to-and-fro, lining up for their daily ablutions. Damn! Of course, I didn't ace the paper, and for what its worth, the concept of a Gaussian curve was illustrated to us by the means of the course grading.
So think about it. What has now become a norm was once a new experience for each one of us. These are just one of the many things that will stay behind, as we move on to another chapter in our lives. To add insult to injury, this endsem was on my first birthday in IIT!
If only we had it so simple :-/
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