.jpg)
"The secret of success lies in maximum achievement with minimum effort”. This has been the motto of my life. A physics textbook in my hand and all I could think is of sleeping. I remember my teacher say, “6 hours for women, 7 hours for men and 8 hours for fools”. Now I wonder where does a nine hours sleeper like me belong? I looked at my watch, it was 9:30PM and it displayed “28th Tuesday”. Two more days for the board exam to begin. I closed the textbook that talked about voltage, current, concave & convex mirrors and other indigestible concepts and theories. I shut my eyes and entered to the world of my own which restricted Newton and Einstein getting in and dreamt of the cars and phones I wished to own.
Amma was shouting at me to wake up. The time was just 6:15AM. She placed a cup of hot tea and ordered me to study. I sipped the tea and felt I needed to brush but went against the idea. There was nothing like a hot and sweet cup of tea on a February morning. ‘February morning’, a question aroused on my frontal lobe. February was the month having shortest number of days in a year – 28 days. If it was a leap year, it would have a day extra. The year in the calendar on my table was 2007, which is not supposed to be a leap year. So the month of February was done yesterday and it gave way to March. So, from my calculations I concluded that today is 1st of March and my board starts in next few hours and all I’ve read is about a long bearded man who won Nobel Prize for physics in the year 1942. I ran through my room like a dog carrying fire in its tail. I opened my NCERT textbook tearing and chewing my nails to read myriad concepts, theorems, diagrams and problems. Nothing entered in to my brains. All that ran through my mind was the supplementary that followed and that tight slap from my father. With adrenaline rising up I gave a ring to my friend for the ‘important questions’.
Today I spent a long 10 minutes in the pooja room, which was received by the bewilderment of my mother. It was something that doesn’t occur often. With ohm’s law and kirchoff’s law in the socks, Einstein’s relativity and Newton’s trilogies inside my shoes, reflection and refraction under the belly clogged inside belt buckles and units and dimensions sandwiched between the ends of my kerchief, any Fidel Castro might have prayed for a long time. This was my last hope. My target in the exam was a high 33 percentage that is equal to 23 out of 70 for a pass, which wouldn’t be that tough because last model exam I was just short of two marks. So with these bits of papers and a large byte of confidence I took my pen and the hall ticket and left home, well aware of the 5-year suspension from writing any exam once when caught.
Attending a funeral is much relieving than standing in an exam hall. Students, students everywhere. All clad in white and blue, not a single smiling face. Everyone recalling every thing what they have mugged up for the past 1-year for a 3-hour exam. A tensed looking aunty was giving ‘arthy’ to her daughter, the embarrassed look in her face gave me a good time to laugh. “What are you laughing at? Don’t you know you are going to write one of the most important exams of your life.” Said my friend. I guess I did a big crime by laughing just minutes before a fucking important exam! Snubbing his words I entered the hall that was at a Siberian end of the school. I was dangerously placed at the second row but thanks to the window that looked at a garbage ground, which could very well be the corporation waste disposal area.
The stout, plump old lady was particularly not interested in the front few rows. She occupied a place somewhere at the back near Das, whom I believe was carrying the textbook itself! The question paper was tougher than I thought. There wasn’t a single question from units and dimensions or from the ohm’s law. I felt like cheated, an ambush. With the fortitude of an army man in the Kargils, I raised my pen and started killing all the questions one by one and contributed the question paper to the garbage outside. With the help of the bits of paper I prepared, I wrote a highly creative answer sheet that carried a powerful nuclear reactor with a chimney that occupied four pages of the answer sheet.
Einstein would have had a heart attack, Newton would have shot himself and Kalam might call his vision: 2020 back once if they get to evaluate my caricature. The traitor who helped me with the important questions came running towards me and asked, “hey! Karan, how did the exam go? Would you get through this one?”
“May be, yes! If the evaluator is drunk.” I replied and we laughed together.
The bus got filled with pricks in white and blue. With some physical effort I conquered the window seat. I looked out and thought about the exam to come. It was chemistry and my chemistry with chemistry wasn’t that good. I asked the fellow sitting next to me, “Which are the questions in chemistry you think is really, really important?”
He gave a half an hour lecture on the main topics and they were convincing enough for me. Happily I noted them in my brains and reached for the soft bed in my room. Patting myself for the great work I’ve done that morning, I silently whispered to myself, “The secret of success lies in maximum achievement with minimum effort.”- A motto that fueled my life.
