FINAL EXAMS!!

Just a week to go before my 'Final Exams'. I was sitting back this afternoon and thinking about it. Yes, these are indeed my FINAL exams. I would never enter an exam hall again in my life ! Would never have to go to the shop, the night before my exams to buy a reynolds ball pen!(Unless I plan to pursue a doctorate, at a much later stage, which looks highly unlikely). I just couldnt believe it.

Exams ! This word has stayed on with me for such a long time. In the very early stages of school, I used to go and write down what I had learnt at home. Never understood the significance of exams. I distinctly remember two things. Mom said, don't show your answers to others and also don't ask others if you don't know. And I used to carry a lot of pencils and erasers in my double decker pencil box !

Exams were always an enjoyable process. School had plenty of them. Unit test 1, mid semester, unit test 2, final exam......Who can forget the anticipation and the countdown for the exams to end, both before Diwali and more so before the summer vaccations ! How do I spend my vaccations? The plannning would start a couple of weeks before the exams started. The day the last exams got over, rush home; and go to play without even removing our school uniforms.

Then the phase where exams started taking on a new meaning. Enter the era of competitive exams. We no longer competed within us, but on a pan India level. I would definitely say that the enjoyment levels went down drastically. It became too mechanistic ! I never enjoyed my engineering papers; somehow felt that they were an extension of rote learningl with no emphasis on fundamentals.

That is where I liked some of the exams at IIT. If not all, some of the papers were extremely sastisfying. Prof CRs OR and TQM papers which made me think...Prof Thillai who made sure we used our brains evertime ! It got back the enjoyment process in exams. And that is something I really liked.

Exams ! This five letter word has now lived with me for 27 years. I am going to cut myself off from something so close to me ! Does it hurt ? Yes it does. As I close my eyes, I feel I have done reasonably well, but this is something I would miss forever. Workplace might have appraisals and say that it is the equivalent of exams. Your performace rating is like the grades ! But I think it is not. We cant even compare. They are miles apart. For me an 'S' grade in a course or a 19.5/20 in an 8th standard Geography paper is something that I would still value most !

I have a collection of all my report cards, right from the nursery I went to. Would add my IIT grade sheet to it. There is an emptiness in the heart, but the files containing them would certainly look complete...................