Sunday, August 8, 2010

The art of examination survival



Things were not looking good for me. A backlog would just outcast me from my family and bring inexplicable ignominy to everyone. The question paper looked like Greek,Latin,Telugu and Marathi to me. My plan had failed miserably. The questions looked as complicated as a boring editorial on Europe's economy in the Hindu. I had read 5 out of the total of 10 chapters, assuming that alternate lessons would be enough for a comfortable score. Some cynical professor who would definitely be born as a toad in his next birth ,thanks to my powerful curses, had messed everything up for us. The first thing I did after getting the question paper was to pinch myself to check if I was in one of those clichéd "stuck in the exam hall with a Chinese question paper in my hand" dream . It was a real paper,not in Chinese, and could not be oil fried to crispy manchurian like I do it in my crazy dreams.And if you are wondering why there is an Anil Kapoor picture, read the entire post.


24 hours ago,my Coimbatore home

I was having a hard time remembering all the circuitry. In fact, the only thing that I found interesting in the entire book of "Linear Integrated Circuits" was the author acknowledging his in-laws who stood by him while he was writing the book. It was frustrating me that I could hardly understand and comprehend even a minuscule portion of the content. Integrated circuits were grating my brain's circuits. This was when I was reminded to use the emergency mugging up technique. The technique was to make relatively easier acronyms to memorize large content . For example when I had to remember chemical equations in the 12th grade, I read CH3COONa as Chatri-Coona and CH3CH2OH as Chatri Chattu Aw. While linear circuits was nothing like chemistry, I decided to make vibgyor like acronyms for answers which had bullet points, by taking the first letters from them. I came up with 'maryBombLeh'(memorized as mary went to bomb the leh valley) , 'marBmwIdle'(after eating idlies, hit and run with your BMW), 'wordPimpdel' (delete and forget whatever a pimp says) and more on the same lines.


Exam hall,Today

A few minutes of sweating vanished the worry in my mind and my blood pressure came back to normal . I looked around for company. Vinoth looked at me and gave me a thumbs down, quite to my relief. Raju however seemed to write something vigorously and that somehow seemed to bother me. I closed my eyes, mumbled hanuman chalisa to myself and somehow convinced myself that I was motivated. I ticked out the questions I seemed to know. With a sparsely ticked question sheet , I started writing whatever I knew. This was when I realized that I remembered the acronyms pretty well, but I did not know the questions to which I had to tag those answers. And for some godforsaken reason, my mind, quite inappropriately, was playing "One two ka four, my name is lakhan' on a infinite loop, which I was unable to stop.

I took a best possible guess and expanded acronyms for questions that I believed were the right ones for the answer that I wrote. For every unknown answer I promised one coconut for lord Ganesha. After an hour, I drank 2 huge cups of water taking all the time I could, for whiling time was also becoming the primary concern. I decided to take on a few unknown questions. To motivate myself, I quoted my past achievement to myself where I had used the sewage disposal system from 9th standard and converted it to a nuclear reactor in 10th standard exams, with just some changes in interior decoration.

Frankly, I seemed to relish the scope I had for my creativity . The first question I had to answer was about something called the Walter-Nelson circuit. I had to narrow things down, both logically and creatively.

I started making a not of all that I could infer. It was invented by two people, it had to be somewhat big. The question has a return of investment of 12 marks, so I had to write 2 pages.

""One two ka four, Four two ka one, my name is lakhan", sang my mind when I reached a moment of oblivion. I had no control over the relentless music and images of a hairy Anil Kapoor slide show played on my mind.

Now, I had to put things in perspective. I tried to remember whatever I could from class about Walter-Nelson circuit.

2 months ago, 2nd year classroom

Something called Water -Nelson circuit was written on the board, double underlined. "Your turn now", said Kavikumar, handing over his mobile to me. I hid the mobile under the desk and started batting. In fact, a circular plain faced Tendulkar was batting for me. I had to score 23 in an over to beat Kavi. When I scored 12 off the first 3 balls, an sms interrupted me . Kavi took his mobile,read the message and said to me, "Nothing important, just Shreya wallpapers message.". I gave a momentary and obligatory glance at the teacher who said,"The reason we have 2 capacitors is ".,when Kavi gave me back his mobile and broke my attention.


Exam hall, today
So 2 capacitors is all we know currently. Maybe we will have a resistor for company. As far as I remembered, 80% of circuit diagrams had at least one resistor in them. I decided to start out with the circuit diagram.



Subconsciousness -" Two people have worked to create a circuit, its got to be bigger. This is too trivial . You had to add something more. Maybe something creative."
Subconsciousness said,"yeah, great impulse of creativity. Drawing a fido dido in a circuit diagram totally makes sense."



Subconsciousness: "Okay, For the love of god, the last comment was sarcasm. Stop drawing junk, and save yourself from a backlog. Probably have a two level circuit or something. Meanwhile, let me get back to my song, "One two ka four, my name is lakhan, mera naam hai lakhan'.

Subconsciousness: "Good. A timer adds authencity. Maybe Walter-Nelson invented the time bomb.Anyway, lets wrap things now. Probably complicate stuff and confuse the examiner with one more layer of circuity."


Subconsciousness: "Great. So genuine and authentic. Moment to take pride on our work, inspite of the fact that we do not know what that arrow thing stands for."

I gleamed with a sense of pride and self-appreciation. I then started writing the text for the answer.I wrote a huge paragraph describing the components of the circuit with excellent description accompanying each component. Then I randomly mixed a 'marbmwIdle' and 'wordPimpDel' to form a 'marPimpDel' , and put them quite pragmatically under the heading 'benefits'.

And there you go.


One month later,street corner Ganesha temple

"Dear Lord Ganesha, You rock", I said, breaking the first of my seven coconuts.











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17 comments:

Anonymous said...

Did not read the article fully. But did notice 'Chattri-Koona'. The way we used to memorize the Compound names was awesome.

Harini said...

Good one!! :) :)
Yes, even I agree with memorizing :D
And, yeah :D even I have experienced all these ;-)
Good post :) Keep it going!!

Premnath Thirumalaisamy said...

circuits wer awesome.. Great passion fr writing macha .. Loved reading it..

Anand said...

Humorous one na.. That visualization of creativity part where that 7up lad peeps out from the circuit is awesome.. I suddenly burst out into laughter on seeing it..!!

life is beautiful~viky said...

Another good one simma!words are now exhausted to praise u.....good one ya., namma potta circuit padathavachu nala bomb thayirachukalam...avvlo dangerous..

Arrchana Raj said...

Fido-Dido was totally unexpectdd...!!! :D Really good one...

Anonymous said...

Nice post and this mail helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you for your information.

vidhu said...

superb. so creative and interesting. can imagine "one two ka one " playing on an infinite loop" in a student's mind. i love this line. u have beautifully put it in the verbal form. keep rocking.

Ramya said...

Haha, very good one, so finally scraped thru exams uh??

I loved "One two ka four" it happens to me all the time...

lavixu said...

Awesome post..Just burst out laughing for almost every sentence :) . Especially when u decided to make machurian out of the paper like u do in ur dreams. I wrote a similar post some time back, of course not as awesome as yours! Take a look at the image :)

lavixu said...

And of course So can connect to a song getting stuck and never agree to go away! and imagine the embarrassment when a collegue is askinga doubt and while pausing you sing peee looo !! http://yetanotherblogbyme.blogspot.com/2008/08/bey-ab-to.html a bit similar :)

Anonymous said...

Just came across your blog. This was very funny. I hated the electronics papers we had to give as part of computer engineering!

karthik said...

Really loved this post. Very happy to find another electronics engineer who dawdled in the exam hall. :)

arjun said...

Ultimate !!

Aditya said...

"One two ka four, four two ka one. My name is Lakhan" - I swear, I could relate to such a thing happening on occasions where things were not looking good for me in an exam hall(which was pretty often :P). Nailed the narration. period.

Pika said...

one two ka four had me laughing out loud for quite a while!!! Awesome post! The 7up dude was least expected!!!

Irene said...

This is a great article, and a great topic to explore. Thanks for sharing.

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