Exams ! ! !

Sensing my unusual delirium, I begin my hypothesis of exams (exams! there's a cruel word, if you like) . . . while throng of boys and girls, with tilak, sandal wood paste daubed on their forehead, in between eyebrows, with books in their hands, riffling out pages, gathered in the middle of peak summer, reeking of sweat and nervousness to appear for, what it looked like from their faces, perhaps the most important exam of their lives, I, stood desultorily in bewilderment, with my friend who is as screwed up as I am, except he is capable of undressing women with only his eyes and whose business was to tell me which of the girls had the biggest of boobs or a perfect ass. And after the exam when we came out we were faced with paparazzi, only they didn't have cameras and they were parents, answering their own questions . . . "how was the paper? Was it easy? How did you guys do? Well no? Everybody did well? "Blah! Blah! I don’t give a shit about papers, I am lucky to be alive. Go get a life, codgers!

So what's it like? . . . Piece of shit! No, wait. It’s worse than that; it's like a pile of shit, with you in it. Enrolling for CA was the second biggest mistake of my life; the first one was when I fell for an Australian girl at the age of 13. Then, I fell into the trap of a pretty face and blonde hair; and this time too I fell into the trap, but of a longer title before my name: Chartered Accountant. Longer the title shittier (and that's a word) the course. They make it sound really professional and everything, but it's basically just high quality trash. I mean, it's the kind of stuff that makes you wanna fart in an aluminum foil and smell it . . . It’s going to take five years of your youth and you will, if you are lucky, end up with a job(if you pass, that is, which is going to take like a thousand years for me)

Once the exams are over, you are either recovering from an annihilating shock or preparing for another shock. Between the exams and the results you don’t know what to do, not that you did before, but this time it's different, I call it the pre-depression phase, the lull before the storm kinda stuff. Being a ca student comes with lots of gifts such as ability to, use a calculator, interpret financial statements (that nobody else is interested in doing), along with a few piffling medical problems such as hypertension, insomnia, schizophrenia. It has in itself become some kind of a disease, I say; I have a headache and people go . . . Oh! Exams coming no? It happens. I have high blood pressure . . . exam pressure right? It happens. One day I'll die of aneurism, blowing my temples, spouting blood from my mouth, and people will say he was a CA final student, after all, it happens . . .

. . . Everything in this world has a story, and every story has a moral, this one here, has one too. Last Sunday I went to Eden Gardens to see a game between KKR and Mumbai Indians, KKR played wonderful cricket only to loose on the last ball where they got hit for a six. So the moral goes like this: No matter how well you do, you can still get screwed at the very last moment, and no matter how bad you do, you can still end up winning. Exams are a bit like that, I suppose. You have to predict the unpredictable, conceive the inconceivable, and outdo the outdoers.