(Disclaimer)-The following events are true and any resemblance to any person living or dead is totally intended.
The I.C.S.E exams had just been over but carried with it no sense of euphoria. In fact it signaled an end of childhood and the first meaningful journey into adulthood where career was primary started right there.
As is usual with most students, for me too it meant the starting of tuitions for class 11 and 12 and preparation for the HOLY GRAIL of engineering-IITJEE.
The first 5 months (or it maybe 6) went by in a blur. The Board results came out and I gloated over my 6 pointer. For the next few days I became an insufferable haughty idiot prepared to look down on anyone who had scored less than me. Well I had always been kind of a whacko throughout my life but those few months I was more impossible to bear than usual.
Nonetheless new people came in. So new friendships were forged and new kinds of banter learnt and exchanged. To my delight I found of my favorite teachers teaching us English. I was already some kind of a teacher’s pet then, especially hers and she had a reputation of having too much of an old school no nonsense attitude. To this day I wonder who the more intolerable soul was for the first few months, me or her.
However even I became tired of this constant doting attention and to the relief of us all, she left after a few months, and we were spared further torture(well I wanted to use a better word but my vocab stinks so….).
Now it so happened that I had managed to create a lot of bad blood between myself and the rest and therefore tried to act heroic by refusing to be nominated for the position of the HEADBOY of the school on being asked by someone who was equally unpopular as her friend, the departed teacher.
Of course everyone saw through the hollowness of it all and I did not manage t win many hearts in the process. Then there was also the truth which had been pointed out to me a few days earlier by a friend of mine (in the midst of some argument as far as I remember) which was that I had neither the lks nor the charisma nr even the smartness to be the head boy of our school. To this day I thank the benevolent soul silently who dared to call a spade a spade and nothing else.
Then there was the issue of change of our classroom. We welcomed it at first grudgingly because our current premises offered the best view that was possible of the Loreto Convent. In a testosterone charged atmosphere the little miss sunshines were our best hope. However our new classroom proved to be spacious and had an admirable quality of having only doors and no windows at all. This proved to be a boon later on.
I had chosen computers as subject and much to our delight found we had a recess period whenever a class was supposed to take place for the subject. We utilized it fully and played cricket, lots of it. I made 12 out of 5 balls in the very first match and to this very day it remains my best performance ever in the sporting arena.
Time flew by and soon the exams were upon us. I was so confident about math, having scored a pretty 98 in the board exams and was already dreaming of putting the ball out of the park even before the paper had arrived. And I was in for a shocker! I somehow managed to sit through the grueling three hours of the exam. No wonder when the results came out I found I had scored the lowest in class. My arrogance was once and for all busted and it worked wonders for me! I realized I wasn’t infallible and hence I became more tolerable to the general masses. Strange how uniting bad marks can be as I learnt then and saw throughout my college life. I am much friendlier now having had my own share of tough luck
Thank you failure!
p.s. My marks in Mathematics for that semester read: 42/100
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