Exam day at IBA is when everyone is found digging in their notes, books, etc. Some even dig others’ brains to get ‘summaries’ of what they have studied the entire term. Irrespective of whether the person is among those who pay attention to each and every word and pause of every teacher, among those who doze off in class because they know everything already, among those who know nothing yet slip out of the class to kill time with their friends in the shed or among some other group of people so wholly unconnected with me, every person tries to do something, something that would be directly benefiting him in the upcoming exam.
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But there are some (meaning me !) who you might even refuse to consider sane, who stop their last moment revising, cramming, whatever it is for a while, and attempt to admire the whole scenario. For some I know it may be a highly stressful period but yes, I think the sight is simply… beautiful! Beautiful from which angle? Well, I can’t explain how it is beautiful but I just think it just is. The way humans interact, hasten, learn, rote, question, panic, rush, all in such a brief amount of time is just fascinating to me.
Also, the duration in which we all take our exams in makes me feel funny for some reason. Each human in the classroom-turned-examination-hall has his sympathetic nervous system activated more strongly than before including the invigilators. Every single prick demands the attention of the poor humans under the torture of tormenting questions photocopied on pieces of recycled paper such as the biscuit wrapper’s cracking as the invigilator opens it, the clicking of ball point pens by those who think that doing so will make them come up with brilliant answers to questions they can not yet decipher and the clang produced by stationary items dropped on purpose as some signal to cheat perhaps (in the view of the watchmen). Lastly, and most importantly the voice, the proud and tall voice of ‘Sir, SHEET!’ raises not only the head of an average student but also his blood pressure, heartbeat, pulse and temperature and pumps adrenaline, cortisol in his veins resulting in an over exhausted poor little body in the end. Speaking in terms other than biological ones, an average student’s response to such an exclamation varies somewhere on a line on which lie hope, hopelessness, jealousy, longing, frustration, panic, resentment, focus and many other energies, in an order I know not.
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As for the moments after the exam, they are simply memorable. We see people complaining about the complexity of the questions asked, whining about how less time they had to answer them, questioning their friends about how they did it, reopening their notes to confirm what they had written was right, sometimes even resorting to the restroom and crying (yes, there was this girl who cried so hard after her microeconomics exam that her big round eyes grew larger and reminded me of Dobby’s tennis-ball-like-eyes!). After the exam however, things settle down irrespective of how well or bad they had gone in those 3 hours and life moves on.
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This may be a sight at not only at IBA but in fact everywhere where normal students exist. As for me, wherever I will see it sometime in the future, I shall remember my memories at the place, my four years at which flew by like four days.
