‘April is the cruelest month…’ sang the poet. But I beg to
differ to the bard. March it is! March sets anxiety and panic afloat, for it plays host to
the most primitive of testing procedures man has derived, exams. How many hours of a good night’s sleep does
man lose owing to these unyielding exercises of questions and answers? Yield, of
course they do; marks and grades. But again, no use to the mankind, in the long
run or short!
Paranoia rules homes. Fathers develop burning ears,
shivering moustaches, mothers suffer head-aches and stomach upsets. And both
upset the poor child like what an overheated pan does to some well-kneaded
dough.
Remember those study holidays when all you were allowed to
do was to be at the study table and ogle at the book? And on the D-days, to eat
was mechanical, to breathe was like steaming and even sleep was hard work! Such
was the influence of the mere thought of those question papers on you that numbness
was all you could feel, if you ever could. Forgetfulness was the order of the
day and memory was just another name to fearful loss of it. Such was the
buildup, that the world around was totally irrelevant. Parents had joined hands
with the army of teachers in all-out war on you. Siblings were nuisance and
friends, jealous competition!
The result day was even worse. It
is like ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ answer papers! You
get to know what the margin of your defeat is. If you scored 60%, you fell
short by 40, if you scored 75, your failure margin was down to 25% and if you
scored 95, you were still short by 5%. Had it not been for the exams and their results,
you would still be confident about your awareness on science and statistics; mathematics
and history would not give you nightmares; grammar and phonemics were distant
botherations.
The ideal academia in my book will be one without
exams. One where all are evaluated on
their forte and not on what they flunk in. And each faculty one flunks adds a
bonus point to what one scores in. It makes better sense to produce a master of
one faculty than to make a jack of all.
The other day, I wanted to set it right and told my bigger
one to relax. ‘Answer what you can remember from the lessons the teacher gave’
I said ‘too much of anything is bad.’ She was silent for a couple of seconds. I
thought she would yell in total glee. She yelled alright. Referring to one of
the many times when the social animal parent in me overpowered the thinker
intellect I pretend to be, she yelled back “and listen to you chiding me all
night on the result day?”
