Making of a joker-Part 1

I was in class 10th when I felt it first time. My mom told me to study hard as 10th was board exam year. If I study well I will have a great life. It was just matter of a year of hard work & enjoyment of whole life. I was given a choice & The choice was obvious & being smart & obedient, I worked hard & got ok if not good marks.

I was in class 11th. My teacher told me that up to now it was a piece of cake & I thought WHAT!!!!! I wasted my 16 years on what turned out to be a piece of a cake. Why didn’t they offer me actual thing before. It did not make any sense to me but ok, yesterday is history I thought & listened to my teacher. He told all of us that these 2 years will make or break our life. It was again 2 years of hard work & lifetime of enjoyment. There was no choice. Only a dumb or true daring person would chose 2 years of enjoyment & lifetime of struggle & me being neither, chose what was obvious.
I studied hard & a lot. I still remember I was weak in mathematics those days. I had managed to learn how to cram sentences but cramming numbers & figures was a different ball game & I was quite bad at that. I still remember I scored pathetic in mathematics but I needed a way out & I found one in time. I was told that people score 99 even 100 out of 100 in mathematics & I didnt’ know how. But At the end it was just easy. I followed that as I needed those 99 or 100 badly. Like most if not all of them I always knew the answer to every question in that exam & rest was a piece of cake. In short We all crammed the whole book!!!! What I got was 99 out of 100 which didn’t mean to me that I was mathematics champ like most of them were. It was just that I had found a way to cram numbers & figures too like most of them had. I had crammed a mathematics book of about 300 questions & answered 30 out of them correctly. Wow!! I was learning the art of education. My first step in becoming a joker of the pack was successful & we all celebrated it.

I entered an engineering college & I woke up. What I see in front of me was a life where I needed to work hard all the days & where the hell was that promised deal of study 1 year & enjoy whole life!! I was being hood winked by eventually all of them. But that’s ok I don’t blame them. Someone must have done same with them too. So I realized that there’s no way out now. Then I took the most important break of my life & saw what’s happening. Upto now I was just following what others were saying because I forgot to question. In that process of cramming & vomiting the crammed material in exam, I lost my power to ask & challenge. This was all a pack of jokers & I was a good joker upto then. When I looked back, I saw, I read every damn book not to learn something interesting or new but to cram it & speak in its way. I looked back on 18 years of my life. I looked at English, Math, Hindi, Science, Economics, History, Geography, Civics blah blah blah. I don’t know if I am different or just too good. But somehow I just managed to abstract myself from the burden of all these names. These were all sets of questions to me & I was told from where to cram the answers. I just have one significant achievement upto now; I have managed to learn how to CRAM!!!!!! Now I had the deal to polish it to do M Tech, PhD or something which would look like 99 out of 100!! of course then I would had awesome life again. Only a fool or a true daring person would refuse it as usual, but this time I was ready to try to start becoming one of them.
(To be continued.....)

Arpit