And another one bites the dust.....

Happy New Year!!

May all your troubles last as long as your New Year resolutions!

Ow.

My butt is aching after sitting on a wooden plank-chair for three and a half hours straight.






More later.

EDIT:

The full story? You bet.

Though this is not an attempt to expose the insane state of affairs at weird-ish NTSE centres in Delhi, I have an even more weird-ish feeling it just might come close.

12 November, 2006 A.D.
2:00 AM.
I trudge back home bleary-eyed after spending two and a half hours trying to play football with a bunch of guys 1 x 100000000000000000^1000000000 better than me.

7:00 AM.
Moi gets up, looks for school uniform, calls up 5 people to ask if they are going for the NTSE.Is suddenly hit with the relevation that I just might be the only one giving it.

9:00 AM.
I reach Govt Boys Senior Secondary School, Minto Road, just as it says on the admit card.

9:15 AM.
The centre has been changed to Govt Something-Something School, Mata-Something Road, just as it says on the admit card.Not.

9:30 AM.
I am in room no. 12 hopefully with people from school, if they decide to turn up.

9:45 AM.
I am sitting on a wooden plank/chair, next to a wispy-ish 8thie from Lady Irwin School.
I am also being shouted at by the Invigilator for sitting at the wrong seat.
I am also being asked to get up, look up my correct seat number and find it.
I sit at the same seat again because it is the correct seat.
I am shouted at again and made to look for the correct seat.Again.
I am shouted at for the third time AND made to look for the correct seat AGAIN (does it matter that I am ALREADY sitting on it??)
My dad is shouted for being in the room.Does it matter that they are parents of five other kids there??
I think that the Invigilator does not like me.

10:00AM.
MAT begins.

11:30 AM.
MAT ends.
I try not to look at the Invigilator as she collects my question paper.

11:35 AM.
SAT begins. By now, my butt is aching (badly) because I am still sitting on the wooden plank/chair. The fans are off. Every 17.5 mins, I can hear the sound of a train passing.The Invigilator is also pissing me off.Because she happens to think I am some snooty kid.Which I am not.

11:59 AM.
The SAT sucks.Majorly. Super majorly.
I have resigned myself to picking out mistakes in the question paper and irritating the Invigilator by pointing out every single one of them to her, then asking in my most innocuous voice whether she can get them clarified.

12:12PM.
Shruti asks the Invigilator if the people who have finished the paper can leave.The Invigilator says no.
A groan resounds through the un-classroom.

12:56 PM.
Contrary to what Disha expresses on the C-Box, I am not in love with my paper.I am just scouring it for any questions I might know.

1:00 PM
Shruti asks the Invigilator again.The Invigilator says no again.A groan resounds through the un-classroom again.

1:10 PM
The NTSE is over.
A horde of people rushes out of room 12.
Freedom! Liberty! Tyranny is dead!

And so ends a chapter in Vasudha's life.

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And then you expect us to be sane??!!

Its always been a universally accepted fact that the CBSE has never exactly been......well.....normal.I mean, look at the syllabus for instance.The same poem we did last year is there in the Orient Longman Grade 2 textbook.Says a lot for the standard of things.But this happens to be something way unexpected.

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful -- The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles.
I have looked at it so long I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake.
A woman bends over me, Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully. She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


-Sylvia Plath

"............................Sylvia suffered from bouts of severe depression throughout her life. She had entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950, but in the summer of 1953, after her return from a guest editorship at Mademoiselle magazine in New York, she experienced a severe episode of depression and was treated with a regimen of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and, subsequently, at the beginning of her junior year, on August 24, 1953, she made the first of her suicide attempts. She was committed to a mental institution, and seemed to make an acceptable recovery, graduating from Smith in 1955, the same year she won the prestigious Glascock Prize competition for her poem "Two Lovers And A Beachcomber By The Sea." She later depicted her breakdown in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar."

The suicide attempts didn't stop.Know how she finally died?

By sticking her head in an oven.