Exam fever. Exam blues. Exam fear....
I was to students what Modiji is to most Indians now when he goes “Mere pyare deshwasiyon…” at 8pm (take, and not give, a couple of hours). There was no escaping me, though the exercise seemed futile. There was no wishing me away. I came as I pleased and took my ‘pound of flesh’, as Shakespeare put it. There was no Portia in disguise or otherwise to save Antonio!
Or so I thought. Sigh. ‘Beware the ides of March’, the soothsayer had warned. The writing was on the wall, but I was lost in between the lines.
I am called different names, and I am omnipresent, but March is a month over which I hold sway. Tense students and tenser parents, all sweating over the board exam, which makes or breaks careers for many. There I was, this year too, taking it all in, much to my delight. There were murmurs of a certain virus making its presence felt in the country, but most of us, much like Caesar, dismissed it as a ‘dreamer’ and hoped it would ‘pass’.
It did not. And before I could say ‘time's up, pens down’, I was postponed indefinitely and the country went into a never-seen-before lockdown. I, Exam, for the first time in my life, bowed before the unknown—Covid-19. This virus, which sounded like some English king (did I miss the 18 ones before it? Are there more to come, I dread now), made me feel like the student whose paper was snatched away before he could tie the all-important second knot on his extra sheets. Will those sheets hold on till they reached the evaluator? With extreme trepidation, I crossed out the days.
Schools and colleges were closed and I gathered dust. My masters tried to revive me, but faced stiff resistance from you-know-who. It was the calm before the storm, I consoled myself.
But the storm never came. CBSE betrayed me. They devised their own law of averages to assess the performance of the students and the results were declared. I gulped down the insult and soldiered on.
Amid the clapping, beating of utensils and showering of petals, I was pushed into the shadows. I felt like Thakur Baldev Singh in Sholay, while the nation trembled in the wake of the spike-headed Gabbar Singh.
The man with the hammer, however, came to my rescue. No, not Thor. The Supreme Court gave me my Jai and Veeru—National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) and the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main. Despite protests from students and political parties across the country, the court put its foot down and gave the green signal.
My hopes of regaining past glory soared. But, once again, the C-word was on everyone’s lips and on meme-happy social media. Yeah, don’t mind me. The D-Day arrived. For a second, I thought I was in a medical camp or had walked right into a doctors’ protest rally minus the banners and slogans. Armed with masks and gloves, and face shields to boot, they looked nothing like the chattering and nervously excited groups I was used to. Add to it the sweet-smelling hand sanitisers of every build and quality, and the temperature checks at the entrance. The tension was palpable. And so was the distancing, literally and otherwise. A sneeze or a cough was met with fiery stares that would put even Amrish Puri to shame!
Disappointed and a trifle hurt, I searched for solace in online exams, and soon realised why teachers and angels alike fear to tread there. Gone were the classrooms of yore, and instead, there was Google Classroom and the like. Learning is a never-ending process, and the teachers are learning it the hard way now, as much as the students. But, as history has proved, the students are always a leap ahead of their gurus. I heard tales about benevolent souls who would write the correct answers and pass it on to academically challenged souls on WhatsApp groups and other sharing platforms. Books are kept open, and so are the multiple tabs on the browser. But being time-bound, the students have to know precisely what they are looking for and where. It is almost like playing Fastest-Finger-First on KBC, don’t you think?
Some audacious ones even try to pass off somebody else’s answer sheet as his own, or a Google image as his own diagram. Desperate times call for desperate measures, teachers admit with a chuckle.
And if nothing works, there’s always the good old excuse—rukavat ke liye khed hain (Technical issue. Inconvenience is regretted)! From sudden loss of internet connection, to attachment errors, teachers have now seen it all. Of course, there are proctoring software and AI tools available, but when has surveillance acted as a deterrent for students, really. Eternal optimists and geniuses that they are!
My hopes now rest on the vaccines brewing in the labs around the world. And then, people will behold me with the same old awe and fear. And then, I will ‘bestride the narrow world like a Colossus’ again.
