Decisions

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10
18
17

My math scores between 2001 and 2003 do not look very encouraging. SSG didn’t help with her tireless crusade against me and my helpless friends, and this hapless group included Tarkari, O-Sam-a and P Shome. Another thing that went against me was that Calculus involved no numbers, a fact I was not aware of when I filled my forms.

Until then, Calculus was this cute professor in Tin Tin comics.

In the end there I was, burdened by PCM, the most “challenging” of the courses. Cruel indeed, was Mathematics, but it earned me a few gold medals.

The credit goes to Patrick for coming up with this ingenious analysis of examination-leaving skills. Now those who thought they spent the least time in the examination hall would have an imaginary medal to prove it. So in the end, those of us who weren’t cut out for the Math Olympiad did get the consolation a medal to reward our resistance to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s evil spawn.

Physics was another chamber of tortures and in the end it took good old-fashioned mugging up to scrape through those initial exams. Tarkari and P Shome though were in a league of their own. While O-Sam-A and I disintegrated under the formulas, our two commendable Bong Brothers sailed through their integration sums.

Well, those medals were kept aside for a while, when the twelfth finals loomed. Considering that my total over my last 4 exams was 53 to be precise, I needed to double my previous best (18) to pass. Well you can guess the results from this hint; the exam was Istanbul, and I was Liverpool.

35

I look back now and I see an incredible slide in my academic records. But somehow I have no regrets, and while that curve was downward, there was another that went up. My ability to make decisions for myself grew when I started realizing that I was failing miserably when I tried to stick to the safety of norms. I was never cut out for a Science course, and deep inside I knew it. It took two years and a lot of cussing, failed subjects and below par attendance, to make me realize that I hated what I was supposed to be doing.

Maybe that’s why the adventure of a trip to Bangalore looked so promising. That was the beginning of independent Sly.