It was 3:30 a.m. It was pitch dark outside with the mercury at -2 degrees. I had forgotten to turn the boiler on before going to bed, so the house was freezing. Yet I woke up sweating as if I’d just been in a furnace. There is, perhaps inevitably, a nightmare involved- one about my Class IX additional mathematics exam I took nearly 8 years ago.

I walked into the exam hall a little apprehensive about my preparations. My friends at the esteemed south Calcutta school were eagerly discussing the hottest news off the tuition circuit about which variant of the most complex quadratic equation was about to be tested in the paper.

Some of the class toppers were giving advice to the lower beings about which sums to glance over at the last minute, pearls of wisdom which were lapped up eagerly. Some students were sitting in a corner turning over the pages of their Maths books so feverishly that I wondered whether they had decided to memorize the sums in it.

Some students from a prominent Rajasthani community walked around without a care in the world mocking the others who pored over their books, perhaps secure in the thought that their family business would surely employ them.

As the time for the exam to start drew nearer, the chatter was prominently rarer. The students focused on their own books and divine scripts (the infamous tuition ‘notes’). Over the last 15 minutes, my state of mind had sunk from slightly scared to panic.

It looked like I hadn’t prepared half as well as the other lot. I didn’t even understand most of the sums they were discussing, which has got to be a bad sign. I had skived off countless number of times during my Maths tuition to play cricket, moments I was cursing now.

When the paper was handed out, my fears were confirmed. I thought I knew enough to scrape it through, but when did that matter? Anything less than 85 is mediocre, and anything below 70 is blasphemous. As I was grinding out the answers, I knew I would never make a living out of crunching numbers.

After the exam was over came the worst ordeal. All the so-called brightest students had jotted down their answers to the various questions and were exchanging them with others. Herd mentality ruling paramount, I had done the same, but my answers didn’t seem to agree to most of the ones which the seers had. Since they must be right (what with the 5 hours per night studying and scores of tuitions), I had definitely flunked it.

The whole journey back home I felt like a zombie, that something terrible had befallen me, something much worse than an exam failure. I had realized that I was a loser, one of the people who were destined to play carom on the roadside in their 20s instead of being in a high flying career. Relatives would tut at my name pitifully (and mockingly) and my parents wouldn’t be able to speak of me without a tinge of disappointment in their voices.

That is a middle class Bengali family’s nightmare, for they are usually supposed to be manufacturing units for doctors and engineers. Imagine if all of us had made it, where would all the other professions go?

I walked into my house to my parents’ expectant faces asking how I fared. One look at my gloomy face and they understood. But even while consoling me (my parents were infinitely better at this than some of the others who’d have beaten the boy black and blue), they did not forget to mention that I hadn’t put in the required work.

Of course I hadn’t. I hated most if not all of the subjects being taught. I hated what I was being taught and how I was being taught. I hated the 1,000 pages which I was supposed to memorize each week, and that was supposed to demonstrate my knowledge of the subject.

I played truant in class (sorry Aroti aunty for flinging the chalk at you when you were writing on the blackboard) and cricket in the evenings (sorry Ashish sir for missing your tuitions). Each day what was taught in class we were supposed to memorize in the evening. I didn’t, so fell further and further behind. Next day I didn’t understand what was being taught because I hadn’t done my homework so I fell behind even more. It was a self-destructive whirlpool I had gotten into, and my results (along with my future) were sinking fast.

As I cried that night in my room I realized that I could never succeed in this rat race. I admired and was jealous of my fellow classmates who could summon up the motivation to learn all this garbage (minerals in the London basin, for example) but I just didn’t have it in me. The Indian journey was just too insurmountable for me, and I was destined to never make it in life.

I got up and went outside. It was literally freezing and I was wearing just shorts and a T-shirt. The sky was cloudless and the moon was bright. As I breathed in the cold and fresh December air I realized just how relieved I am that my nightmare was about events in the past and not the present. A wave of pure and unadulterated joy overtook me and I broke into laughter, only to quickly realize the time and the fact that my emotions may not be appreciated by my neighbors, especially at this time of the morning.

I have left India behind. Even when it sometimes catches up with me it scares the life out of me. For people like me- mediocre students who are after something else apart from memorizing from school education – India offers no hope. Our ceiling in life is determined beforehand- a mediocre job with a mediocre life. I could have never held my head high in the company of the brightest students in my class.

England has offered me a ray of hope in life. It has taught me that memorizing chunks of text does not get you marks in every corner of the world. It was given me a life which I could never have dreamed of as I was sitting in the quicksand of the Madhyamik syllabus, slowly but surely falling behind each day, fearing the next, and dreading what was going to happen if I get 5 marks less than the person I sit next to. Would he talk to me after he knew I was a poor student?

In fact, I have learnt in England that no matter how hopeless India has told me I am in a particular field, it is not necessarily so. It could have been the system itself that had stifled the life out of me and the fun out of Maths, so much so that I detested numbers each time I looked at them.

You know how I know? Because today I work in one of the biggest accountancy firms in the world.

Next time when I go to India I will search in my wardrobe for those Maths tuition notes. And I also plan to invest in a shredder.        

January 25, 2009

Image under license with Gettyimages.com

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