The Last Leg of the Board Exams
Stuff Sivakami and I said during a month of examinations
1. When will the exams get over?
Sivakami said this innumerable times before her Boards started — during her mock and preparatory papers.
2. I made a controversial argument in favor of Shylock.
Antonio was horrible to him, spitting on his Jewish gaberdine and stuff.
Sivakami always had a soft spot for Shylock!
3. She always goes into the Math exam with half a tank of sleep and comes home with half a tank of marks.
I said this before her Math exam.
My strategy to put her to bed didn’t work too well, though. Sivakami babbled AP-GP formulae in her sleep at 5 AM, waking me up.
After her sleep-talking, I couldn’t sleep for the stress. I made her look over the arithmetic progression/geometric progression formulae in her notes before she left for the exam later that morning.
4. After the Chemistry exam and before the Biology exam, Sivakami said: I need to study Mendeleev’s Laws of Inheritance.
Sivakami meant, Mendel’s Laws of Inheritance. Mendeleev was the chemist whose periodic table arranged the elements according to atomic mass.
5. Mom, why did you clean the toilet again today? Sivakami said this to me.
I read that cleaning the toilet brings luck! A Japanese boy was saying so on YouTube. He showed us a statue of a toilet God. He said that rich Japanese businessmen like the Hondas clean their own loos for luck.
I felt it couldn’t hurt, and the sparkling toilet must have felt good.
Two more exams to go. Sivakami is scream-studying Biology today. Two days after Biology, her last exam is Hindi. Soon, she will be on the other side of her matriculation exams and will be face to face with the freedom she has been pining for.
She may find the freedom more irksome than she realizes now.
The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant people are. With anyone over fifty you can be fairly confident what’s been taught and what’s been left out. But these young people have such an intelligent, knowledgeable surface, and then the crust suddenly breaks and you look down into depths of confusion you didn’t know existed.
Evelyn Waugh.