of the moment

People might just end up judging me by this one. It's one of those things that leaves the nerd in me screaming with jubilation at being embraced and shown off. This is one of those moments when the nut in me takes over and i write what i find hardest to confess.

Ok! Enough of the build-up. The nerd-osity is in your face long before i say my first words and though, now, i occasionally pretend to chafe under the tag, i revel in it most of the times.

This one is about a little thing called exams. Yes, i know. I've written about those before. But this is different. This is one of those wacky confessions that is going to leave one half of it's readership in splits and the other half gaping in pity. I can never tell which is which. But getting down to brass tacks...finally... I love the feeling of pounding out a paper.

Exams give me this mad rush of adrenalin that's never bad. While the hours slither by like a sinuous boa in the sands, i am happily burning out the ink and spitting out page after page of what could have been crap, but what looks like a loopy and exhaustive answer. I know a tee-shirt that says: "If you can't dazzle them with brilliance, then baffle them with bullshit" and the marks will come a tumblin' at ya!

The soft rustle as a sheet of paper is turned, the random little coughles and the severely tense atmosphere in the room where feverish attempts are made to nail those ever-elusive marks are sounds of the most charged atmosphere to me a lot of times. You can alost hear as pens strain to grind through the paper and into the wretched grooves on the persecuted desks. You can sense the breathing of the person behind you, next to you, in fron of you....THREE ROWS FROM YOU...quicken ambiguously. Does it mean that she knows or does that mean that she's met her match? There's no time to tarry. Ponder later. Your own battle is still neatly smiling at you from the question paper.

You roll up your sleeves. Your tic takes over. Knuckles crack. Caps click open and shut again. That point evades you, slides into the folds of your brain and slips away among the many layers of things that you know that you should remember but can't quite tell what they were. The supervisor moves nervously. A cheat? Or just plain restless? She hasn't looked up for an hour now...is her neck ok? He looks like he's going to write clean off the page if he goes at that speed! And he's surely missing a thought. A student sees the supervisor looking. The look is a blank far off stare.

She's searching the silence for some action. Your eyes are tempted. They follow. But then that dull purple grey of the question paper has more for you to tackle. You look back. Seconds per word. The pace gets hotter.

Ah! That final point! But wait! I can't relax! Have i done everything? More crackling joins you as if in accompaniment. The papers have all been tuned and grooved to sound the same: battered yet strangely musical. The worst is over. Shaking hands wield a pencil. The ruler is forgotten. Time will not permit it. Sub headings are distinguished from that mass of anxious text. The final line skids to a halt!

Phew! Saunter out. Breathe. It's over. Until the next one.