The
memories of the state board chemistry public exam of March 1986 and the period
from when the results were announced till the time I stepped into college, are
still fresh in my mind. My daughter has
just finished with her 12th CBSE board exams and it’s interesting to
see, how so many patterns still remain the same, when we see the situation that students are into, across
the years. In the month of September in 1985, when the quarterly exams results
were being declared by the teachers for the 12th standard, each
student was called up and a feedback was given on his or her performance in
front of the whole class. We were just 70 students and this was a batch that
had been picked up after a lot of weaning out of the non performers in the 9th
standard. The state board scores were out of 200 and the toppers reached a
maximum of 175 in the main subjects like maths, physics, chemistry and biology.
It was not that scoring much higher was difficult but I think the best students
were yet to get into the preparations with a killer mode, as the final public
examination was still a good 6 months away.
Our
chemistry teacher was distributing the answer sheets and giving her feedback
while my heart kept pounding. I wanted to remain calm but marks were everything for me and I just waited without being able to thinking about anything else. The top
students in the class collected their papers and the maximum score stood at
174 so far. And then I heard my name being called. “I just kept this paper for the
last. Can anyone imagine how much Roy has scored?” asked my teacher. There was
pin drop silence and my heart kept beating faster. “He has scored 193. I am
really happy with his performance. Give him a big hand. Please maintain this momentum
Roy, keep scoring higher and finish with a centum”, she said with a warm smile.
It took time for this to sink in as I just could not hear the sustained claps
and thumping on the desks from my classmates, while I walked back and sat at my
place. I felt very special that day. Many classmates had just joined the 11th
standard from other schools and in their eyes I created an impression. I was
already a serial first ranker right through most of the years at school and my
old mates knew that, but this was something special. And so, in addition to the topping the class
and a centum in maths, there came in another expectation to score a centum in
chemistry too. Each expectation grew every day in me like within a huge pressure
vessel, slowly building the pressure inside, every day.
In
the days that went by, I developed special strategies for attacking the chemistry
question paper. There was a ten marks organic chemistry question right at the
end and I always cracked that first and then with the huge momentum that I
gained out of it, I raced through the entire paper and finished in pretty well
each time. I was getting a rhythm and success was smiling at me each time in
chemistry. I really felt that I would get the centum that I was so keen to. But then, on the day of the public exam, my plans did not fall in
place. The ten marks question just did not give in and I had to skip it and
finish the rest of the paper and then get back and try it again. It never came through. I could not
enjoy the examination and I was not relaxed right through. When the results
came, my score was again just 193. On the whole my scores were pretty good and
it got me a mechanical engineering seat at the College of Engineering, Guindy,
the top college in the Anna University that day, but still I was crest fallen
that I had not got a centum in chemistry. What hurt me more was when I faced the
questions that my classmates, my chemistry teacher and other teachers asked me
as they had huge expectations from me. My Dad’s friends and our relatives had
expected me to top the state. It was an irony that I carried this pain inside
me for several years although I had admission offers from six engineering
colleges and three medical colleges that year. The root to this pain was in my trying to
satisfy what others were expecting from me. It was more to do with questions
such as “How will I face them?”, “What will I answer them?” that was running inside me.
Our
society and our external world is still the same and they are always keen when
it comes to 10th or 12th standard results. On the day the
results were announced for my daughter, I had a large number of calls and messages
on my phone. A few of these were from those who were genuinely interested in the progress of my child, but the rest I believe were just those who wanted to
quench their inquisitiveness and gather some news to talk about it elsewhere. I
responded to a few and left the rest as I could not at that point in time. I
responded to them later. There were a variety of questions like “Any centums?”,
“What is her MPC score?”, “Has she got into Anna University?”, “Why did she
take Computer Science when the computer industry is in doldrums?”, “What is her
total and percentage?” and “Why is she not going for medicine. It’s evergreen?”
and so on. At one point I thought it would be sensible to hire an exclusive person
for a month to handle public relations. A week before the results were
announced, I noticed a number of people calling my daughter while at church to
ask her about the results. It was an intimidating experience for her and it was
very similar to what I had gone through. This has become like some kind of
malignancy that has affected our society. From my experience, I have seen how communication skills, presentation skills, monitoring skills and other soft skills have really helped individuals move up the ladder. The marks scored just becomes one minuscule element in our career journey.
Now,
let me place some interesting statistics in front of you. An MPC score of
197.85 that I had scored in 1986 is a pretty high score. But I have several
friends who scored much lesser than me and who had to study in colleges which
were not as highly rated as the one where I had studied, but have raced to very
high positions in their career. Three of them are vice presidents in multinational
companies. A lot of my classmates and school mates, who could never score the
marks that I could, have made a lot more money than what I could and have lot
more assets in their possession than what I could buy. So if it’s just money, assets and position, even then only a few in the circle enquire about it. In the
twenty four years that I have been out of college, this society who has been
after me on my marks has hardly asked me anything on what I am doing in my job.
They will probably surface again with their questions if I sit at home without
a job and as long as I pick up my office bag and leave every day morning and go
somewhere and come back in the evening, they are fine. I have not had one
person in this circle who has asked me “What did you do with the engineering
you studied?” or something like “Did you develop anything new that relieves the
common man from the suffering he is going through every day?” These are
questions that really ponder around making a mark in the field and not just the
number game and rat race. The best that you could get from a few would be “What
is your salary there?” or “What is your position there?” It does not really
matter to them about what you do in that position or job.
In
2005, I was into an assignment as a contractor with a leading aircraft manufacturer
in the USA. A elder relative of mine derived a lot
of pride in sharing the news with a lot of his friends that I was in the USA and
that too with this leading company, the name of which was known to every common
man. In 2007, I told him that I preferred to take a change in my assignment
as there was nothing new that I was learning or doing. I could sit there and
continue but that would be a vegetating exercise. “Be there itself. That brand
is known to people here. I don’t know anything about the new company where you
are heading for.”, was the advice I got from him.
Even today, we tend to take
career decisions or decisions on what area to pursue in our studies based on
how society looks at it. Even if it's not that way, we face stiff resistance from different quarters due to our choice. That decides our market value for marriages and our
face in the society in general. The earlier we break it, the better, but in
India, this will continue to be in vogue.
