Testing Times
Having recently concluded my round of examinations and finding them to be pleasantly similar to your common or garden variety of exams, I found myself afforded with vast tracts of time with which to think about any sort of nonsensical subject matter that struck my whim and fancy. Because when one is ploughing with gusto through the main course, the principal thing that is coursing through one's mind is what will be for dessert (this is another of those foul Western habits I've picked up – the necessity to have some sort of sweet or the other after a meal) it of course struck me, but without surprise, about how as good students who have followed most of the rules in the book to a T, have emerged as automatons of executing examinations, to eke out every single drop of marks available like a vendor would, running the dry, lifeless husks of sugarcane repeatedly through the churning presses. After all, its what we've been trained to do for nearly ten years, sneaking like invisible ninja assassins through the metropolis, snucking up behind exams and slitting their throats with a razor, without them giving even the slightest resistance or murmur. I think you even underestimate the stealthiness.
Though wracked with the image of a thousand ninjas slashing a thousand throats, I thought that this was the case in the exam hall where we sat our papers. Ever since we had to take our first exam, parents and teachers had gifted us the perennial analogy that an exam was like this dark, hairy, horrible monster not dissimilar to those that patronised the cupboards in our young dreams, and that given adequate preparation we too could defeat this beast. Fortified by such a potent metaphor, we set about the arduous training but more often than not ended up daydreaming about kicking things, high in the mountains, just like in your requisite B+ sword-fighting epic.
From then, every examination has brought with it such a connotation, that it was some sort of barrier to be surmounted, or destroyed, and failure to do so would only sound the death knell in the quest. The whole academic life cycle, it can be envisioned, may be described as a 110m hurdle race but the hurdles are all covered in razor-sharp, poison-tipped spikes and in the background there are as many fires of hell burning and brimstone spilling as you can care to imagine. For those safely out of the loop, being ushered into another of these races ("No my friend, those were only the heats") seems a little too much, but then you just put on your used, blood drenched number tag and off you go again. There is, of course, no escape.
Much as this image suggests only discomfort and itching, I've always tried to enjoy my exams, thinking of them as something else, as though I go into a large hall, air-conditioned, and sit down at a table and wait to be served. Only that I have no idea what it be, something like going to a restaurant for a beef dinner, where lurking under the flawless steel server could be a tender steak or a dismembered raw calf corpse. I have yet to be unpleasantly surprised though.
