My Madras University

I was just registering for a course here at UC this quarter and my mind inadvertantly went back to those good old days in Madras University when we used to have a month's 'study holiday' before semester exams. I have nooo idea how many of you are even familiar with Madras University or the way they used to conduct examinations n stuff... But I can proudly tell you that I belonged to the last batch of Madras University (Its now become Anna University and I dont think its any different in the way it functions... )

Study hols were that period of life in which I couldnt explain my natural tendencies towards many things. I mean everyone knew that studying was the last thing on our minds... We had 30 days to study 5 units from 6 subjects, a total of 30 units... which we could do leisurely at a unit a day... Now come on... who'd wanna do as less a unit a day.. there was no challenge in that... You might as well make it 2 units a day and enjoy the 15 days you saved... Sadly, our parents neither bought our theories nor agreed with them. I am more a 'book' person than a 'TV' person... So i found it really hard to explain why I had to see 'Kyunki Saas...' when I hated soaps, or 'Khana Khazana' when I didnt know 3/4ths the ingredients Sanjeev Kapoor was using... Practically everything on TV from 'Small Wonder' to 'Annamalai' became a must-watch. And then were these perfunctory hours you had to spend in your room, pretending to study while I secretly laughed over a copy of 'Archie' obviously open inside my textbook (My visits to my lending library reached peaks my parents were unaware of!) The textbooks we used, were something we never bought at all... Most of the time it was this cheap 24paise Adyar-Xerox copy which you could hardly read from.. To accompany them were these horrendous green/pink 2-mark question books, which we saved for the bus journey the morning of the exam and... how can I forget the Question-Bank... The most effective method of study to date has been to make a list of the 12-mark questions they asked year after year n study the most common ones.. Had never failed me in my 4 yrs of engineering!

And then all sorts of classmates landing up on your doorstep the night before the exam, "Andha notesa oru 15 minutes eduthutu polama? Inime thaan padikave aarambikanam" -- (Can i please borrow those notes for 15 minutes? Have t start studying after that)

And how can I forget the phone calls?? My parents being aware of what branch my friends belonged to would obviously frown upon me if I spoke an hour to Gayathiri ("She's in Civil..what can you possibly discuss??") or Naresh ("I'm sure he'd have finished 2 subjects by now"). This was unfortunately true... Naresh had this knack of 'tensing' people up by the amount of study he did. To match his pace, I would need 400 hours in a day.. Luckily for me, other people's studying didnt bother me one bit... But then that meant I had to play counseler to sooo many of my friends who called up all nervous, "Did you know he's done 3 units in 'Numerical Methods'? And thats only our 4th exam!"

And ofcourse you treated yourself if you met a target you never thought you'd do.. For me, it was giving myself a TV program, or an hour more of sleep or an extra phone call! I'm a total night-person and I can't dream of getting up early.. I mean study hols were especially bad... I would rather stay up to the hours some of my friends got up at rather than do it their way.. Hehe..

The day of the exam itself... For most people, it was the D-day where one expunged everything from memory to the paper... For me, it was an intermediary act. I had to sleep after an exam to get the contents of that exam out before I could absorb material for the next one!

My most memorable exam to date has been my DSP exam. The invigilator was this guy who we called 'Isku'(roughly a play on the hindi word 'Ishq') coz his initials were I.S.K n he thot he was just tooo good..and he as usual hated me for no known reason.. He gave us our answerbooks. (I was soo dumb that I didnt know that these answer booklets were standard and each had 21 sheets n all) In mine, the first page was 80% torn... and I happily ripped it right off n started using it as a rough-sheet to do my calculations! With 30 minutes left in the exam, Isku moved up in front of me n saw this piece of paper sticking out from under my exam-pad. He grabbed it and his eyes literally gleamed as he screamed "I have found the secret to your intelligence -- You are copying!" I was confused for a microsecond -- I mean that would be the secret to my marks if anything... how could it be the key to my intelligence?? Undeterred I kept writing as he went to fetch the college dean.. My close friend, Kavi was sitting to my right and kept shooting furtive glances at me. I heard Isku in the corridor and knew there was more to come. Damn! He walked up to me still with that gleam and the dean at his heels. The dean thankfully knew of my actual 'intelligence' n found it hard to believe that this sheet I had matched the exact cut of paper in the front page and that the math scribbled there was exactly to the questions in the paper... He reprimanded me for my stupidity in tearing the page off and attached it back with his endorsement.. And I couldnt help but steal a glance at Isku... He was quite crushed.. :)

When I compare all that to this plagiarism stuff that we hear all about in the US n everything, I sort of miss Madras University... The movies... the arattai... the spoon-feeding (My patti used to maintain a desk-service during exams.. everything reached me at where I 'studied' n was taken from where I left them)... those bus journies on exam-day, and ofcourse the semester holidays! Here, I actually had a quarter where I took just 3 classes and the finals of all of them fell on the same day... I mean how horrible can your luck get? In some way, I'm in a sort of limbo now... hose Madras Univ days are never gonna come back.. nor are the 3-exam days... I am as of now stuck with a whole lot of research and a bit of scattered course work to do... Enough illusioning I guess.. Quarter begins Monday...