Contemplating a murder

 

You know that phase of life when you just feel drowned in depression and anxiety, nothing seems to go right, you live one day and fear the next one and after spending a day you are left wondering how on earth you lived through that? What do you call it? Winter of your twenties? Depression phase? Apocalypse? Well, we MBBS students call this the exam season.

Medical colleges give their students exams which are tailor made to test the highest levels of their endurance, patience and cramming capacity. In short, they just want to torture the hell out of the students. Scheduling exams during the festive season, giving no holidays in between exams and setting some really creativity-provoking question papers are just some ways in which medical colleges aim to make the students “tough” enough to deal with a doctor’s life.

If one looks around the exam hall one can see all kinds of students: the ones with revolving heads, the ones who write at full-speed as if their life depends upon it, people who simply stare into the horizon or people who frantically scratch their heads or bite their pens to find some idea or motivation to write.

Like students, questions are also of different kinds. Some questions laugh at us from within the question paper as if saying, “You saw me but dared to turn the page. Think I am unimportant, eh? But look at me now as I grace the 10 marks section. Its revenge time.” Then some others are like those unfamiliar faces one sees on public transport. One does not know from which chapter they are, what they stand for or even their pronunciation for that matter. Also, there are some savior questions which you have studied and when you see them on the question paper, you cry tears of joy. Finally, there are some legendary questions in some subjects which makes one silently contemplate murdering the invigilating professor using a one-side sharp blade kitchen knife and imagine the appearance and depth of the stab wound created thereafter.

The invigilating professors, unlike the students seem to enjoy every bit of this exhilarating exam journey. One finds them eating delicious snacks with coffee in the exam hall, taking short breaks to change the seats of some poor student caught asking something to the person in front. Sometimes they would come and say, “You are asking him? Ask me instead. Now, now, which MCQ do you want? Number 4, is it? It was written with purple ink on the umpteenth page of the Textbook of Murders. Does that ring a bell? No? What a pity!” While at other times some of them are kind enough to provide some actual help with some really difficult questions.

In life we always tend to think that we have plenty of time and we can always do something “later”. These exams probably come to teach us that this is not true at all. That’s why a famous Hindi saying goes as: “Jo kal kare so aaj kar, jo aj kare so ab”. (What can be done tomorrow, do it today. What can be done today, do it now.)