Staring at the Ceiling Fan

CAT around the corner. Didn’t actually hit me till the day before the exam, ie 19^th November, 2005. It was actually early for me. Usually, the seriousness of the day that follows hits me late in the night. (every semester this happens) The reason: TV channels. It was obvious that everybody wanted a piece of CAT. Different names: Bell the cat, ring the cat, etc but the same thing. All they did is catch hold of a couple of guys who wrote CAT probably a decade ago, when it was not even half as difficult as it is now, to give aspirants some gyaan. And it was quite obvious that they had completely forgotten what it was. But it did succeed in freaking me out.

Now with my nerves all charged up, I had no idea what to prepare for. Confused, I sat up the whole night watching Sidhu talking rubbish on NDTV. I must agree, he does talk sense once in a while. But when the package looks so stupid who cares to see what is inside. My center was the Meenakshi College for women. I was the only one, in my circle of friends, who wrote there. As I didn’t want to be late, I was one of the early birds who got there. All around me were people who “looked” confident. A whole hour was wasted watching people joining in groups talking about how good or bad their preparation was. Whatever they said one thing was sure, no one was speaking the truth. Either they exaggerated or they were too modest.

About fifteen minutes later, I was at my seat, looking around at the competition, I had, in the hall. There were people from all ages, from 20 to 40 or more. All of them had one thing in common: Anxious faces. The paper was given. The face expression grew from bad to worse. I, on the other hand, seeing there was both one mark and two mark question thought I could capitalize and score high. What I had missed was the fact that there were only 90 questions. The announcement came very loud and clear ”You may open your booklets. You have two hours before the completion of the exam.”

My strategy was simple. Get through my verbal in about half an hour, (not because I was exceptionally good at that, but because I wanted to minimize the time wastage), move on to DI (try my luck) and then finish off with quants (the only section I was comfortable with). So, I started solving verbal and it took me a couple of minutes to find out that the verbal section was as difficult as one could get in CAT. Didn’t know a thing. It didn’t matter. Used up half an hour on it. Then went on to DI. I felt it was very easy. The last part was quants. It must have been the pressure. I kept looking at the same questions for an hour and didn’t solve much. The two hour bell rang with utmost precision and even before I knew, I was walking down the narrow stairs.

With my nerves all wrecked, I couldn’t go home straight, so wandered around for another half an hour. Reached home, tried to analyze what I had done, to find out that the quants paper which I thought was very difficult was indeed insanely simple. DIFFERENT answer keys were published by the various institutes (T.I.M.E, IMS, Career plan, PT India,..) and at about 8 PM that night, I knew what a mess I had made. It was a matter of one day that spoilt a year of preparation. (Quoting someone else here, I wasted a lot lesser time) The results came. Indeed, the percentile I got was a lot better than I thought I would get, after the exam. One important lesson learnt was that you can be as prepared as you want, but if you don’t have the luck on that day, you’ll just end up waiting for another year or will have to search for easier avenues.