Staring at the Ceiling Fan

Note: The run up to CAT 2005.

Finally, the post on CAT that I had promised in another post of mine. I can say with a lot of confidence that it was the only entrance exam that I attended, thinking, I had a real good chance.(I still do) But as usual, it ended the way every other exam did. Beached high and dry.

The journey started on February 8th when we guys joined for coaching at T.I.M.E, T Nagar. Still remember, we started off with a bang. I, to start with, forgot my identity card right on the first day. (so typical of me, people would say) I had to listen to a lecture on how inappropriate a person, I was, to write CAT. He had some valuable points. Then again, in a class of eight, me and my friend were caught talking, by the same person. The lecture that followed was a bit longer, but the views were more or less similar.

The classes began. We began doing what comes naturally to us, bunking them. If we had five classes a week, we attended a class once in two weeks. Don’t blame me. Who listens to what the tone of the passage is all about??? Or Was the guy who wrote this, insane or not ??? Lot of people did, I couldn’t. I used to attend most of the quants classes, would sit there shouting all the wrong answers and irritating the staff. Right or wrong, quants was always fun because most of the girls who talked crap (please assume what I don’t understand is crap) during verbal classes used to be unusually quiet.

Then, the test series (guys, whatever be your mode of preparation, if you skip these, CAT would remain a dream) began. There are about 18 of these (in TIME) before you write CAT. They just told us one godamn fact “You suck at this”. But the routine was strictly followed. Every Sunday, we went to Loyola College to write, made a big mess of it. We analyzed our mistakes in the couple of days that followed. The results came by Tuesday night. Told ourselves, we are gonna do better this Sunday. The next 4 days days was spent in deep thought “What if I do better?”. The question “How could I do better?” never popped up even once. The D day comes and the same procedure follows (except, for a couple of weeks, when our time table had an odd class we went to). This went on till November 13th of 2005. My last mock CAT saw me getting my highest. Naturally upbeat, I told myself, “You are set for the kill”. It took me just another week to find out that the hunter had become the hunted.

p.s: Sorry, the post was turning out to be a very long one. So, what happened on November 20th has been moved to another post.