phase test and music

The Phase Test was held yesterday. Now I don’t want to resurrect bad memories that should have faded away by now to be replaced by happier thoughts, but unfortunately a chronicler’s got to do his job. I admit I wasn’t able to sleep much the night before, but it wasn’t because I was nervous or anything, because, strangely, I wasn’t really. I was just not used to going to bed so early (10 p.m. compared to 1 a.m. during the vacation.) I had studied what I thought was enough, although physics is practically the only thing I did, the other two subjects being so boring that getting within ten feet of the books made me yawn. I reached school an hour before the test was slated to start, since I like reaching early on test days, and met Nicky at the entrance, and immediately dropped the misplaced idea I had about studying a bit before the test. We kind of spent the greater part of that hour wandering around the corridors and watching others tear at their hair in nervousness as they stared into an open book with a constipated look on their faces and decided that we were the only ones who weren’t studying then. Then it was time for the test, and I thought I did reasonably well in chemistry and physics (not so well in math), and was thus satisfied. I met up with Nicky again during the lunch break, and we kind of went down to the second floor and began making disparaging remarks against the disciplinarian in total abandon while standing right outside his cabin, which was fortunately empty, ignoring the fact that members of staff were passing by within earshot of us continually. Then it was time for Paper II, and as is my habit, I chose to pass off the rumors that this paper was going to be a lot harder than the first as one of those common fallacies that sprouted from a nervous mind. Sadly, those rumors turned out to be true in the case of math, where I barely did half the questions. I thought I did physics and chemistry well, although the new subjective section (in both) occasioned me no little anxiety. Right when I was exiting the room (at this point I think it would be worth mentioning that one of the proctors was the French teacher), I found the IPE teacher standing rather unobtrusively outside. He smiled at me in this “uh-oh!” sort of way, and I said Hi so as not to appear rude, and then he told me he was going to announce some corrections in the math section. I walked away briskly. There was nothing I could have done, anyway, once I’d turned in my paper.

During Test Analysis today (that fancy session that my school thinks will benefit everyone, although if you ask me, it’s just another one of their cheap tricks to make us come to school), it transpired that I had actually done pretty badly in chemistry. I expectedly did badly in math, so that left physics as the only hope for redemption. Luckily I did do pretty well in physics, and I think that is what saved me from falling into the bottomless abyss of irrevocable failure. Although my total score would easily look like that of a failure (194/480), I have in my defense several facts about the test that make it different from the regular tests: this test was of the standard of the IIT-JEE (my physics teacher disputes this, though); several of the questions were related to topics that hadn’t been done (according to my chemistry teacher); and it was plain hard. Mine is probably, therefore, the average score. So it’s not that bad. I wonder how the others did, though.

Also, I got a piano yesterday. It’s a Pearl River T-6 (upright, of course.) Hauled it in from Bombay. I wasted no time in getting down to business, and printed out the sheet music for Chopin’s Scherzo no. 3, Op. 39 in C-sharp Minor, and tried playing as much of it as I could. I have no illusions about my skills at reading music. It took me ages to play the first bar, and I think I played it wrong anyway, so I moved on to the end and discovered that I could play the coda, or at least a part of it. Well, I know all the notes in it—I just can’t play them… yet. God help me if my parents ever ask me to play something for guests.