this is insane

I took one look at the schedule the dear, beloved school made for us to help us conquer the thing they call the Reshuffling Test, and instantly thought that there had been a mistake, that they'd given us the wrong schedule -- the kind of things that one usually comes up with in a lame attempt to refute an inconvenient truth, in this case, the fact that the dear, beloved school expects us to study 10 hours and 35 minutes every single day (Sundays included). They even set aside 10 minutes in the morning for something called "humming meditation" (what it is, only they know), and even indicated that we had to read the newspaper in the half-hour that they set aside for breakfast.

On a divergent note, let me not make a secret of the fact that I do not like to read the newspaper. I have never liked it, and I shall never like it. Occasionally there's a genuinely interesting article, or one that is otherwise deserving of my attention, but the inevitable conclusion is that seventy-five percent of any newspaper (no matter which newspaper you're referring to -- believe me, we get three) comprises utterly inane articles about superficial celebrities, movie stars whose careers are in the dumps, and the like, whose only shot to fame is to have jobless reporters write two-page reports on how they like the color red or how they named their pet poodles "Noodle". And in absence of the abovementioned intelligence-deficit elements of society whom I like to call "losers", there's always that one impulsive politician who fortuitously chooses the moment the cameraman is taking a picture of him to throw a rotten tomato at his opponent.

Returning to the topic, the questions in the review book they gave us are so insanely hard (at least the math questions) that it took a lot of patience on my part to resist the temptation of throwing everything I owned out the window when I was trying to solve some of them this morning. About half of them are reasonable -- as in, you can solve them with enough effort and time -- but the rest include everything from the frustration-inducing type to the absolutely outrageous ones. So is the case with chemistry, to a certain extent. Solving some of the problems demands methods that I scarcely know. It doesn't help that Phase I happened to be the phase in which I had paid the least amount of attention, or that our chemistry teacher had been CMNR, the King of Incompetence.

In fact physics is the only thing that I seem able to do without gritting my teeth or banging my head against the wall every twenty seconds. That's one of the many reasons I like physics. Hard problems in physics are challenging -- not ridiculous. You can actually look beyond the monochromatic letters on pages and visualize the problems. That's why it's not only easy but fun. I like math only to a certain extent. I like problems that involve big calculations and require a sensible amount of ratiocination to solve. I detest those that are practically insoluble unless you resort to some arcane method that was developed by IIT-ians in the early thirteenth century or something like that -- in other words, problems in which the second step bears little relevance to the first. In other other words, problems that the school and IIT love to give in their tests. In other other other words, problems that are likely to occasion me no little frustration.

If I had been in possession of spiritual pressure right now, everything within a hundred-mile radius would have been decimated. Okay, that was delusional.