That was the title of a humorous short story I had read in the sixth grade. In this entry, however, “funny” is synonymous with “ridiculous”, “sad”, and “pitiful”. I refer to the fact that I forgot to apply to BITS Pilani – well, not so much forgot as was unaware that I had to apply at all. When you’re used to the way the IITs admit students, it will never occur to you that the application for an Indian college could be different from the entrance exam. And it will never occur to you to visit the school’s website, since you will already have got your score right after taking the test. As fate would have it, I visited the BITS Admissions website just three days after the application deadline, only to discover – yeah – that. It’s ridiculous, because my score in the BITSAT was my best score in all the Indian entrance exams I took; sad, because I went all the way to Bangalore to take the test; and pitiful, because I haven’t got into a single Indian college as a result. My score (292) was comfortably above the cutoff (274), and could conceivably have got me a course at Pilani. My parents were obviously furious when I told them about it, but my dad later said he was glad that I had been honest. Both my parents, however, agreed that there are two important lessons to be learnt from this funny (meaning ridiculous, sad, and pitiful) mistake: 1. I need to stay well informed about everything, and be aware of all deadlines; 2. I need to use people as resources for information. For future reference, I could have got into BITS Pilani. I don’t want anyone to doubt that I could have been admitted.
Yesterday, I uploaded some of my older fan fiction to this blog. You will find the stories in Works --> Deleted Fan Fiction. These are fics that are not bad enough to remain in perpetual obscurity, but not good enough to be re-uploaded to FFn. In the process of uploading them, I discovered a clever way in which to format the entries to look like this without painstakingly placing the paragraph tag before every paragraph. After you’re done choosing a font and aligning your text (in that order), copy the HTML code and paste it on Wordpad (NOT MS Word). Replace the last token of all of the font tags with the same thing followed by the paragraph tag; then paste the code in the HTML editor, and publish your entry.
While going through my old books cabinet, I found a notebook I had owned in the seventh grade. I asked the principal (Mrs. Saraswathy, who was the principal from 2002 to 2006) to sign in it on March 27, 2006, at the end of the term (I was obsessed with collecting teachers’ “autographs” back then). She wrote the following, very nice message: “Never be discouraged with the smallness of your task, job, or life. Cling fast to the words of Edward Everett Hale: ‘I am only one, but still I am one. I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything, I will not hesitate to do something I can do.’ The key to accomplishment is believing that what you can do will make a difference.” That’s something we can all be inspired by.
2 comments :
That's got to be the most optimistic valedictory statement I've ever seen in all your blogs :-)
Oh and did you find anything else of mutual interest in that book?
It was a very nice message. I don't remember what she wrote in Narniadung's book, though.
That's the only thing in that notebook. The intention was to make every teacher sign in it, but Chronology (remember those eighth grade extra classes? XD) kept it for a week, and school had ended by the time I got it back.
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