harking back to those board old days

A valid reason for shooting me now would be the pun I just made. You could argue that "bored old days" doesn't make sense to begin with, but I was being poetic. Now, the matter at hand: I just realized that one important event in my fabulous life that I have neglected to write about here is my ICSE Board Exams. I mean, most of my posts in March 2009 were about how awesome Bleach is, and generally bitching about the fact that I had had eleven subjects. In fact the majority of the posts I made during my days at that venerable old school of mine were about exams. That's because I started this blog in the tenth grade, and was hit by Life with a set of eleven exams rolled into a ball every forty-five days or so. These were the Pre-Finals, a name which was supposed to strike terror into the hearts of all the fifteen- and fourteen-year-olds experiencing them.

Anyway, my exam center was this school that exists just a building away from FIITJEE called Vidyaranya, formed by a sandhi (if you're familiar with the Sanskrit term that is now used in a technical sense by linguists) of the words vidya, meaning knowledge, and aranya, meaning forest or something. On the day of the first exam our school took us there in one of their dilapidated buses that were secretly driven by a bunch of uniformed bus drivers using the same mechanics that were used to operate the Flintstones' car. I remember Nanochip and I were struck by how refined the students at Vidyaranya appeared. They spoke English. Which is more than we could say about the strange species of mammal we were constantly surrounded by at our school, our only defense being our awesome gentility. The school building was an old, nineteenth century colonial-style building that might have belonged to one of those tyrannical rulers of the princely state whose capital the city used to be. Yeah, that was it. The exams themselves were conducted in large halls side by side. I still remember my registration number: T/6438/070. I remember being pleased that I was 070, because 7 has always been my favorite number. It is only a happy coincidence that Sendoh's jersey number is 7. Another happy coincidence is the fact that I have been inordinately fond of sucking the life out of lemons long before I knew of Slam Dunk or the fact that Akira Sendoh had the same hobby.

Enough with the digressions. The Board Exams might have been the most relaxing part of the tenth grade (which was probably part of the problem). The high ceiling made the hall pleasantly cool while the world outside scorched under the harsh summer sun. (Pre-summer, if you want to be technical about it, though I defy you to find a person who finds being roasted at 1000 degrees preferable to being roasted at 1020 degrees.) Also the thing I always loved about exams at that school was the fact that you got to go home half-day. We got into the exam room at 8 AM, and got out at 11. Then we got to have a relaxing lunch at home, fool around for a bit (in my case a lot), before studying for our next test. Those were the days, eh?

Here are a couple of stupid pictures I drew at work. I think the pen strokes are all wrong. But I've never been particularly good at drawing, so meh. Oh, and both are self-portraits.