11.The Exam Schedule

2/3rd of our 1st sem was over then. The labs as usual sucked, except for the comp sci lab. I had some previous knowledge on programming, as I was a PCMC at school.

Workshops continued to be a nightmare, with us struggling with the welding rod at hand, and cursing everyone from the syllabus makers till the last level instructor there. “Why do a comp sci engg need to learn welding”. 

Answering this obvious question one of the workshop instructors told us, “Imagine you go to a welding shop by chance, how embarrassing it would be if you say you are an engg and you don’t know welding. That’s why we are teaching you all this.”

I could hear my neighbor say, “Go to hell!!!”

The same regular time tables, canteen in the evening, dinning at mess cursing the cooks, the hostel officials, the dean and even the government as a whole for all the delicious dishes they served for the future pillars of the nation.

As I had a laptop, my room used to be crowded. We used to watch movies got from day scholar guys, who downloaded them from some torrent sites. 

Life was good, and even the news about 3rd asses didn’t bother us much. As it was just the best 2 out of 3, most of us felt we were not going to do any better in the 3rd than the 1st two. 

But, but the news about end sem was not the same. It sent shock waves through all of us. The epidemic of exam phobia spread all over the first years. It was far worse than the news about 1st asses. 

We have heard from seniors, "Even state toppers have at times failed, so keep yourselves upto the mark". This didn’t add to our fears, as we were already in a saturated level of fear, and we can’t be scared anymore.

Yes the last line was due to my specific college ‘Chemistry’ fears that burned words like ‘Saturated’ in my mind’s non-volatile memory.