The disaster called the mid term exams will finally end tomorrow. Actually the unofficial end coz all we had left over today was the paper of Oral Communications and Presentation Skills. An irony it is that a paper testing us on oral skills has to be a written one, but then again starting from next week Mr. Kapoor has promised us that we have to do some presentations in front of the class which would be given a heavy weight when it comes to the final grade. We have to make a book review, but the catch is that it has to be done it two minutes flat … extending the time limit calls for negative marking. I am thinking of reviewing the Goal which happens to be the first and only management book I have read, something I definitely have to change, considering the fact that I am now a management student. But I used to think that these management books were full of global gyan … something akin to common sense (Our law professor always says that law is codified common sense), but after reading the Goal my perception has changed somewhat. I happened to read three pages of The 7 habits of effective people or something like that by that Covey guy … and have never lifted it up again. It is basically common sense … and if you really need someone else to enlighten you upon common sense, then its really a very uncommon thing (See there I start off with my clichés again … somehow I have this irresistible itch to use common sense and uncommon together … in the same way its been done for at least the past four hundred years).
The exam was a disaster in the true sense. All our seniors used to tell us that there was no direct relation between the number of hours you put in and the grades you would eventually get, well I haven’t got my grades as yet, but one thing I can definitely say is that no matter how much you study, in the end it all rests with the professor and his sense of torturing poor people like us. Statistics paper was a perfect example … not that I had studied much for it, but the best part (or rather the worst part) about the paper was that no body still knows what the right answers are, no doubt everyone is speculating and praying hard that their method of solving the problem was right, but then again it all depends on how Mr. Anwar Ali decodes our answers. HBO (not the movie channel … but this ultra boring subject ) was even worse, Mr. Kalra happened to let us know that the test was an open book test a day before and then he lets us know that the test was open book only for one particular paper in the test, so that put us all in the panic mode and we had to go through boring definitions like Self Bias Problem and Fundamental Self Attribution Problem and other crap like that.
One bright part about preparing for the HBO definitions was a small joke in the book (it was meant to be a joke … but there was a catch attached to it). The joke was about creativity … it went like this
We just think of a hen as a way of laying eggs … but if you think with some creativity you will realize that the hen is in fact an egg’s way of generating more eggs.
Really stupid joke ( you guys are not even supposed to laugh at it) but the catch was that in case you were studying stupid definitions for the better part of the night and happened to be in the HBO zone then this joke would have seemed to be really funny. I told this joke to Ridhima who happened to be studying statistics at that time and she was looking at me like I was going crazy, but later at night when she had had some hours of HBO she herself started laughing like mad at this joke and that time Kedar was looking at her as if she was going crazy. The truth was that we were all going crazy, but a fun experience it was, giving seven papers in a four days (well I still have to give the seventh) but one thing I learnt was that though it did seem like an impossible task, it wasn’t all that impossible. And then again if I start talking in terms of managerial gas, we learnt to prioritize things and manage time. Well I certainly am not doing a good job of it right now. It’s already
