I know this post is late, but there are some reasons, which I’ll explain later. First, I need to rewind a week or so. I’m mildly nervous. Some butterflies around, when someone mentions something like ‘board’, ‘CBSE’, ‘result’. Completely natural, as my Xth Board result was due out on Friday, 29th May. I could say the same for some but not all of my friends. I had reason to be nervous, as most of my prep was indeed half-assed in every way, and the papers did not go *quite* as planned.

So I was early at 5 on the 29th. Went for a jog, came back, then went to Sirifort for a spot of cricket. Came back around 8:45. The result was due to come out at 10, but the people at NIC decided to release it an hour early. I guess I was one of the first to access it, because none of the friends who I called after checking my result knew theirs, and consequently I can be held responsible for the sudden increase in heartrate induced in all of them. Anyway, with certain apprehensions, I headed to cbseresults.nic.in, navigated to the page for class X results, and entered my roll number : 6168782.

• English – 88 – expected, mainly because this is the most unpredictable subject in the CBSE boards. There really is no way a student can get to know where his/her paper was checked. Anyway, the problem, more often than not, is that the language used can get a bit complicated. Long winding sentences. Strange (at least for the examiner) words. In short, the paper’s too good for a 90+. I tried my best to control myself as I wrote my paper. Tried to use simple words, and tried to keep my sentences short. I guess even that didn’t work. But I’m not really complaining. What when really smart people were in the 70s. So I was thankful that I atleast got 85+.
• Science and Maths – 93 - disappointed. I knew I made a mistake in Maths, that would cost me 3 marks, but what I didn’t know that there were other mistakes as well. And it all seemed to have gone so well… Science was a bit iffy, because the last exam I gave, the MCQ, wasn’t a piece of cake, not by a long shot…
• Social Studies - 99 – shocking…I mean, I know I studied for SSt, but not well enough. Still, I read in the papers that the marking scheme and checking was better this time, so I guess I just got lucky.
• French – 97 – just wow…I just have one thing to say, in my pre-board, I got 64.5…and now this! Still haven’t fully accepted it…

Anyway, shortly after the result came, and I had satisfied all the relatives I knew and those I didn’t with a satisfying answer of 94%, I went out to play cricket and so forth, with my friends. Next day, I’m down with a fever, cold and cough. Went for a VMC class in that condition, and I still regret it… Have just sort of recovered cause my temperatures stable at normal for a few hours. Ciao…

P.S. Whoops and sniffles is not a stupid way of saying celebrating and crying at the same time like some demented insecure teenager. I just mean I’ve got a cold…

Tags: School

I’ve been quite busy for the past few weeks. As I said before disappearing off the blog, my exams were looming on the horizon. Now they’re in the rear-view mirror. I had 5 of them – Social Studies, English, Maths, Science and French, in the same order. Well, it would be useless to go into a full-out explanation for each one of them, because frankly, who cares? I’m done with them, and you don’t care either. But since I mentioned them, I’ll write one line about each one of them.

Social Studies involved a decent amount of rote learning, and I had a bit of trouble piecing together the answers when I was giving the exam. Geography might will be troublesome. English was a piece of cake. Studying for it involves going through the literature lessons and the writing skill formats. Maths was pretty smooth as well. Might have messed up one small question, can’t be too sure. In science, biology was smooth, and maybe a hiccup or two in physics and chemistry. French is an untold disaster. I’ll take the liberty of saying that I’m not alone in my class in saying this.

So much for the exams. The results are yet to come out, so, there’s a lull before the storm. Let me shift the attention to JSTS or the Junior Science Talent Search. I’m not sure if I mentioned it earlier, but I had given the JSTSE (E stands for Examination), and I cleared the first round. The second round involved an interview, which was today, on Wednesday. Didn’t go to school, the interview was at 2 PM.

Fastforward to the interview. First – Biology. The interviewer was a nice person, and we got along OK. He asked me about my strengths, then about where I was from, then about the Code Warriors. Then he got more into Bio. I messed up quite a few of them. Didn’t know about the Blue Revolution, which phylum mushroom belonged to and about some medicinal plants. In fact it was so bad, that in the end, he asked me how much I expected out of 10. I said I expected 3-4, because, truth be told, it was bad. He told me look at how much he had given me.

It was a 7. I was a bit dazed.

Then was physics. He was interested in how much I liked my school, because the guy before me, Shikhar had been asked a question like that. I said I did. Then he asked me how much I paid. Then he asked me how satisfied(?) I was with paying that much for the school. I said that the returns would be monumental compared with the initial investment. Cheesy, yet true… He then asked me some SI units – length, mass, time, luminosity, current. No probs. Then he asked me to provide the volume of a 1 cm side cube in m³. Easy. Then the difference between velocity and speed.

Chemistry, the interviewer was an slightly aged man. Very slowly closed the file after reading my name, and  very slowly took off his glasses and placed them on the folder. Hehe. He asked 3 simple questions. One about why there were so many carbon compounds. Another about fullerenes. And the last about the difference between isotopes and allotropes. The most simple one so far.

On a whole, I see no reason why I shouldn’t get through. Just the Bio might hold me back.

Tags: School

It not exactly the best of feelings when you watch someone saying a speech you worked hard for, when you should’ve been on stage. That’s how I felt today.

I mentioned that I was pretty busy these days. One of my engagements was preparing the speech for the valedictory ceremony for some Mauritian students who had come to Delhi on a cultural exchange programme. I worked (not so) hard and made a speech for it. Originally me and my friend, Nikita were supposed to compere the event. The problem was that I was down with a cold.

Me and Nikita prepared the speech, and then I told my teacher (Ruchi Ma’am; don’t smirk…those who I’m talking to, will know) that I should have a backup, just in case my cold didn’t get better. We got a guy, Aayush and made him practice nad practice and reduced him to a nervous wreck. That’s Ruchi Ma’am’s specialty. In the end, Nikita was sounding too flat according to Ma’am, and we had to get a replacement for her as well. Abhivyakti was good. Quite good. Very confident as well. Nikita gracefully swept aside coz’ she didn’t even want to do this in the first place! I just counted on getting my cold cleared up.

It didn’t…

Today, we had a full run-through, and my voice wasn’t still a bit stuffy. So…I had to gracefully step aside. I knew that this might happen, but still, to be honest, I wasn’t quite ready.  It’s a tough emotion to describe. Still, I continued to help them out, printing edited copies in the iLab (I used the Pavna ) But still, I had lost interest. I think that’s natural. Something you worked for is snatched gracefully from under your nose, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Sigh! If I tell my bro, we’ll go wild, saying that I should respect myself and all that…but in the end…I’m just a nice guy.

Tags: School

Bad cold. That’s bad enough. I’d been expecting it for a few days (itching at the back of my throat, you see…). It was a kinda funny throat infection, one that causes me to hiccup every now and then, as in trying to clear my throat would start off another bout of hiccups.

Then on Monday, the real attack started.  Y’know the drill…one day of intense sneezing followed by a blocked nose whose  intensity varies. Well…Monday was bad. Especially since  I had a stayback class. Sneezed my way through the whole day. And I can tell you that my sneezes are obnoxious in the sense that they’re loud. When I got home, the first thing I wanted to do was have a ‘suana’ (breathe in a lot of steam, for the uninitiated). Sorta like boiling my head.

Unfortunately, when I plugged it in, BZZZT short circuit. So I had to spend another half hour trying to fix that. In the process I cut my thumb. Not very fun. It was deep, but i miraculously missed any major blood vessel, and very little blood came out. I also burnt my hand after that.

Not exactly my type of day.

What troubles me more are these things to do:

1. Geography Project on famine
2. 2 OP (Opinion) sheets
3. Biology prac file
4. General condition of notebooks…symposiums suck a lot out of you
5. Have to compere a valedictory function for some Mauritan Delegates on Friday, dunno how with this nose…

Tags: School