The day described above is 20th November 2005, and there I was in my hometown Delhi, in a school waiting for the invigilator to distribute the exam sheets. People around me looked so anxious and terrified (because the D-day had finally arrived!) about the whole event and I could easily identify myself as the only soul enjoying the whole process :-)
One look around the room and I figured out the I was sitting in the column with maximum number of girls (we are talkig about Delhi girls, wow!!), N-1 to be precise (N being the number of seats in that column) and I was the only male candidate in that column. Other columns had lesser number of females :-)) Now you would think that this was a great situation for me to be in, but alas it was the worst place to be in. I could not look at any of them!! What a waste of time it would be to sit here, I thought.
A little later, the whistle was blown and I opened my exam-sheet to take a look at the couple of sheets that had cost me (1100+434+16+some more=) 1550+ bucks and I knew it had all gone down the drain. Anyway, managed to do some of it pretty well and felt really good when the whistle indicating the end of time was blown. Thank God, the ordeal had ended as it was taking too much out of me. Another look around the room (the invigilator was still collecting the sheets) and I found that people were emotionally too attached to the answer-sheet and were not willing to let go of it easily. I laughed at them and then at myself, the fool i.e. me sitting there in that room, who had turned up to write the exam without any preparation at all, in the midst of people who had worked day-in and day-out to do well on this day. I did not stand any chance against them, so why was I there? The answer came from within, "C'mon dude it is just 1550 bucks. You get to appreciate the beauty of Delhi girls atleast!! :-P" and that cooled me down because trust me, Delhi girls are the hottest lot I have ever seen. See it to believe it!
Just to mention, it was a brilliant co-incidence that I had the same centre for CAT last time I had written it (back in 2003) and that time I was with my college pals. So while climbing down the stairs, I went through all those memories, all the fun we had together, all the hanging out and suddenly I realized I had got much more for those 1550 bucks, than I ever expected. For the next 30 minutes or so, I kept thinking about two things:
- The time I had spent with my friends in Delhi over the last 5 years.
- How do I reach Akshardham? (Why Akshardham? Forget it!)
Let's leave all that there (except the hot Delhi girls).. that's the end of flashback part :-P
Anyway, today while discussing with Kaushik about the CAT scores (he had also written it), I proposed a bet that whosoever scores better in CAT has to pay for the other's coffee at Nescafe hoping to win a coffee. He accepted the bet and I got a strong sense of achievement, after all I had won myself a coffee. Luck, however, betrayed me. As we found out later, I had actually scored more than him (which is a big-big achievement, he is our dictionary.com) and therefore I had to pay for his coffee (although Dhiru payed to for it because I had run out of money and the ATM wasn't working). According to the IIM Kolkata website, I have got a percentile of 98.44. What a joke!
(This result has ensured that I'll waste some more money few years later to go through all this again..)
