Dear exams, Hello! I guess we’re pretty well acquainted with each other. For you are all that has been running through my head all these past 3 months. You sure are familiar to each tenth grader around. Apparently, in a frenzy of excitement, the school decided to gift us a full three-course meal of you. With the same syllabus. Kind of like mastication, isn’t it? Makes me feel like I’m cattle. You have deteriorated to tedious repetition of chew the syllabus, vomit it out. Chew and vomit some more on the next cycle… and more, and more and more. In December, for starters, we had the docile second-semester version of you. In January, we were treated to the tricky pre-board version of you, which also doubled add our stream allotment. Hardly had a couple of days passed, that our practicals commenced. And now, we await the main course. The Boards version of you. The “future- deciding” “fate –changing” version, with all kinds of weird rules and regulations. But I wanted to ask you a few questions. Ironical, right? But yeah, I never really understood what you hope to achieve. How can you judge the intelligence level of millions of students, specializing an interested in millions of different fields, from their answers to the same question? How do expect us children to remember the thousands of bits of information that you force us to mug up from our textbooks, and, more importantly, to procure them at the right time? Why should any child’s entire future be tied to a few scrawled lines on a bunch of sheets of paper?
Helen Keller was of the opinion that you exist solely for the confusion of those who truly seek after knowledge and I would presume to agree with her. Walking on the path of knowledge and wisdom, you rise up from the earth and tower above us all like an impassable barrier. And when we finish the hard climb to the crest and the bumpy ride back down on the other side, we are only greeted with a taller and more forbidding version of you, with more questions and more weightage than ever before.
Khushi Singh
XII A
