Examining Exams
I'm Bernard the Buffalo, and this is my home.
It has been a long standing tradition in my family that the lazier one is, the merrier one’s Christmas will be. Everyone, maybe with the exception of Mother Alvares, absolutely makes it a point to wait till the very last minute to do things they should have done ages ago: like making the Christmas star, [...]
An examination is a strange and pointless thing, where one is expected to retch out answers to questions asked in a haphazard manner with a minimum of understanding. Which is why I haven’t had one in 1 1/2 years. 1 1/2 glorious years, spent fruitfully by concocting grand plans, almost all aimed at getting even[...]
I’ve been thinking lately. And when I say ‘thinking’, I must stress upon it, as in thinking in a rather intense, almost suicidal manner, you know, the kind of self-obsessed fluff that leaves you staring at the ceiling late into the night. A certain incident relating to a member of the female inclination from last[...]
(That last School-Basher of mine ended with the mention of an overly mysterious person named Hindustani. So this here is my attempt to demystify the enormous mystique of Hindustani, the one everyone loved to hate.) 1 Hindustani slapping me. Hindustani slapping me it the first thing that comes to my mind whenever my perverted thoughts come to[...]
Goodness, I thought that bloody exam would never end! One week of slogging, one week of losing sleep…actually, I’m lying. I didn’t work hard. I practically didn’t work at all, you could say. No way was I going to sacrifice my routines for the sake of pointless turdish things like exams, not a chance in hell. But it eventually did end, and so you find me here, relating like I’ve never related before. I should tell you that I found great reinforcement for my staunch belief in my ability to find laughter and joy in the most unlikely situations, as you shall see:
It was my Hindi exam. I failed in the first test, and it looked highly likely that it was a trend I would repeat for this exam too. It really, truly was terrible. Absolutely horrid. Half way through, I had given up all hope. But, my capacity for laughter did pull me through. How could I not laugh when the supervisor kept bumping - nearly humping, in fact - into a desk at the front? The first time was understandable, the second time he might have forgotten about it, but every single goddamn time? That I can’t explain, no way. And each bump seemed to be more severe that the one that preceded it, accompanied by groans of correspondingly large intensities. And every time he did it, I would laugh myself nuts, so much that my partner, after looking at me like I was crazy, slowly started to shift away from me to the very end of her side of the desk, till the professor kept bumping into her instead, which only made me more laughter-prone, which in turn made her shift further away, which brought about more severe bumps, and so on and so forth. But the real stumper was that on my way out of the classroom, I myself nearly broke my poor foot on the very same desk. Sweet irony, isn’t it?
Then there was the actual paper. Right at the bottom, the very last question said, in hindi, Translate into Hindi. Then there were five question, in English, and in ALL CAPS, as if it was meant to scream out at us. And did I mention that they were in terrible English?
It’s almost like they saved the best for last, which I’m not making up: Naveen’s mother reffied his hair. Reffied? What in God’s name…? Just the sight of that silly word made me laugh, and then cough to cover up my laugh. REFFIED. What the hell could that possibly mean? Was there a remote chance that it could be ‘ruffled’? Unlikely, since it’s usually the father or the pesky uncle who ruffles hair, rarely the mother. Right? Unless….unless Naveen’s mother was in fact his cross dressing father? Was this some sick plot to turn us all into something we were not, through our friggin’ hindi papers? Nah, that would be giving the dingbat who set the paper way too much credit.
A class mate asked the supervisor, who by some bitter irony, happened to be our English lecturer. (There were two supervisors.) “Ma’am, what is raffyed, this raffyed?” asked him, giving the terrible English a whole new spin with his equally lousy pronunciation. She looked at the word, and stood there in silence. Then, she looked at the question paper of the boy in from of him, hoping she would be able to better understand his paper. But no, it said the same thing: REFFIED. After some thought, she concluded that it could possibly mean, ‘combed’. After some inquiries, she told him, and just him, the Marathi translation of the word. Clever thing. She couldn’t give the Hindi translation, could she? That would just be teaching, I mean cheating. From the Marathi translation, he deduced the Hindi translation, and asked her, to which she laughed and said, “I don’t know.”
And hilarity, as the more perceptive of you might have guessed, ensued.
THE END. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to read more, there's plenty available in the archives