Nine's and Three's

Exams are always a help I say! These hours spent in the loneliness of an examination hall where one cannot talk to even the dearest of enemies and have to spend the entire stretch of unending tick-tock with painstaking concentration on wholly one’s self, can sometimes reveal the funniest of facts – of course, only to the self – and bang the head with the brightest of ideas too!

Well yes, exams are the place for absurdities too! You don’t know why something happens the way it does when in an examination hall. For example, how a bright 16year old sitting through the mathematics paper of the CBSE class 10 boards could not simplify ‘square root of nine’ as three; ahem, + or – 3 as always corrected by my father; is something even beyond his own comprehension. Thereby, he reduces the quadratic equation to a step from where it could have actually been reduced further – yet the 16year old feels completely at peace and perhaps proud too that he did it All alright!

It reminds me of the scene from Taare Zameen Par where the little Ishaan travels in his space craft to Join ‘planet’ 3 with ‘planet’ 9 as an answer to the problem of adding 3 to 9. This has been picked up straight from one of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips, which were brought to my notice by a friend – who instead of generating Sales for his company in the crucial month of the last quarter, was actually busy laughing over Calvin and Hobbes sitting on the 19^th floor of his office building overlooking computer-wallpaperish scenery of the Pacific bay, sipping on coffee and munching on cookies! Well, he claims he passed one big exam of his life – the IIT JEE, and whatever has followed till date has been the fruit of passing that one exam.

Ahh… so like I said, exams do help! :)