It's always a good conversation stimulant when people ask me about my GPA in college. I can then verbosely regale them with the fact that I went to a school where there was no GPA, no exams, and even (and this is where I one-up Bennington, my sort of sister-college based on its being populated by so many of my countrymen and classmates) ... no credit system.
It was therefore a nerve-wracking experience to suddenly be faced, after 12 years, with a testing procedure so regimented, even a fly couldn't get through any loopholes. Maybe it was the communal nature of exams in our formative years that made the experience so much more natural. The peeling, chipped desks with eager, innocent daylight gently stroking our faces in pre-partition limestone buildings were a tad bit less jarring than computerized one-minute compartments of time staring out at you in the cold certainly of a your isolation booth.
It was in just one such air-sucked vacuum of a cubicle in which I gave the GRE this afternoon. The dead-pan efficacy of it all was strongly reflective of our existence today. I was shown my result as soon as it was over. No natural gestation period of expectation or worry. Although I'm personally glad I got the whole procedure over and done with, the somber loneliness of the experience somehow ties in, for me, with the conversation I was having with R and S today about the frazzled, short-attention span everyone today seems to have. A vague blur of disjointed existence, the result of not being able to remember yesterday, or a month ago, or when a month ago was. Trying to imbue my mind with simple and not-so-simple mathematical concepts in a mental space that keeps getting sucked by deadlines, twitter streams, facebook photo comments, life-goals, my iPhone todo list, updating my iPhone apps, facebook wall posts, syncing my iPhone, and trying to live, feels like tugging at a cloth that keeps fraying towards nonexistence.
It was a tough test. Apart from the content, and more importantly, the time factor, that made it so grueling, it really is the regimented quality that makes the whole process so daunting. Little as I had prepared, the geek in me actually enjoyed practicing the Math, but I wasn't even able to complete the section, scoring not very well in it as a result. It was the constant self-conscious voice inside me that kept laughing at myself for taking a test like this at age 30. For the one hour that I was just sitting in another room before the test, I was playing mental table-tennis, trying to stop realizing how I had completely lost the carefree innocence and crazed, blind optimism with which I used to approach exams etc. before.
When I was Young.
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