The Most Important Year of My Life! - I

Well ideally this should have come on the 2nd of January… But better late than never… So here it goes...

This past year has been THE most important year of my life. From placements to entrance exams to interviews to what not! But it has given me many memorable moments. I’ll write about one such moment-probably the most important of all… XAT 2011!
I had been preparing for CAT and OMETS (Other Management Entrance Exams), as we used to call them for almost 2 years! It was December… CAT was over… So were other exams… But for XAT! And I had no idea at all that it would be the Big Daddy of all the exams!

I was all fed up of all giving so many exams in the past few months and to add on to those were the 7th semester end term exams! XAT on top of them! I was kind of fed up after writing so many exams! But “paise bhare the yaar, wo bhi Rs. 2500, exam toh denge!! ”—a conversation with a friend about XAT! :P
Moreover, dad was recently posted outstation and he had come back for the first time. And had to go back on the same day as XAT! To add to it, a bloody semester exam the very next day!

Anyways, you can imagine my state of mind before taking the dreaded exam! However, the X-Day finally arrived. 2ns of January 2011. As usual I got ready and left for the centre(somewhere in East Delhi… huh! I don’t get it. East Delhi walon ka centre North main aur humara East main!) I knew a couple of people who had the same centre and talking to them made me realise that they had come with similar feelings! ;)

We reached our respective exam halls and were distributed the papers and to my utter surprise the pattern of the paper had changed! Differential negative marking was converted to differential marking! And then the most controversial line: “… there may be one third negative marking…” Ab ye “may be” ka kya panga hai???

I had allotted times to each section as per my experience with other papers and I started keeping that in mind. Half an hour into the paper- verbal ( always my strong point) almost through! I found it relatively easy. But I was around 5 mins behind my schedule! I hurried and started with the Decision Making section! Now this was something new and I had allotted 35-40 mins for the section. Half way through and I was stuck on one stupid question where I needed to tell a businessman which airlines to travel with and what scheme to choose? ( Couldn’t he do it himself?? Just choose the one that suits best and take it!!) Whatever! By the time I ended I was very late for my weakest section! ( Yes even after being an engineer Quant is my weakest section!!) 35 mins only! So I had to buck up! But after looking at the questions I realised it wasn’t meant for me! Everything went over my head! But I did not lose hope and tried to pick up questions that ‘seemed’ easy. 2 mins to go and how many questions had I attempted: 5! My paper is screwed, I thought, so why not take a chance- directly in the answer sheet, the next 5 questions, without even reading the questions, I marked option ‘D’. I do not know why but I marked ‘D’! The bell rang. XAT was over!!

Or was it?? In the hustle and bustle, I had almost forgot about the ‘Open ended question’. What is that?? An essay in simple language!

10 mins break and we were handed over the essay topic!




















Blank! That’s what happened to me after reading the so called ‘topic’ which was a paragraph in some language which seemed like English by some idiot which at that point of time did not even seem remotely connected to Economics (which I later came to know was written by the Father of Economics, Adam Smith, in his famous book Wealth of Nations). Now how in the world are we supposed to write something about such a topic??

10 minutes into the 20 mins of essay writing I realised I was not the only one struggling! A guy in the next row stood up and showed everybody his answer sheet saying “ Guys I am done! My season is over!! “. And he had written just four lines!! “How gutsy”, I thought!

Anyhow, I wrote some crap(GAS as we call it now) and came out of the centre thinking that was as far as XAT 2011 would take me but for the 5 tukkas I had marked!

In the evening, while calculating my marks according an answer key released by some website, I realised that the 5 Ds that I had marked were all options: ‘None of the above’ and were all wrong. To add salt to the wound, two of those five were 5 marks questions (What the hell was I thinking while doing this in such an important exam?????????) I was doomed losing whatever hope I had!

But it was not to be!! I am currently a part of the XLRI Human Resource Management batch of 2011-2013!! :)


How is another long story which I’ll keep for some time later!