So, this year again, there is a cloud of uncertainty looming large over the careers of many aspiring students facing the class 12 exams over the admission to engineering colleges. No lessons learnt from
last year. The Government should have been prepared well in advance, rather than put more pressure on the students during the arguably most important weeks of their life.
In this context, let me tell you the story of a totally naive guy. From his early school days, he had the dream of becoming an engineer. He did very well in the class 10 and got 14th rank in the state. The problem started in his class 11 and 12, when he changed to English medium from Tamil. Though he had a good knowledge in English as the subject, his vocabulary was not poor, so he struggled a lot. He continued to get 98+ % in Maths, which required least knowledge of English; chemistry was poorer and physics was the worst.
Being a very shy and less-talkative person from the childhood, he had abysmally poor knowledege on the know-how's of getting into professional courses. He knew that there is the 'big entrance test' which is very important; he assumed that the admission to B.E. would depend only on the performance in the entrance test. So, he was concentrating mostly on that. He paid equal attention to all his subjects - for him, the languages were as important as the science subjects. Whereas most of his class were focussing only on phys, chem, maths and/or bio, he spent equal time on languages as well.
One of his close friends from class 10, Subbu, who got 7% less marks in class 10 than him was doing very well. He thought Subbu's success lies in his tuition classes for physics and maths. Came the final exams, and, after writing the chemistry exam, he was chatting with one of his friends, JP, and telling him how his dream of becoming an engineer lies in the next few months, the time preceding the entrance exam. It was then that JP asked him how he thinks it is possible, with insufficient marks expected in the final exams.
Can you imagine how he would have felt.. Had he been told atleast a month earlier, he would have slogged and tried his all best in the exams.. Why should he be told it right after the last significant exam? He was terribly broken; he had given up.. he didnt even apply for the entrance test. Somehow, he recovered and his uncle from Coimbatore told him that he can join some special courses offered in the engg. colleges over there, like, B.Sc. Appl. Sci. and B.Sc. Comp. Tech., which are far better than the average B.Sc.
Bad luck was about to strike him again; for some inexplicable reason, he stayed back at his hometown for a week after the results were announced and went to collect his +2 mark sheets. Then, he made his visits to the desired colleges to file an application, at a time when admission was going on. After a week of hectic trying in Coimbatore and failing to get the top colleges without a donation, he decided to return to Madurai, where he had done the last 5 years of schooling. There again, it was too late. All the top colleges had filled up the seats, and he could get admission in one of the not-so-famous colleges..
To top it all, there was terrible confusion over the entrance exam in that year. In the end, for the first time in several years, the government had decided that the admission to engg. colleges would be made based solely on entrance tests!! Had he not talked to JP after the chem exam, he would have atleast given his best in the entrance exam, for which he was preparing for months.. Those were some of the worst months of his life.. He was terribly depressed.. somehow he recovered and managed to do well in his BSc and join a reputed institution for higher studies.
Recently, he was talking to Subbu and for the first time, opened his heart out on this story, which he had not revealed to any of his +2 classmates thus far.. Subbu said 'Hey, if you had discussed with me about it, I would have told you everything about the procedure.. Thats why we were wondering why you got more marks in the languages than physics'.. It was the case of a big 'IF'. A bit of inferiority complex, that he carried on due to his language-shift had caused him dear.
You all know who the 'he' is.. Though he loves his choosen subject, he cant stop thinking why things turned so wrong in the most crucial phase of his life.. and imagine what would have happened otherwise.. It is like a love-failure nevertheless.. even if one marries somebody else, the mind would tend to think what if the first love was not a failure.. It is not adultery, is it?
