Month: March 2019

From a very meh paper to a paper I enjoyed preparing for and writing. How emotions and the thought of pleasant faculty can affect one’s preparation is immense. Our Competition Law faculty is exuberant, energetic, and passionate. He also goes off on tangents at numerous points during a discourse. But, if you choose to pay attention in his classes, you will leave them a little better informed, but certainly, more entertained. I think that sticks through as you prepare, and it allows you to focus on content because you know it’s correct and has logic to it – since he’s explained it that way.

I’m also ridiculously sleepy – not because of anything but my own actions and choices. Studying the night before an exam is an adventure I would not recommend to the weak-willed and the faint of heart, because sleep is a powerful intoxicant that demands your entire attention.

Especially when you choose to sit on your bed.

I can’t believe it’s taken my 4 years to figure that out.

Is it possible to have a good paper followed by a bad paper? Yes. Such is life. Exams are such. Each exam must taken independently, and not as an entire set of papers. Which necessarily demands that you take each paper without thinking about papers in the past, and papers of the future. This is particularly difficult when exams all happen in one stretch, a singular week demanding all your focus, your energy, and your concentration. Of course, there’s a hype about – exams here are often straightforward, demand very little application of the mind, and are usually glorious writing-fests, but, the fact that you attempt to prepare to the best of your capability is not an aspect of exam-taking that you can overlook.

This is difficult also when papers vary in difficulty – either owing to course material, course subject, or even inherent interest.

I like Taxation far less than I like other Laws. Conceptually, however, Taxation is something I’m for. Which is not a system I’m comfortable with. This dichotomy in preference clearly showcased itself to it’s fullest when I wrote my Tax Law paper. Onto the next one.

I had a good paper today. Aside from legitimately having a lot of content to write for all answers, I had a good paper because I thought the paper was well-set, and that made a massive difference to my mentality as I wrote. This was one of the first papers in Law school that tested us on everything that was included in the portion for the exam – which meant skipping modules and not preparing properly would have affected your confidence in writing answers for sure. It was well-balanced, with questions across all modules, options, and options designed to test your test-taking ability by testing your time-management decision-making, which I think is an attribute not a lot of faculty account for – they either set papers that are excessively lengthy, or uselessly short that we spend time faffing around about.

Which brings me to my qualm about exams generally. Even today, on a paper I enjoyed writing so much, I found myself counting pages that I had to the end of the manuscript. I knew I had 18 sides to fill up with my content, and 5 6 markers to attempt, so no real split was possible, especially since each answer was to start on a fresh page for readability. But by the end I noticed I had 7 sides for 2 answers and kept counting to make sure I had enough content to get to the end. Which means I’ve become a slave to the system here. I don’t know if it reflects poorly on me, but this is a culture I wanted to stay away from in first year, and yet, I’ve succumbed to it. One day I’m hopeful that this attitude leaves me. The sooner the better.

In either case, this is who I am now, so I must embrace atleast the fact that I don’t think I faffed on even one of those eighteen sides I have written today. Which is noteworthy.

Last night was exciting too. I saw a cat in the boys hostel washroom around 1AM. The electricity was cut off at 2AM for about an hour, which meant utter chaos because people were screaming things collectively and letting out all their frustration by shouting into the abyss and nothing could regulate us. I don’t know how the energy sustained one hour but the josh in the boys hostel at losing our source of power, was frightening. If you channeled the screaming for electricity, and converted sound energy to electrical energy somehow, you’d have a self-powered machine in the boys hostel. Man.

Too much yelling.

Law school can sometimes push you to these places, I think.

Tomorrow’s a rough paper – because the course is poorly structured and horribly explained. I’ve just completed the portions but I understand very little of it at the moment so it’s going to be a long night of trying to understand bits of what I’m going to go tomorrow and write eighteen sides for.

One of my friends told me we’ve written 87 papers here already. All midsems and endsems included. That’s an accurate number and it’s horrifying. I don’t think I wrote 87 exams between 10th to 12th Grade.

If you haven’t read Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, or about women in our epics, it’s a premise worth reading about. It’s worth pondering. It’s worth considering, and worth questioning. The answers aren’t convenient at all, but if anything, they’ll get you to question how deep-rooted some notions are within our society.

I first read Palace of Illusions when I came to University, and then read Forest of Enchantments today, which I think is a phenomenal piece of writing because it imparts emotion to a person whom society reveres for hiding her emotion throughout an epic.

I’ll post a full book review only once my exams get over.

However, I think our epics are also worth some of my time. In 2016 August, I purchased a translation of the Mahabharata, that Penguin was publishing, with an ambition to read all the volumes as translated and really get into them. I didn’t make it past book one. Now’s probably as good a time as any to get back into reading ancient Indian literature. I’m fortunate because my family is full of sources who can read Sanskrit and have read the texts and various commentaries to offer interpretative guidance and answer some difficult questions about human existence. It’s probably also time to consult them.

If you aren’t a reader, watch this:

Ignore your feelings about Zee, no matter what they are – because while I understand them, you’ll miss out on a masterclass in Historical Fiction.

I have successfully wasted one day during exam-time – a day I thought I’d spend studying and finishing as much portion as I could for an exam that I’m genuinely dreading. However, the day has ended, and my accomplishment of portion stands at a meagre 33%. As times like these pass, I think about my 10th Grade productivity and feel bad at times. I liked all my subjects back then, and honestly, you could give me three months to sit at home and study, and I’d study every single day. The lack of motivation hits hard before papers I don’t like studying for these days, and that’s not really something I associate with myself.

But it’s happened too many times over the course of Law school. I’m grateful that I’ve always found something in the subject to motivate me to study, but it gets tough at times.

Things I did today, however, include a lot of nice reading. And creating my first legitimate Spotify playlist.

Another paper down. Thankfully so, because now we’ve got a break of two days before the other four hit us in succession. This means I can watch YouTube for half a day or more, depending on my motivation, before I start studying. In reality though, I’ll sleep through the entire day and begin studying only at night, which is precisely what happened today after the exam. I woke up being supremely disoriented and confused about how much time had elapsed, and wondered how seasons had changed (the only explanation for this is Gujarat weather, and nothing else).

Today’s paper was alright. The preparation for it was really irritating though, because at various points while studying, I found myself questioning the necessity of studying the subject, it’s purpose and relevance to my daily life, and whether I was understanding anything that I was mugging up. Only one answer was positive, and thankfully, for now, it was the last one. I did, however, grow frustrated with the number of case laws we had, and ended up at one point during the night, taking a frustration nap.

This bothers me because I feel like I’m doing two things wrong. One, I feel like I’ve stopped enjoying my studies – something I really dislike, because I love how much I like learning new things. But, two, and what I find more problematic, is that I feel like I’m betraying why I came to law school. I think it’s fine for me to dislike subjects – I’m entitled to a subject preference. However, questioning a Law’s relevance to my life feels really strange because I now think that I’m being unappreciative of a profession and passion I love dearly.

So for the next four exams, out of which I’m dreading just the one, I’m going to work hard to combat this fear of “I don’t know when this will ever be useful to me”. Because if I grew up thinking that, I wouldn’t have ever studied Math. It’s direct application in my life continues to evade me.

Also, yes – I did skip uploading blogposts for the last 4 days. Trust me though, blogposts were written and saved. There’s no way I’m breaking this streak of writing.

 

First exam down. Aww yeah.

Today wasn’t an excellent paper by any stretch of the imagination. However, it marked the start of exams, and the culmination of 1/6th of them. Also, it led to the revival of the whiteboard tradition in my room – where I write the entire schedule of examinations, and our plans for the day the exams end, and my roommate erases them one by one, as we destroy each paper and power through this entire set.

It brings the simplest kind of joy to our lives.

Today’s also the 1st of March! It’s pretty amazing how quickly time has flown by this year. GloPoWriMo is merely one month away now, which is rather exciting. And my summer holidays are closer as well.

There’s one day left to the first exam of this year’s mid-semester examination cycle. I’ve spoken earlier about how disenchanted I’ve become with the teaching-learning system at University, and with the entire mechanism of testing that we have over here, but as a student, irrespective of my criticism, the system is one that I must abide by. So here I am, scavenging for notes, and attempting to understand 60 days worth of lectures in one night. Welcome, to one week of an erratic sleep cycle, unhealthy binge eating, and loud music. If the electricity dies, welcome to one week of frustrated yelling loudly into the abyss (this applies throughout the year in the Boys Hostel, but especially so during exams).

So of course all I can think about today is Spotify. I first heard about the service back in 2010, when I discovered that Americans paid for their music, and bought the songs that they listened to on their iPod. Much unlike the piracy I was used to, and accustomed to surviving off. Spotify caught my imagination because it offered streaming, and soon, I installed it, using a VPN, and then realizing my technological prowess would lead me to paying way too much for the service.

Thankfully my friend Bhukkad moved to America, leading to 3.5 years of mooching off his Spotify Premium account. It’s been great – I’ve had unlimited access to excellent music, no advertisements, and the ability to annoy him by changing the music he’s listening to. I also had the power to make music play in his earphones even though he didn’t want it, and once, caused him public embarrassment, I think, by making music play over his speakerphones.

It was great.

But Spotify launched in India, and I expressed my desire to buy an account. This is a departure from me being cheap, and I’m glad my parents supported it, because now I’ve got access to unlimited streaming for myself – and artists are being paid for their art as a result.

The only thing I’m sad about is that I can no longer annoy Bhukkad.

There’s something homely about cheese Maggi. It’s nostalgic, delicious, and gives you a textural difference that is enjoyable and palatable. The Maggi purists claim that Maggi ought to be eaten without such additions, but I say, what is Maggi as a brand if not adaptable? The strength of the nations unhealthiness lies in our ability to take 2 minute Maggi and make it the most wholesome meal one has consumed.

As evidenced below:

What genuinely sucks is the remnants of illness. You know, the kind where you’re definitely not sick, but you still feel the bits of an illness that has just passed. Basically, having the taste and breath of phlegm every morning –  because it takes time for phlegm to pass out of your system is perhaps one of the worst feelings in the world.

This is also because there is no pleasant way of describing this irritation to people around you.

And no amount of throat clearing helps.