How To Study Like a Ninja On The Night Before The Exam

Note: This is a very serious article for three types of people. First,those who don't know what they are doing on the night before the exam, secondly those who don't know what they are doing in college for the last one/two/three/four years and lastly those who don't know what they are doing in this world for the last twenty odd years. Exam is a pain in the ass and this article has been written keeping that fact in mind. People who sleep for more than four hours on the night before the exam should refrain from reading this article right now.

The biggest question that goes on in the mind of a normal student is when they should begin studying for the semester. On a broad basis, there are three kinds of students,

1. Who start studying for a semester thirty five days before the semester begins

2. Who start studying twenty seven nano seconds after the P.L (Preparatory Leave) begins

3. Who search for their notes on the night before the exams.

An OMG! Fact is that the probability that students of category 1 and 2 would be reading is this article is slightly more than the probability that Alia Bhat knows who is the President of Uganda is. Knowing this fact, let the students of category 3 be assured that they are exclusively getting these tips to ace (survive) the exams.

Tip 1: Never ever begin studying 12 hours before the exam

Studying for exams isn't a cake walk. If you have an exam at 10 AM on Thursday and if you plan to begin studying as early as 9 AM on Wednesday, your mind might explode with the stuffs you would come across in the textbooks that still smell fresh (probably completely unused). Hence never study so early. As a result of explosion, you might lose sanity and land up in a mental asylum with no WiFi. 10 PM is an optimum time to begin studying. 

(P.S: Ignore this tip if you already know an asylum where they provide free WiFi)

Tip 2: In the first hour of studying, locate notes, textbooks, phone charger etc

The plan is to have everything near you so that you don't need to get up every time. Make sure you have cigarettes in right numbers, a charging socket nearby to charge phone and similar such amenities. The next task is to locate notes and textbooks. There is a strong probability that you might find some of these stuffs in the places where you hide porn magazines and Pehli Suhaagraat DVDs. 

Tip 3: Make sure your boyfriend(s)/girlfriend(s) is (are) asleep before you face the book

Your boyfriend/girlfriend can be a serious threat to your sanity on the night before the exam. Make sure you don't need to address stuffs like "Babu you don't love me na?" at 2 in the morning. A little bit of mushy stuff is okay but the excess of it can create serious mental disturbance and hence should be avoided. Make sure your girlfriend/boyfriend sleeps early and if they are insomniacs, put your phone to airplane mode and till morning let them wonder that you have been eaten up by a giant gorilla that your neighbor was trying to tame in his secret animal laboratory. This might also give them a false hope that they are free from you.

Tip 4: Study the most repeated questions

This is the first instance in the semester where you're expected to think (a bit). Go through the previous exam papers, see what has been asked, what has been asked twice, what has been asked thrice, what you can skip, and what you can't. Now make a list questions that, if you study, you would somehow be able to drag your ass beyond the finish line.

Tip 5: Jo aata hai padho, jo nahi aata hai usey ratta maar lo

You are likely to come across stuffs like "the third root of alpha square equals baby doll mai sone di" types bizarre equations and derivation, and you would more likely not get what that piece of shit means. The secret is, no one gets it either, be it the professor, your class topper, your hostel watchman or the "over-qualified" guy who wrote the text book. The plan is to memorize them just like they are and forget them as soon as the exam gets over. 

Tip 6: Go for a walk/ Listen to a lot of music

A small walk to the nearest chaiwallah stall or listening to good tracks can be magical after a serious session of study. (Caution: please don't put the earphones on if you suspect that your bisexual girlfriend is a Justin Beiber fan and has secretly sent you Baby and 19 other tracks secretly along those 23123454 "I love you" audio messages. Unusual behavior has been noticed in a teen guy who listened to one of these songs accidentally and two years later, he ended up waxing his chest hair and started cross-dressing)

Tip 7: Don't stop swearing

Bring your frustration out, you need to. Mentally abuse your room partner for tempting you to have two pegs of Old Monk on those nights when you had to complete assignments, your girlfriend for romantically involving you in those long late night calls on the night before the project deadline, your professors for speaking in a language that closely resembles to that of the Democratic Republic of Congo all through the semester in an English-medium college, your parents for forcing you to join a college where the girls to boys ratio was around 0.87 females to 1000 males, which also caused you to bunk lectures out of disinterest. They deserve this, after all they are the reason why you are in this condition.

Tip 8: Don't forget to make false promises to yourself

Look into your eyes, faintly visible in the dirty mirror of your hostel bathroom, tell yourself that you would study hard next semester (which, even your the dog outside the hostel gate knows, is a lie), you would start attending college, you would become regular (in completing assignments and not in collecting porn DVDs). These false promises make you feel good before the exam. 

Tip 9: Take the exam like a ninja

Complete studying the important questions, make some chits, hide them in your socks, pockets or underwear or write the equation of drain to source voltage of a MOS transistor next to "I love Ria mam ki chuchchi" on the toilet door. Attempt all the questions even the ones you don't know. You're free to write Savita Bhabhi and the Bra Salesman's detailed story under the headline "How to increase the efficiency of an Amplitude modulated communication system". The guy who checks the papers doesn't have time to read what you have written and if he does, he might give you marks for a good orgasm that he got while reading the answer. The trick is to take chances. In a country, where everything happens out of an accident, be it the arrival of a new member to the family or a Chaiwallah becoming a Prime Minister, taking chances might help you in passing even the hardest of exams. If you're working hard, college is probably not your cup of tea, you need to work smart.

(The writer has personally experimented the above mentioned activities for three years in probably one of the shittiest college in India and has managed to get a 7+ pointer ever semester. Also the writer doesn't deny the fact that he has a bisexual girlfriend who loves Justin Beiber songs, in fact quite recently, he has been spotted near one of the hair waxing parlors in the city)

Life lessons from the Sixth Semester: Engineering Life means more than grades

As of the record, the last post on this blog was written on November 30th, 2013. So it is almost five months that the random thoughts in my mind  remained confined to my mind and this place which has been my trash can for the last three years has remained quite clean and empty and devoid of any human interactions whatsoever. Storing too much of crap is dangerous for the mind and hence, I am making an attempt to write a blog post again, which I ought to write.

From my classmates' point of view, Semester number six was straightaway a failure for me. From my professors' point of view, my life can be seen as a graph quite close to this

My performance has been a case study for the over concerned professors of my department who have been discussing this over lunch, when they were bored of the same food being packed by their wives and needed something new and spicy to discuss. Even at two instances, they straightaway said the same words to me "Pinaki tumhara performance neeche jaa raha hain" after I scored 79/150 in my Mid Semester examination. Even I spotted a peon giving me a dirty look for hanging around with a female classmate in the corridor because I was late for the first lecture. His face read "Sala Ladkibaaz".

But then for the professors, classmates, peons, life is restricted to grades, attendance, assignments and of course, the boring food that their wives make in the lunch. They fail to recognize the need for bigger things in life and seeing life as a platform to learn infinite things. Engineering life, in fact teaches more than you can even imagine. I have seen people who have screwed up four years of engineering but they learnt invaluable lessons in the four years of screw up and now are successful entrepreneurs, software developers, social media employees and the list goes on.

Anyways, after beginning this article with the point of view of thee different class of people witnessed in engineering colleges, about my performance, let me come back to what I did this semester and why I don't consider it as a failure. If you know me via twitter, you must be knowing how my itch to tweet and tweet more. However, twitter occupies a big portion of my life. It is more than an itch to tweet, now. In the past six months, I have made friends, friends, and more friends over twitter. Exchanged numbers with them, got added to Whatsapp groups, met twitter users off twitter, made a lot of conference calls, witnessed a lot of fights on timeline and so on. Six months down the line, twitter looks like an inescapable part of life. Although you might judge me as an addict (which I probably am) twitter has been a learning experience too. I have seen people who have achieved a lot in life and in contrast, people who have achieved nothing, have non existent real life and hence looked for an escape on twitter. I have met excellent writers who write witty one liners, Shayaris, make trends and are always on high on creative juices. Had I never joined twitter, I would have never met them, I would have never known what creativity is all about, what's happening in Delhi, Mumbai or Chennai. A fair gift life has provided me at the cost of grades.

The second high of this semester was the college festival. I joined the anchoring team, got a partner who is supposed to be a class topper and whom, I naturally assumed to be dedicated and hard working. But work on field was quite different. While we begun writing scripts, I just realized I am putting in almost all the effort and she, just being a fellow spectator in all this, apart from trying to dictate me at times. Those two days of festival seriously kept me pissed off due to her excuses and attitude towards work. There was a lot of load and no team work and here is where I learnt something. Being a topper in the class doesn't make you an excellent person in life.

Coming back to the point, I took it up as a challenge, delivered my portion of what Robin Sharma refers to as "great work" and finally made "our" performance on stage excellent. And the strange part is, my professors and classmates don't have the vision required to see taking up challenges as a parameter in assessing performance.

This semester was more than challenges, I had failed dates, developed a taste for poetry and shayari, became a fan of Ghulam Ali's voice, slept a lot, watched a lot of movies and most importantly "had fun". I don't eliminate the fact that there are students and in fact classmates who enjoyed more than me and yet remained punctual. But then, as a rule, one shouldn't regret anything that makes them smile.

I didn't write a single assignment in the entire semester because I was busy tweeting all the time. But then as an engineering student, nothing is impossible. Yes, we are the ones who spend the entire semester watching a lot of porn, seeking girls, doing "keeda" and much more stuffs, make life dance on our finger tips and yet manage to make something out of life. This is because for us, life is more than grades. It is about your dedication, your willingness to be slightly off route, fail and then come back and deliver a tight punch back to failures.

On that note, let me end this article. And here I am going back to my assignments. I have got submissions beginning on Monday and I have to write around 10 assignments for the two submissions that I have on Monday. The funny part is, I am the only student in the class who hasn't got them checked (yes, check karwana to choddo, aaj likhne baithunga). But then, you just can't give up. If you have spent the semester enjoying, you have to buck up and deliver in the last few days.