Exams. Sigh

Well, it's exam time and so I guess it's high time I posted something about many thoughts that have been running through my head since morning. Well thoughts don't really run, they just come and go, like flashes of words I want to incorporate or jokes I want to crack and include. Or incidents I want to recollect or people I want to quote. Write about what, one may ask. During exams, what does a normal engineering student have to write about? The usual woes and worries and late night coffees and night outs and attempted wake up calls and snooze alarms and finally - skipping bath, breakfast, lunch to study in those precious last few minutes. All for marks that don't matter even now, let alone matter a few years from now. I see people around me, in a trance - staring at their notes sometimes repeating what they're reading, sometimes going around frantically trying to look for that one person who understood that equation rather than mugging it, and I wonder. I wonder about those days in school when I actually used to enjoy what I was reading, trying to learn new concepts in physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. Oh math- how I miss math. At university level we get more theory in a mathematics paper than problems. Where's the question of trying to apply what you've studied to solve new, challenging questions? No answer. Half the people here don't even know the meaning of applied knowledge, and half of the rest don't bother to apply their knowledge though they know they can. Unless a system demands  a thorough understanding of basic principles and its application to further one's knowledge in a particular subject, most students are going to give up trying to understand and resort to mugging. Never a great fan of mugging myself, and incapable of doing so even when I need to, I simply give up sometimes. Give up on things that don't matter anyway. Give up on things that should have never mattered.

             It's funny. I've come to the stage where I'm so averse to what I'm reading because of the way the syllabus is framed or the way we've been asked(rather instructed) to answer, I don't even bother to figure out if I like a subject anymore. I automatically resort to thinking that it's another paper I won't like. That threw me off track a few days back. I'm now at a stage when I'm not able to give my subjects more time than that, and I doubt I will even if I did. Anyway, here I am, and suddenly after more than a year there it is. A subject that is staring at me in the face and I actually feel like I like it. There are many things I read about that I like in the field of science, but most of it lies outside my 'academic' knowledge. It took me some time to accept that there was something, if I had probably given it more time, some potential subject that I could like. Well, I'm not blaming the system or anything, it IS after all my fault for not having started earlier, but I do hold the system one of the major causes for changing the course of my liking.

Like I told a friend - people usually say "you either beat the system or join it". But what does one do when stuck in between? Unable to join it, but too insignificant to beat it!

P.S - Due to lack of time (I have an exam tom, people!) and a stream of thoughts that flow faster than I can type, most of what I've said here may seem incoherent disconnected. It's been a long time since I attacked the keyboard with overflowing thoughts, so kindly adjust with spelling errors and the like.