by G. Sampath
ALL QUESTIONS ARE COMPULSORY
1
What type of semi-conductor is obtained when silicon is doped with boron? (2 marks)
Having invested the whole of yesterday making notes on what he should be making notes on, instead of making the notes he should be making, Roll No. 27 did not want to use up another day in pre-preparatory mode, tuning his mental engine, so to speak, and motivating himself and building his self-confidence by oiling his cerebral cortex with the most powerful – literally, the V8s, you could say – of inspirational quotations by famous and powerful role models and dead people the whole world looked up to such as Benjamin Franklin and Swami Vivekananda and Abraham Lincoln that he had personally curated from Reader’s Digest and jotted down in his red diary for ready and regular reference, a sort of psychological vitamins that he gulped down a few mg of nine times a day as per the self-motivational alarm he’d set on his wristwatch with the option to also, alternatively, chant inside his skull silently (so as not to wake anyone, apart from himself, up), ‘YOU ARE A TOPPER, YOU ALWAYS HAVE BEEN A TOPPER, YOU ALWAYS WILL BE A TOPPER’ whenever he found the needle of his can-do spirit sliding toward empty and the avalanche of negativity threatened to bury him under. Sometimes the avalanche of negativity began as a tiny and innocuous wave-particle vibrating at a frequency of 80–400 MHz between and slightly above his eyebrows where his third eye would have been had he been Lord Shiva and this vibrating wave-particle gradually either metastasized or rippled outward across his temples and ear and neck and burrowed down his spine and, like a fighter jet, swooped back at the last minute away from his butt and up to his diaphragm and chest cavity and when this by now body-sized wave-particle swept over him and turned into the avalanche of negativity, he knew nothing was going to change and he would flunk again and be held up as a warning to others – as others had once been held up as a warning to him – because he just wasn’t good enough and the moment he knew he wasn’t good enough was the moment the urge to get up from his desk and leave his books and go somewhere else, anywhere else, became irrepressible.
And that’s when he sought the help of inspirational quotes, from Paul A. Hauck’s How to Do What You Want to Do, and from the proverbs from the Book of Proverbs that he’d been gifted for his fourteenth birthday by his male parent. The Book of Proverbs was a concentrated form of the inspiring real-life stories from Chicken Soup for the High School Student’s Soul that he’d picked up from the 32nd International Book Fair and been dipping into of late. They were self-belief-inducing, psychic momentum-generating capsules of motivational whey protein designed to make the reader believe – without the necessity of any intervention from his/her volitional apparatus – that s/he had it in himself/herself to tough it out because tough times never lasted while tough guys/girls did, and so he (Roll No. 27) needed to believe in himself enough to be able to motivate himself, to read out the riot act to his negativistic mind, show his negative-thinking self – his enemy and agent saboteur – who was boss, so he could prepare adequately this time, rather than end up repeating what had happened with the quarterlies and half-yearlies, where he’d exhausted all his prep time trying to get himself to believe that he still had it in him to study instead of actually studying.
But then, even now, though he knew he should be focusing his mind on semi-conductors, he noted with disgust that he was spending more time sipping his red diary and Chicken Soup, alternately, to convince himself that he could crack this chapter if he really applied himself instead of actually applying himself to cracking the chapter. He was deeply and self-consciously conscious of still being unable – despite the tons of high voltage self-motivation he was bringing to bear on his recalcitrant psyche – to bring himself to believe, at an emotional–psychological–visceral level what he intellectually grasped, and unable to translate, so to speak, cognitive fact into lived knowledge of the kind that could generate the desired outcomes in terms of empowerment and capacity-building such that he could see himself as a glorious academic gladiator competing joyfully with other academic gladiators for a respectable podium finish. But inexplicably, he was unable to practise what he preached to himself. Instead, all he wanted was out. But there was no out. He was in, very in, as his male parent never tired of reminding him, and the only option he had was to haul his ass to the toilet seat, set his bottom down calmly, and not get up till he got his shit together.
Getting one’s shit together, as Roll No. 27 knew already, was easier said. It was 3.45a.m. already. He’d been on the same page since 2.17a.m., having woken up at 2.05a.m., brushed his teeth and done his neck rotation exercises before settling down at his desk, as he’d planned, to crack the semi-conductors first, being the easiest of the chapters.
But though he was still physically seated at the table, much time had passed since his concentration stood up and left. He was already thinking of getting an earlier start tomorrow, which he could if he went to bed earlier. If he could time his daily mandatory quota of sleep to coincide with the hours when distraction was at its peak – say, from 7p.m. to 1a.m. – he could still get his minimum requirement of six hours’ sleep and be up at 1 and well-positioned to max out on the quietest time of the twenty-four-hour cycle.
The big question was, would that even make a difference? Put differently, would even that make a difference? There was a crick in the second vertebra from down up that he tried to get rid of by doing a seated twist but it wouldn’t go away. You never are 100 per cent mentally available for your studies, are you now, his negativity asked him. Never, he agreed. Even now, this early in the morning, and it really was early by any yardstick, his best time for study, full quiet, no distractions (save the occasional barking of a street dog, but that couldn’t be helped, and besides it didn’t really count as a distraction as the sound of the barking did not carry any meaning that could draw his mind away from the subject at hand [semi-conductors], or rather the barking did not carry any meaning at all – except perhaps for other dogs, or some human who was within biting/chasing range of the barking dog), and no regrets (about having wasted a part of the day) troubling him when he was trying to focus, and yet he hadn’t been able to concentrate or make any progress with the bits and pieces of concentration he did manage to muster for some eighty or ninety seconds max at a stretch before hitting a pothole of distraction. On the positive side, he still had time to get some study miles behind him before he actually started trailing his timetable, yet again.
If he were to put a determinedly positive spin on it, as of this moment, 3:45:58, he still did enjoy a comfortable head start on the day. Undeniably he did. For he could, technically speaking, waste his time or let his mind wander for the next two hours and still not have regrets about having wasted a part of the day because the day did not start until 5.45, which was the time he had set for himself for starting on his daily studies in his official timetable. But a couple of days back he had hit upon the idea of setting up a parallel, unofficial timetable that began a few hours earlier than his official time table so as to keep the pressure off himself. So that even if his mind kept buzzing off, and he managed to get done only, say, forty-five minutes of actual studying considered in terms of his mind being involved directly (and solely) in processing the concepts and data of his syllabus textbook open in front of him and not the quantum of time he happened to be bodily bonded to his desk-chair (which was not an easy task either), he would still have a surplus of forty-five minutes – one entire half of a full-time football match – to begin his study day with, which should come in handy in combating the pathological negativity and hangdog mode he had a tendency to slip into if he slipped up on his concentration by even ten seconds in the crucial first hour of his first official study session of the day.
But this head start, instead of being a source of security and imbuing him with an attitude of relaxed and confident positivity toward his studies, only seemed to encourage his mind to goof off even more – the typical hare mentality of the hare–tortoise parable. In th
e hour he had been studying, or rather, sitting, just beyond the rim of the off-white spotlight produced by his table lamp, his chin supported by hands conjoined at the base of the palms, the prickly mood of his sleep-interrupted eyes compounded by the excessive brightness of the page burning under a 40W bulb 13 inches away, his mind abandoned the silicon-doped boron (or was it vice versa?) and dwelled instead on the socio-biological injustice of his eyes being pressed into the hard labour of transporting meaning-resistant text from the page to an uncomprehending brain during a period of time mandated by God and Nature for rest and recovery, thereby challenging directly the study timetable that another faction of the same mind had thought up and sought to institutionalize.
The rebellious faction of Roll No. 27’s mind seemed to receive much support from Roll No. 27’s eyes, or at least one of them, given their asymmetrical musculature.1 Roll No 27’s eyes’ rays of visual attention, which, according to their JD, were required to converge on lines of text, were now doing their own thing – another way of saying this would be to say that they seemed to have developed a mind of their own, which was a fallacy for they were all acting on the orders of the various competing factions of the same mind, i.e. Roll No. 27’s. And these rays of visual attention of Roll No. 27’s eyes began to diverge, at first a little, and then some more, and then some more, until they ended up taking a wide collective U-turn of sorts, away from the page, and turned inward – into Roll No. 27’s own mind, into his past, his present and the future that was already visible to those who could see his past and his present, and at the same time, they also continued to transmit, via the conventional neural circuit, packets of lexical and conceptual data to Roll No. 27’s brain which, also resentful at being yanked into night duty during its me-time, stalled over the potentially lucrative pieces of knowledge2 packed into the pages of the physics refresher positioned at the centre of the above-mentioned spotlight which had turned the immediate physical environment of Roll No. 27 (beyond the page) into a zone of sombre, post-apocalyptic grey where glowed dully, like abandoned luxury cars, the shiny bonnets of several fat textbooks that lay in peaceful slumber on the floor, heavy reminders of the syllabic miles to be covered for which he had given up his sleep.
But let alone miles, Roll No. 27 had trouble covering millimetres. He simply could not study. Something had to be wrong with the engine of his psychic apparatus. The gears necessary for him to be able to focus would not click into place, and on the odd occasions that they did, would not remain in their slots. Changing tack, he moved away from semi-conductors to the section on the capacitance of a parallel plate capacitor but it only made him ponder his own impending academic and existential incapacitation – caused, it seemed to him, by his mind’s enormous resistance to the abstractions of physics, its poor conductivity of numerical logic, and the extreme marks-dependence of his personal happiness and public self-esteem.
2
What is the probability that an ordinary year has 53 Sundays? (1 mark)
Delhi boy Harish Goel emerged the national topper with a jaw-dropping score of 100 out of 100 in chemistry, physics, biology and mathematics in the Central Board of Secondary Education Class XII examination, the results of the Delhi region of which were announced here on Wednesday. The only ‘disappointment’ being English Core, in which he got 97.
Another Delhi boy, V. Chandrasekhar, emerged the commerce topper, and the all-India humanities toppers were Shakti Sethi and Veena Majumdar, also from Delhi.
‘I am elated right now,’ said Goel, on his way to a television studio to give his first interview of the day. ‘I did not take tuitions, but I studied hard for twelve to thirteen hours every day throughout the Board exams,’ he said, even as his mother added, ‘whatever Harish wanted, Harish usually got’.
‘He was a very focused child, I’ve never had to scold him to study or concentrate like other parents. He knew what he wanted and he went after it,’ she said, adding that he was their only child and ‘wanted to be good at everything he did’.
Goel was especially grateful to his school, Vaikunt Valley, Paschim Vihar, and had a special method that helped him get ‘awesome’ scores. ‘I studied throughout the year, and by the time the exams came around, I was in my third revision,’ said Goel, adding that he intended to study physics at St. Jobs’s, in Delhi.
3
A given rectangular area is to be fenced off in a field whose length lies along a straight river. If no fencing is needed along the river, show that the least length of fencing will be required when length of the field is twice its breadth. (6 marks)
What was the name of the river? What colour was it? Blue, like in the maps in his atlas? Green, like in the holiday pic the boy who thought himself Salman Khan showed him? Shit-brown, like the one they drove along on a road trip to Kashmir? How cool was the water? How swift? How deep? Roll No. 27 calculated that he needed to study, outside of school, at least eight hours on school days and sixteen hours on school holidays (not excluding Sundays, bank holidays, Diwali and his birthday). He had arrived at the figures of eight and sixteen when, following his flop show in the quarterlies, at the suggestion of his male parent, he’d decided to benchmark his study routines with best-in-class practices. His class, 11-B, was already the best of the four sections (A, B, C and D). Matching his study routines with the best of his own class ought to ensure he followed the best practices of his entire batch which ought to ensure he got as close to Harish Goel as humanly possible.
So he conducted an informal quantitative survey of his class’s upper percentile’s study practices. The questions were, of course, couched in casual terms, embedded in segments of data he proffered about his own routines (not that his respondents were interested in knowing them) so as to pre-empt any suspicion about his motives. He quickly discovered that his classmates belonged to two categories.
The first category consisted of specimens who refused to admit they ever studied, who would tell him, on the morning of the exam, that they hadn’t even ‘touched’ the subject in the past month because they had expended the entirety of their time reserves on cricket-playing and TV-watching and these specimens typically scored in the high nineties and were expected to top the school if not the district and the state.
The second category consisted of entities, admittedly less superhuman but no less extraordinary who casually let it drop they could study only fifteen hours (instead of their usual quota of sixteen) on Sunday because they had cousins visiting over the weekend who wouldn’t leave them alone to study and they told him, on the morning of the exam, that they were feeling 10.5 per cent sleepy because they had been up from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. preparing (managing only an hour of sleep from 6.05 a.m. to 7.05 a.m.) and these organisms finished in a narrow band from the high eighties to the low nineties and, though they were destined to gain admission to any college of their or their progenitors’ choice, they nevertheless berated themselves every time over what they deemed an abysmal performance (a performance Roll No. 27 would have been thrilled to a million little pieces with) because they were yet again several percentage points below the Category 1 specimens despite having worked several times longer and harder than them.
In this class, Roll No. 27 was of course a bottom-feeder, though he had never been one until his male parent had shifted him to this elite school for his Class 11 and Class 12. But whatever school he was in, the subjects were the same, as his male parent had pointed out to him several times and the brain capacities were also, presumably (unless he had suddenly turned an idiot), the same. So, if he worked as hard as the toppers, there was no reason why he could not do better than finish second last – on the positive side, there still was one student behind him (Roll No. 33).
Given the same right inputs he ought to obtain the same right outputs. The equation in his head was as follows:
P + (Q x H) = M
While P was a constant and stood for a given subject (physics, maths, chemistry, whatever), Q, H and M were quantitative variables and represente
d IQ, hours of study, and marks obtained, respectively. The higher the IQ of the student and the higher the number of hours of study, the greater the marks he or she scored.
Evidently, Roll No. 27 did not believe his Q to be below that of his competitors. So all he needed to do was match his H with those of his academic betters.3 Of course he could not benchmark his H on those of the first category even though their self-proclaimed H (or lack thereof) seemed to work rather well for them. So it had to be the second category. But though hour-wise targets gave him at a practical level the motivation to affix himself to a single point in space for long periods of time by virtue of having his posterior in non-stop contact with the seat of the metallic folding chair that was now paired with a metallic folding study table, Roll No. 27’s fundamental problem remained as intractable as ever.
4
Q: How did you study? Did you follow a schedule?
A: I used to get up at 6 in the morning. 7–12 in the morning was the peak concentration time for me. I think it’s very important to set your biological clock to the time of the exam, usually 10–1 in the morning, so that you are mentally alert while giving the exam.
From a certain perspective, it would be a gross simplification to say that Roll No. 27 could not study, for saying so would imply that this was simply a personal, and perhaps idiosyncratic dysfunction, which was simply not true – not the whole truth in any case. Sure, it was true that he was a student (an occupation he had had no hand in choosing, and having been enrolled in school by his parents soon as he reached a certain age, he had continued in the semi-incarceration [physical and mental] built into schooling as an institution without there being any mutually meaningful consultations on the matter between him and his parents, either on the nature of, or the necessity for, or the rationale behind, the kind of schooling he would be subjected to, and organize his life around, for an entire decade, and whose impact on his psyche and/or suitability for his temperament would not become a matter of discussion until after he had been processed, stamped and ejected from the said system), but that was more a description of the social status accorded to him by default than an identity he had actively sought for himself – at least as of then. The fact of the matter was that it had become irrelevant whether or not he thought of himself (primarily) as a student. And yet, despite this irrelevance (which he could glimpse in stray moments of perspicacity), he had, via the emotional carrot-and-stick policy of his parents, his peers, and the cumulative social expectations of the network of blood-and-non-blood relations and well-wishers at large, internalized the achievement-orientation that had come to characterize high school studentship in most of the higher-end English-medium private schools that the middle-class and well-to-do sent their children to. But the tragedy (or comedy, as the case may be, depending on your temperament as an observer) in the case of Roll No. 27 was that while he had uncritically bought into the hyper-competitive, ‘I achieve, therefore I am’ mind-set, his own emotional and psychic wiring were ill-suited for such an orientation, having evolved, presumably, for a different, more benign, cooperative rather than competitive, living environment. It was this fundamental disjunction that produced the existential paralysis resulting in a crisis of mid-life-ist dimensions in this sixteen-year-old soul, now in Class 11, in the final segment of the penultimate year of school education, while less than a week away lay, like the proverbial crouching tiger, his annual examination – an examination which would determine, on the basis of his performance in it, whether or not his school would promote him to Class 12, which was a class he needed to get to in order to appear for the Boards that would follow exactly a year from now, and he knew, and his parents knew, that his performance in the Boards would determine the trajectory of the rest of his material life and if he wanted that trajectory to point upward and not downward, he needed to do well in the Boards, and to be able to do well in the Boards, he must first qualify for it, and to be able to qualify for it, he needed to do well in the Class 11 annual exams, and to be able to do well in the Class 11 annual exams, he needed to be able to do something he simply could not do: study.