Five Years Forever- III

In the end the long and short of it is that many grudgingly took the exam, some bravely abstained, most failed, most letters reached homes, some even had unhappy consequences but amidst all this our spirit emerged victorious. So nothing changed, and life went on.

Soon winter came and we realiaised why Pune is such wonderful place. If there is anything as a “perfect winter” it is the Pune winter. Delhites disagree but I have always found the Delhi winter to be cold in an impersonal way unlike the Pune winter, which is inviting and embracing. Never chillingly cold to the bone but still cold enough to flaunt pullovers and jackets, cold enough to always be centre of our conversations but never menacing enough to keep us indoors, it was perfect. The temperature is just right to go out and have a cup of coffee with friends. A lot did happen over a cup of coffee but mostly it was at Zaika’s and not CCD. Late into the night, sitting at the sidewalk opposite Zaika and sipping steaming coffee, remains the signature image of the winters. As the winter progressed, say around January, exams often started popping up in late night coffee talks. But it all ended with the consolation that there were still a couple of months to go, which implied that we could afford more fun. People started going back home for the so called “study leave” and then by Feb. only a handful of brave souls remained in Pune. I was one of them. Soon we had a lot of advice from people who had gone back home about their lack of any headway as far as studies were considered. This bolstered our spirits and egged us on to have more fun and made us believe that studies could be kept for some more time at the backburner. The truth is that with most of our friends away life was not all that cool. Of course the movies, coffees and beer did not stop but the zing was missing.

Then came the time when we could no longer afford not to study. The harsh truth of examinations could no longer be obscured and we were left with the choice of “do or die”. Now, no one wants to die, if he can help it that is; so out came our books and we sat down with the purpose of somehow passing the exams. Seniors had already told us about the strange ways in which the Pune University awarded or not awarded marks and it did no wonders to our already jittery confidence. The fact remains that we did get down to some serious studying for the last one month. A lot was at stake after all. We had just begun to realise the enormous “extra academic” possibilities the next four years in Pune presented, what a rollicking holiday it was turning out to be and we were in no way prepared to chuck all this because of a lousy exam.

Finally, the exams started sometime in middle of April. The smart people had realised that the mantra of success lay not in the heavy tomes that preached about the different subjects we had to suffer but in the yellow coloured exceedingly thin “note” book called the “Pathan Notes” which could teach those voluminous tomes a thing or two about brevity. Badly written, typeset horribly, alien to the concept of proof reading, and full of errors, English that was pedestrian- by all accounts it made you feel that it was one sure way of flunking. But anyone who really read it still has to flunk, for in spite of all this, it did reduce whole subjects to 40 to 50 pages. Some even went to the extent of saying that the university awarded marks on the basis of the faithfulness of reproduction from the Pathan books; it was rumoured that even the examiner’s were guided by it. So with a lot of help from the Pathan’s , and with our sincere will to have a even better time the next year we took the exams. And most of us did make it, much to our own surprise. We had seen the power of Pathan’s first hand and then there was no turning back. It ensured that for the remaining of our law education books were out of the picture. Having already done away with classrooms in the beginning of the year, we ended by making even the books irrelevant. It’s a wonder how we became lawyers!