50 percent of 50

I wasn’t, as you must have gathered from my last post, the most popular guy in school. Definitely not as popular as T78O89P (the chronic topper), M34I26S34 (the girl who had grown quickly & how!) or C2H3O8 (the science wiz kid… Man, that guy could devise a fully-functional bomb from the contents of a make-up kit, seriously)… And evidently, not as someone whose name a girl might remember when tapped in a local bus after a decade or so.

To put things in the right perspective, let’s say I was comfortably average. Like someone who found bliss in passing his subjects rather than scoring in them. Someone who was friends with most in his class but no one in particular belonged to his ‘circle’… maybe because he never had a circle… not even a triangle … not even a segment. Someone, whom most found was a nice guy to know but perhaps not nice enough to know for good…

Ha! Got you, didn’t I? Jyada senti hogaya kya? Aare boss, aisa kuch hota to kya mein yahan full-on Valmiki style mein apna school-puran likh raha hota?!!

To be true to you, the first line fits my scholastic personality bill like how those hot pants fitted Rimi Sen in the opening song of Dhoom 1 (Yeah, you know what I am talking about… ;) … or perhaps the first two lines, the second being only partially true.

You see the need to score 35 percent or the golden minimum was limited to 5 or perhaps 6 of the 9 subjects I had in a year. The number would have been far lesser if something as lovable as ‘Science’ had not mutated into an ugly three-headed monster namely, Biology, Chemistry and Physics by the time Phoolan Devi became an MP or I reached the seventh standard.

However, thanks to my extraordinarily developed mugging skills, I somehow saw the end of these subjects by the time I wrote my final exam. But, how do you deal with a subject that can’t be mugged? How do you deal with a subject that doesn’t award you five marks for filling a page or two with meaningless crap? How do you deal with something like… mathematics?

Yes, I hated Maths. I hated every percentage of it, it’s every permutation and combination, it’s every angle and it’s every side. I hated it as much as Rakhi Sawant hates to leave her house without make-up or with donning clothes more than ten inches in length. Okay, maybe not that much. Nonetheless, exam times with Maths were always difficult. The lack of scope for mugging always left me staring blankly into mine and then intently into the papers of those around me.

Of all frightful exam memories that still manage to wake me up in the middle of an office meeting, there is this one instance… one question that I might have stared so hard that it now appears to be photocopied in my mind. The question was something like:

Section 2. Solve the following (3 Marks each)

01. 50% of 50 is ___

Yeah… fifty percent of fifty. Two identical numbers separated by one confusing symbol and you’ve got the kid. Pure evil.

I am positive I hadn’t got it right back then. Now of course if you ask me, I can tell you right away the answer is … yes, it is… (Ah, now where is a frigging calculator when you need one?) … Ha! Yes, 25… I would have told you the answer is 25. But, I couldn’t back then. Going by the intellectual composition of my class, I can say for sure that 50% of the 50 odd students never got either. I was one of them. One of the 50%. And that’s how it remained for most of my initial schooling years. I was always trailed by 50% of the best. To make it sound better, I always managed to lead the 50% worst performing students… Comfortably average.

However, scoring consistently low wasn't all that bad afterall, as it soon turned out to be… The year was 1996 and we had a new student joining our class…