Jumbled Thoughts

One of my school friends had this habit of wearing the same shirt everyday for all the days of an exam – be it the quarterly or the annual, we were sure he’d wear the same yellow full sleeves day after day. The shirt was too worn out, totally faded (I came to know it was actually an yellow shirt, only when he told me!), in fact I remember seeing couple of patches in the arm pit area, but all these didn’t stop him from trusting  his old shirt. Nay sir, never ever did he come with out his good old "yellow" shirt!

This made me think why I had no such beliefs or "superstitions" myself….may be if I had something my grades wouldn’t be this abysmal. Anyway, all the shirts I used to wear to college were kind of worn out already – things other than clothes were of interest to me then (no..no..what you are thinking is wrong!) – so I guess I had this same-object luck all the time

Thinking about it, I now realize that nearly all my friends had at least one exam-superstition. One of my 9th standard friends didn’t cut his hair during the annual exam, while another friend didn’t take bath through out the exams This was kind of awkward for all of us as he used to sweat a lot!! I am used to skipping bath too, during exams, but that was purely because I thought I could use that 15 minutes for reading couple of more pages – I used to open the text book only the day before the exam, you see, so I needed all the time that I could get for at least passing the exam. Maths and Chemistry were the prime candidates for me, to skip bath, during my school/UG days.

During the exams, I have noticed God becoming an important entity in all students’ lives. My mom used to shout at me, to see the God before going to the exams, but most of the times her sound advice didn’t penetrate my numb skull as my mind was full of some formulae or some text which I absorbed (read, "mugged up!") in the last minute! My level of talking usually went down during exams – Aha…may be this was my exam-superstition, if you can call it one – "to talk less", as I was afraid if I talked about other things, I would lose the thread of what I learnt for the next exam.

Superstitions used to vary a lot; From "I will eat only 2 idlies in the morning of the exam" to "I will come only by the 8.30 bus" to "I will make use of only this hero pen for all the exams" to "I will wear the same slipper/dress everyday"; there were too many to count here. Luckily, my friends’ circle was made of so many varied characters, I had a nice exposure to this wonderful world of exam superstitions. There were couple of weird habits too – "bringing a peacock feather and keeping it out near the paper during the exam" beats it all! One of my 8th standard friend used to do this. "Tying a knot in the corner of the hand-kerchief at the start of the exam and untying it only after the exam" was an intriguing one too.

I am pretty sure these habits die hard. Only a small percentage of people who used to have these beliefs during their school days grow out of them. These habits are carried forward in to the corporate world too….wait…is this probably why my colleague was stinking so much that day during his presentation?? may be, may be not!