CATastrophe!

It came, it saw and it screwed me! Yes, I’m talking about CAT, the mother of all entrance exams….at least in India. I was one of the whopping 2.6 lakh people who took it this year and I finally know what all the fuss is about.

I had heard stories about CAT and how some people went into a trance preparing for it, how some passed out in the exam hall during the test, and how some actually committed suicide after the results. As frightening as some of those stories may be, they never seemed to bother me much. Not because I was very confident, NO SIR! It was simply because I never took it all that seriously, and my score would surely prove that.

God only knows why I enrolled in PT for coaching, since I hardly attended any classes. The attendance register at the Center Point branch is testimonial to that fact. But yes, the mock tests conducted by PT, or PracCats as they call them, did help me a lot. They helped me develop useful strategies and build a good amount of confidence, which is a great help in exams of this order. I did reasonably well in those tests, notching up percentiles between 90 and 98. So I was up for the actual thing. Not that I had IIMs in mind or anything but thought I could get a decent enough score.

Verbal Ability had been my forte with DS playing the supporting role. Quant? What’s that???? Never mind….So obviously I was banking on VA and DS to get me that decent enough score I talked about earlier. But fate had something else in mind. VA was pretty tough and I had to really rack my brains to arrive at some sort of a conclusion regarding the answers.

The great thing about CAT is that not only does it test your knowledge but also your intuitive ability. I mean the options in some of the questions look so similar that the only way one can figure out the right answer is through sheer instincts.

Anyway, at the end of it all I was rather confident about my performance. I felt that maybe I would manage to get that decent enough score after all that I’ve been harping on, and travelled back home a satisfied man…..until I checked my score online. Damn the Internet! The score was far from being decent…in fact it was pretty obscene.

But no worries….one day, I can proudly tell my grandchildren that I was there, that I held my nerve and fought it out, that I survived the grueling two and half hours...I can tell them what all the fuss is about.