The Mystic Ranger

Thus goes, the basic “tenet” of Murphy’s Law, which I expe­ri­enced in full force today. It was fun though, rather exhil­er­at­ing, if I must say so!

Today, as you may, or may not know, was the [in Namya’s words] “big vidya­mandir test”. In the morn­ing, I get up (which is rather unchar­ac­ter­is­tic of me — as most of the time I am made to get up), as you might infer — all by myself, and then, in a method­i­cal, monot­o­nous way, get ready, and by 10.15 get out of house, into the car. We are 150m off, and I, for the first time yet, check my admit card — and sur­prise, sur­prise — my day begins now. There was a place where we had to “affix” our photo and I had not. We turned back, got the photo. We sit in the car, and I declare, once again, that I’d left the admit card at home now. We once again go up, pick it up (too up? is it? I think so too…) and then sit in the car (we did go back down — I thought you’d pre­sume that. )

[I notice that I’m suf­fer­ring from relaps­ing tense trou­bles — I am again and again faal­ing into using the present tense. An after­ef­fect of read­ing a few pages of The Zahir. Try it. You might empathize.]

And then, I reach the cen­ter, sur­pris­ingly quite in time. And there, at the gate I tell my roll num­ber, and the guy says — “I’m at the wrong cen­ter. There’s no such roll num­ber ’round here.” And I’m like, what the heck?! Then the guy says, there are some ran­dom rooms which are empty and I can go to “Room 17″. En route, I meet one of the orga­niz­ers, who shouts out, Room 17 khaali hain, Room 15 mein baithon. And then, Room 15 has just me, and another silly girl, who actu­ally asked me if I had com­pleted that prac­tice CD, and when I said yes, she was half-stunned. As if it were the most impos­si­ble thing to happen.

And then, in 5 min­utes, the bell rang. With not a sin­gle teacher/invigilator in our room. Then we ran about, and were made to sit in the next room, with some empty seats.

And then, my watch, very prudly, was still show­ing 10.30 or some­thing — about half an hour slow. I adjusted it, and it stopped working.

The test went on, I won’t tell you how it was (ok, it was very bad — I sucked up big time), but what was very nicely timed of my watch, was that it was con­sis­tently at least an hour behind the time, and if it was re-adjusted, when it was work­ing, it would keep itself from work­ing, until it was an hour behind. And within 15 min­utes of exit­ing the place, my watch was back to func­tion­ing rather well.

I, sur­pris­ingly enough, really didn’t mind, as I remem­bered exactly these words — ‘Every­thing that can go wrong, will.’

[rat­ings]