A CHAPTER IN THE LIFE OF A PSG Techian

A chapter in the life of a PSG Techian – From the Lens of an Invigilator
A prelude to the final 3 hour trial as i captured it on a boring afternoon!!(Like most teachers, i dont enjoy invigilation duty as well!!)..


Welcome to April/may.. the two agonizing months which every Techian would die to trade them off for something more exciting and interesting in his life!!!
What a horrible time to be in? – Sans movies, sans girlfriends, Sans corridor gossip, Sans intercollegiate events, Sans IPL’s ..What a 360 degree turn to his life!

From a shiny, clean-shaven to a hollow cheek decked with stubbles...
From a neatly-pressed branded jean and shirt to a half-dirty pant and a badly creased shirt...
From the world of IPL’s to the world of polynomials and semiconductors..
From Dominoes Pizzas and Boomerang Ice creams to midnight teas at the NMB..

Over to the hostel…

Rooms so long littered with DVD’s, USB’s and sports shoes are replaced overnight with calculators and data books..
Wall papers of Britney Spears or Kareena Kapoor do not distract them anymore….they peer through them with a saintly detachment to figure out the dynamics of socket programming!
Talk time thus far reserved for girlfriends are distributed in all fairness to the 9- point day scholars..
The palates that mercilessly cursed the hostel mess food humbly submit themselves to ANYTHING served in the name of food!
While the 9 pointers discuss and share knowledge, the 5 and 6 pointers catch the tidbits of knowledge thrown by them with bewildered eyes and rapt attention!!!
Corridors so long reverberating with peals of laugher and rail rokos are suddenly overwhelmed by a pall of uncanny silence!!!
Boys don’t look like boys anymore – while the electrical engineers draw electric fields in the air as they walk, the mechanical engineers piously discuss heat and mass transfer while crossing the bridge…

Over to the examination hall....


One cannot but help watch him put a finger on his forehead trying desperately to dig out the answer for the questions in the question paper... Rubbing his cheeks and fingers restlessly, just hoping for the invigilator’s one moment of negligence so that he can share notes with his classmate to sail through the objective types.

What a sticky situation to be in !


Girls are not any different… they hardly resemble their faces in their ID cards..- shorn of all makeup, grace and matching dupattas..
A plain salwar and a kurta and a care-strewn face with her spectacles in place of contact lens…Oh Boy! She does look like the reincarnation of Marie Curie…One wonders…
Was this the same face that turned the faces of many a boy to look at her and broke many a heart as she walked past them in the corridor?
As she bangs the desk helplessly in a desperate moment to recall the answer, one wonders even if the army jawans at the LOC go through such intense moment of anxiety at the sight of the enemy..
Never have I seen students get so restless about blank papers..the same “Arrow”Space engineers who could bend papers to any shape to dart arrows and paper balls now treat the same paper with so much reverence.
The same moving finger which relentlessly and shamelessly replicated assignments in all confidence has suddenly become so rigid and frozen as if she was writing the Book of God (I could listen to her whisper “Gosh! I Wish I had listened to that professor for once!)
Almost reconciled to his plight, he turns around to find comfort in the shared agony of his classmates. To his dismay, he notices them fill in the papers with a dogged determinism! To add to his agony , he sees a girl in front him stand up and ask for an additional sheet from the ever-willing invigilator..
(Alas, he doesn’t know the fact that these are the smarties who have mastered the art of presentation skills – presenting the same first paragraph in many different ways in the subsequent paragraphs)

This is how my lens captured his myriad expressions and mental states in the grueling three hours time

1.50 – 2.00: The Mr.Morose in him morbidly walks through the sea of humanity, locates his seat and lands himself there as if he were attending a funeral

2.00-2.10 : The Optimist in him waits in all anticipation and hope as the invigilator distributes the question paper

2.10- 2.30 :The Meditator in him sails through the questions, sets the mental compass right and tries hard to unearth the answers from his cerebral cortex with the intensity and academic rigour of Einstein or Spinoza. Alas! Yet, more than 80 percent of the contents in the question paper look no familiar than the characters of the old Greek alphabet!!!

3.50- 4.15 The strategist in him tries all possible strategies – right from exercising his prowess of peripheral vision to picking answers from forward and backward roll numbers/ asking silly doubts from the invigilator with the faint hope of getting ONE SMALL clue for the answer!!!No trick of him seems to work!

4.15- 4.30: Mr Gymnast now tries squatting his legs on the chair, reclines a bit on the table, stretches arms on the chair..scrathces his head... No amount of physical activity seems to fill his mental void

4.45- 5.00 The stoic in him throws in the towel, and for once, he remembers the powers above, calls them for help and hands over the paper to the (still) cold invigilator and walks out in spirit of despondency overpowered by resignation…