Exam Fever

The doctor repeated the same dialogue I have been hearing from others over the last few days. ”Relax” he said.
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A strange word for someone who is always relaxed in normal times. But these times were not normal.

“Your blood pressure is over the top” the doc said. “If it goes at this rate I’ll soon bust my BP gauge”. “Anyway what provoked your BP to soar skywards?”:

“Exams” I said. “School exams”.

The medic gave me a surprised look. “You are back in school?” he asked.

“No it is my daughter’s pre-boards, the rehearsal for school final exams".

“I understand” said the doc. “I have faced this problem too.. When my son had his pre-board exams for 10<SUP>th</SUP> and 12<SUP>th</SUP> class, my BP soared. My boy was totally relaxed but I felt like pulling my hair”.

I , alas, can’t even pull my hair. Pulling my bald pate would look absurd.

“It is the exam fever” said the doctor. “It is an unfair division. The kids have the exams and we have the fever.”

That was the problem. If my daughter had looked a little bit concerned I wouldn’t be so tense. But even if she was concerned she didn’t look concerned. She appeared totally relaxed.

I thought it was only fair that she should look tense, punch her forehead with her fist, grit her teeth. Nothing of the sort. She was absolutely (and in my opinion absurdly) cool.

And the tension she should have felt got transferred to me and my wife, and a larger unfair share of it accrued to me.

“Relax” my wife repeated the same old mantra. “Your tension is adding to my stress. As such the girl is so chilled out that I am, not able to control my tension”.

“Who the hell invented the pre-boards ? Weren’t the final board exams enough of a headache?” I asked.

The pre-board , wifey said was a scam. It was a filtering process which enabled the school to pick up bright kids and send them to the Central Board of Secondary Education’s final exams. The results, naturally will be good showcasing the schools’ high standards. The rest of the kids are sent as private candidates.

“Why don’t they end this scam?”

“The country is full of scams of all sort. If we start putting an end to them, India will collapse” my wife said. I never thought of scams as the glue holding India together but the idea, though amusing, did not reduce my tension.

“Meditate” suggested the doctor “That’ll help you cool down. What is the most challenging exam for your daughter?”

“Hindi” I said.

“Do letters in Devnagri script keep haunting your mind because of that?”

“They do, they do!”

“Then purge them from your mind before you meditate” said

“On what should I meditate?”

“Anything, anybody. God, Madhuri Dixit, Salma Hayek. Just focus on the object of meditation and forget the rest”.

Since I found Madhuri a bit too old, and God even older, I opted for Salma. Hayek but failed miserably. Immediately I phoned the doc to complain.

“I am not seeing Salma Hayek”

“I know you aren’t.” the doctor said. “Otherwise gossip magazines and columns would be full of it. ‘Indian latest man in Salma’s life’ What a great headline that would have been!”

“I am talking about the meditation. I tried to meditate on Salma and instead I am seeing….”

“Who? Mallika Sherawat?” the doc asked jovially.
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“No something much worse. Letters in Devnagri script still keep haunting my mind along with sinister looking taxmen”.

“Hey! What are those guys doing there?”

“ You see when one source of tension takes over the mind the other sourcs make their presence felt too".

The doc let out a groan and a colorful Punjabi oath casting aspersions on taxmen's relations with their sisters. .

“Relax” he said for the zillionth time.but sounding stressed himself “Once the exams are over you’ll be back to normal”

I did after a few days when I found out that my daughter had not fared badly in the pre-boards.

When I rang up the clinic to tell the doctor that everything was fine, his attendant picked up the phone.

“The doctor is at home. He is not well”

“What’s wrong with him?”

”His BP shot up. His doctor told him to relax”.

“He has exam fever too?”

“No tax fever. That day your mention of taxmen in your mind made his stress level rise like mad. You see he had received a notice from the Income Tax Department the day before”.
:cheers

 

Viji tks, telling the doc to relax would be a good way of hitting back at him.

 

"Since you have selected to use meditation as controller, i suggest instead of thinking of salma, narrow down your focus to the area of salma that you wisht to meditate- go from macro to micro. Then the face doesn't matter."

Jaya, naughty, naughty.

As for reading As for reading Kamalji's blogs, I have always fancied myself to be a better stressbuster than Kamalji. Yes pre-boards should be done away with.But boards should be there since they help in population control (Quite a few students end their life when exam fever and dread of results overwhelms them.

 

Radha welcome to the club of parents stressed by kids' exams!