It was RAMKALYAN'S PAPER!#@!!

The faces of the 37 students who had rushed into the examination hall said it all! The look in each one's face was echoing in unison, "YOU ARE DEAD MEAT!!", yet the silence in the hall was deafening. All I could do was, settle down with the question paper and the answer booklet and give my analytical skills a race for the price.

In an engineering college, speculation has its own coveted position in the academic life of every aspiring techy. For speculation is what earns him the crucial 50% marks to escape that dreaded noose of arrears. The preparatory hours before the exams witness crucial debates on the pattern to be expected and it is in these trying times, that the role of the one with the inside information, like me, becomes indispensable. The community that I represent, are committed to gather information about the person who sets the question paper, its pattern and of course, the evaluators' legacy of sparing the grades.

This time too, my reliable sources tendered that Mr Bennet had set the paper for Signals and Systems and that he would definitely stick to his modus operandi of lifting the questions from his humoungus assignments. The source was infallible, since it was the office of the department of Instrumentation and Control Engineering (ICE) , that gave this information and mind you, the department offices seldom lie. As a consequence, the Xam-eve was a usual night-out, with the guys running hither thither in search of the solutions for the assignments, which I am sure, even Engineer Hercules would have felt humbled. Yet the deed would be done and for a while, conceptual learning takes the exit and enter the sacred deed of mugging.

After all this strife, you are confident of escaping the arrear sentence, or perhaps, yet another arrear sentence, and enter the exam hall to face the battle, only to realize when you get the question paper in hand, that you were indeed caught in the conspiracy of the cosmos, falling prey the trap it had laid; that the paper was not set by Bennet, but another department tough guy, Ramkalyan, who is known for his jigsaw question papers. It is of course, a fait accompli that correct information means a blessing, no information means ill luck, but wrong information means capital punishment!! And the condemned? The informant, who, in this case, is poor me.

Curses and a garland of the finest vocabulary available at the tip of the tongue, apt for the occasion, were the constituents of my remuneration for my invaluable service. Most of the 37 did not wait for 3 hours of test time to lapse. Battered by Ramkalyan's cannons, all we could do was surrender the answer booklet and leave the hall.

But trauma is never an ingredient in the life of an ICE Samaritan. Outside the exam hall, at the end of the accusation trading and words of praise for Ramkalyan's ability to single handedly crush 37 answer booklets and declare them as nothing but jargon that could fetch worth only to scavengers, the junta was back to their usual selves. What more? A smiling Chatley, capable of knocking one's senses off with his surprise, confidently shook hands with moi and declared with his usual penache, "Same place, Same time, but next Sem!!! All the best for the arrear!!"