The Answer Paper...

During school days…there were so many silly (atleast for me..) things that I just couldn’t agree to…One such aspect was EXAMS…and more than that the REPORT CARDS…a report card or a mark list was the most horrible thing I wished I never had to take home…especially if the numbers that was in it was not so biggggggg one…We used to have soo many subjects to learn like Mathematics, Science, English, Social Science etc etc…and this Stupid Card had a detailed list of the marks we scored in each subject…and if luck wasn’t with u, then the teachers would get the chance to decorate the Black and White Card with colours…that is, if you fail for one subject, they would draw a red line below that mark…Maybe this was the only place where I liked it Black & White...

My mom was a terror for me and brother during exams and days we get our report cards…I was considered the Intelligent Girl…for the same reason once my brother started the routine life of going to school and having exams and results, mom let me free…means, she didn’t have the time to spare to sit with me to teach me and prepare me for the exams…I HAD to do it myself…I WAS HAPPY….atleast, I was saved from the official thuds and pinches and slaps….(she had this peculiar habit of asking questions once she teach you something and I used to feel that she was POSSESSED by seeing the way she reacted when I couldn’t give the correct answer…) I thanked my brother at heart…bcoz of him I was saved from the pre-exam terror…So if I study well and do the exam well, I would be spared from the Post-exam terror too…I just needed to work hard and get good marks…or rather DECENT marks (and for her that meant above 90%...uhmmmm….)

But somebody else was cursing me then…that was my brother…leaving me on my own meant my mom had her complete time for my brother…so u can imagine the situation….to worsen things up…he was lazy and considered NOT SO STUDIOUS…where mom kept my Decent mark to be 90%, she just hoped my brother to get a 50% ATLEAST…so pre-exam days was the most horrible days for my bro and my mom too…she had to literally bang her own head on the walls trying to teach my bro and making him study them without forgetting them...atleast until he finished his exams…

My mom didn’t leave us free even after the exam…UNTIL, she sees our question papers and make sure that we have done our exams properly…once we reach home after exams, she would sit with the question paper and start asking us the answers…we had to recite the answers we have written…not to forget, she even asked us to write the answers on question paper…so that we didn’t have to recite them…she would read the questions and answers from the question paper and would have a rough idea of how much mark we would score…she didn’t care much about me, as she trusted me to score high…but with my bro, she prayed hard, that he doesn’t fail…. many a times, we had tried many plans to outdo atleast the post-exam terror, by telling, we lost the question paper...nothing ever worked…some how she used to manage to get a spare question paper…God knows how…

That year, I was in the 4th grade and my bro in the 2nd… that is, I was 9 and my bro 7 years old…we came after our Second term exams (exams before the Xmas holidays)…she saw my question paper and I had done the exam pretty well…she was happy…with shivering hands she started going thru my bro’s paper…he had English exam… there was not a single question which she hasn’t taught her… from the first question ‘The vowels of English alphabets are ____’ to the last question ‘Write five lines on - The Cow - ’…my brother was cool in answering every single question…My mom, for the first time in history had a breath of relief…She sighed, “Ha, this time, he wouldn’t fail…and he would be getting good marks too….even if there are spelling mistakes, still he would surely pass…”…for the first time, she was cool and didn’t wait for the results to come…she knew, this time, the result for the English paper is going to be great…

My mom was in for a shock when the results came…my brother had a red line below his English marks…where she expected to see a minimum of 20 out of 50; she saw a 5½. / 50…She was thunderstruck…she knew there was some mistake some where…Maybe the teacher didn’t correct the answer paper correctly…She was angry, bcoz she knew her son had done the exams so well…She rushed to the school, met the teacher and DEMANDED a JUSTIFICATION for the marks…She challenged that there was some terrible mistake…The teacher smiled…She gave mom my brother English Answer Paper…My mom couldn’t believe her eyes…(if you wanna see them urself, pls click on the below images for Page 1 and 2)....

The teacher just had the most easiest answer paper to evaluate...

What happened to my bro after this is History...

GOD BLESS HIM!!!

My Partner in the Crime...

Happy New Year....

May God bless you with all happiness and success he can shower upon you...On this day, I have decided to share with you some good thoughts... Something that added into my life's "Book of Do's and Dont's"... something that added onto my virtues to grow into a better human being...

Do you steal??? Have you ever stolen anything from your own home??? Have you stolen MONEY from under your parents’ eyes??? I have…but couldn’t pursue my higher studies in mastering the art of stealing…lol!!! It is a story…and here it is…

I was some 5 or 6 years old…and my brother two years younger to me… that year, we both got enrolled into the same convent school… myself being the big sister was cool at the new school…but my brother who was going to a school for the first time, soon started hating it…more than any reason, he didn’t want to go anywhere, where his mom was not present…He was (and still is…grrrr…) a Mamma’s boy….Daily morning, it was a heartbreaking scene to see him screaming and crying when being dropped at his classroom…(afterall, he was just between 3-4 years)… seeing him crying used to make me also upset…

Soon, I had an idea to stop him from crying...Give him sweets…he loved sweets…if you give him sweets, he would stop crying (every afternoon, they used to sell sweets at my school… and my all time favorite was the orange toffee) but then, to buy sweets, you need money… and during those days there was no such phrase called “POCKET MONEY” in my house…we, children, got anything and everything that we wished for from our parents…but we were not allowed to keep money or buy things on our own… to eat sweets on a daily basis was considered NOT GOOD FOR HEALTH by MOM (how weird…) Without money, how could I buy sweets for my brother…I started using my brains…how can I get some money… uhhmm…???

During those days, my mom had this practice of maintaining a Piggy Bank…this piggy bank was kept in her room to build in some “Money Saving” nature in her children… If ever we got any money from anywhere, we were supposed to put the coins into that piggy bank…to increase the spirit, she herself used to gift both of us children with 50paise or 1 Rupee coins to remit into the so called Piggy Bank…(here, it was a powder tin with a narrow opening, which mom had cut out with knife, at the bottom of it…)..She used to motivate us to follow this practice and had promised that once the tin is full, she will open it and divide and gift the money equally to me and my brother, so that we can buy what ever we wish for….

Thinking of the Piggy Bank, I finalized on a fool proof idea to get the money required for the sweets…STEAL… steal the money you want…from the piggy bank…moreover, you doesn’t have to worry that mom would know about it… My partner in crime was my own brother… Very innocently I told him my plan and soon I started pulling out the coins from the small opening on the Talcum Powder tins…the denomination of coins that came out depended on our luck and on that luck depended the number of sweets we could buy that day… I started going to school with this money and buy sweets daily in the afternoon…give some to my brother and eat some myself...days when I got more money, I started sharing sweets with my friends too… I started acting like a big girl, to be on my own and having money to buy sweets and offering it to my brother and friends…my friends used to adore me for giving them sweets daily…uhmmmm….I WAS GREATTTTTTT…

But…all that happiness didn’t stay long…One fine day, I and my brother had a fight on some silly matter…my brother was on fault…and so naturally, mom scolded him…I was happy…He got punishment for his mistake…but then…the most terrible thing happened….Something that I never imagined…something that I never thought would happen…My brother…my little brother…my three year old brother…blurted out… “Mommmmmmmm, why u scolding only me…u should scold sis also… she takes money from the piggy bank daily and buy sweets…You scold her also…”…

I was shocked…yet I could see my mom was Dead Struck…She stood as if she couldn’t believe what she just heard…She asked, “What???”….and within no time, my dear brother presented the detailed story board of how the crime took place and how I walked around in the school with sweets in my hands and offering it to kids who begged for sweets… I felt as if the earth was moving off from below my feet…I just remember mom asking me if what she heard was true and myself trying to mutter some reply…

What followed was a small action movie… literally and physically, she was blasting me out…I screamed and cried…I pleaded for forgiveness…After the initial explosion, maybe she realized, she was over reacting (only I know, she wasn’t..uhmmm)…She took me to her side…calmly she explained how bad stealing was…and why one shouldn’t do it…and if not anybody, but still god was watching all that I was doing…and so on…I cried…I felt bad for what I did…I repented…I apologized and promised never to repeat my mistake…She kissed me and said she has forgiven me…

Be it the hard way, still I learnt the biggest lesson of my life… * Stealing is NO good…Work hard for your needs…Trying to steal it from somebody is equivalent to stealing your own self esteem * … and always remember … "The only thing worth stealing is a kiss from a sleeping child..."

Between, wouldn’t you like to know what happened to my dearrrrrrr brother…uhmmm…when I heard him blurting out the truth, I had felt like killing him… but, soon I was smiling…BECAUSE…he too got a share of the initial explosion that I got from mom…afterall…He was

“My Partner in the Crime…”

Jogging...???? Noooooo, Never....!!!!

Are you a fitness freak??? Do you exercise or jog on a daily basis?...uhmm…I never been for regular jogging…just a month back, when I was sitting at home doing nothing (during my redundancy days)..suddenly I had this thought of staying fit…Enthusiastically I started jogging daily evening for 1 and ½ hrs… I felt healthy…and I decided, I would continue it always….heheh!!! Even my firm will power couldn’t take me forward too many days...Work, Eat, Sleep routine resumed its duty as soon as I was back at office…

Anyways, now to the real story…I was talking about jogging…this is something that happened a few years back…the years when I never needed any jogging to stay slim and fit…during those days, all of a sudden, my brother had this awakening thought of staying fit by jogging…maybe our neighbors, his friends motivated him to start jogging… not to put down weight (he had nothing to loose than some bones…lol)…What ever! one fine day he started jogging daily morning…of course accompanied by his friends…(Inside story: We used to make fun of him saying, he’s just going to the junction and sit there on the road side, sleep for 1 hr and then come back home…hehe!!! So bad right..???) Daily morning, he used to wake up at 0500am, put on his shoes and leave for the hard tenure of jogging (he used to sleep with tracksuits on, so that saves his time in the morning…waking up early was horror for all of us always...heheh!!!)

So one such day…due some reason, I was not getting proper sleep through out the night…I was having regular parades to the kitchen and scanned the refrigerator every half an hour to grab something or other to feed my mouth…lol, when I couldn’t sleep, I preferred spending my time by eating…anything like tomatoes, carrots, biscuits, chips etc…(a small incident during one such trips to the kitchen was…One night, by some 0200am, I walked to the kitchen to have some timepass…hehe!!! To my horror, I heard a sudden explosion breaking the night’s silence…Within seconds, I was back in my bed…lol, that night I had too much of imaginations of thieves, ghosts etc etc as the source of that loud sound…When I saw my mom cleaning the floor near the fridge the next day, I realized with shame, that what I heard the previous night was “A beer bottle breaking…it was kept there by one of our neighbor to make it cold quickly to serve at the wedding reception party at their house…” neither did he remember to take it back nor we knew about it…Anyways, once the bottle broke, the beer had the whole night to flow all around the floor of the room…Only if I had notified my mom regarding the sound the previous night, it would have saved her from cleaning the whole mess the next day morning…)

Now back to my story…so I wasn’t feeling sleepy and literally spend the whole night awake eating, reading books, walking around, watching the stars…etc etc…Soon it was somewhere around 5 O’ clock…I was still roaming around in the ground floor of my house when I heard the alarm go 'TTRRRRRINGGGGGG' in my brother’s room in the first floor. I decided to see him off and then go back to sleep…I waited near the stairs (ofcourse, without the lights on…)

I saw my brother walking down the stairs with closed eyes with his shoes in his right hand…Poor boy, he was still half asleep…I smiled...rather, I giggled…lol…Somehow, my brother who was walking down, hearing something, opened his eyes slowly….Ahaaaaaaa…(“did he hear me giggling..?”) What I heard next was a scream… “Aaaaaaaaaannngggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh” and I saw my brother turning back and climbing or rather running all the steps up…

I wondered…WHAT THE HELL….I called out… "Brooo…What happened…”

He made a sudden halt…and in a jiffy came back in front of me and shouted… “WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE AT THIS TIME OF THE DAY…and that too IN THIS HORRIBLE DRESS…” and he turned back and walked to his room saying (as if to no one) … “Uhhh!!!…walking around in the night to scare people…doesn’t want to sleep herself and then scaring people…above all, no other dress to wear…”…

Only then did I realize what happened after all… I was wearing a flowy white night gown…and with the street light shining into the room, all he saw was “Somebody standing there down at the steps in a white dress waiting for him with a laugh.” In a reflex moment, he took it for a ghost…lol…!!!!

I just broke into laughter…Till date, I never leave a chance to pull his leg on his courage and the way he ran, that night, screaming Aaaaaaaaaannngggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh …

Ofcourse, Who is going to remind him of the beer bottle…!!!