The morning of 9th January 2013… A day I will never forget… Ever…
Refreshing the CAT results website, hoping it would load soon… Wanted to get this done with soon as I had an office bus to catch! And then, all of a sudden, it flashed infront of my eyes… For several minutes, I stared at it without blinking… 99.08 it said! How could I? No this is not happening! I searched around the page… Cross checked my name, date of birth, year of examination… Hell, I checked my photo on the result and cross checked with the mirror in my room! Refreshed the page but made sure I took a screenshot just in case it changed on reload… It didn’t… 99.08 it still was… Grabbed the phone to call up the most important person in my life… “Maaaaaaaa” I screamed, to her horror! Tears rolling down my eyes…
Am I gonna wake up any minute? This has to be a dream afterall… Questions running in my mind while answering all the congratulatory calls… How? Hardly 15 days of study! No coaching! Hardly 10 mock tests! Fluke, I thought… But does fluke work in an exam like CAT? No sane person would say it does… Every person I knew in the world was wishing me that day! And the day to follow…
May be it was the good luck wishes… A lucky charm may be… It had been a lucky year already in the first few days… Waving aside the risk of being branded insane, I concluded that this was pure luck! And for that moment, I felt like the luckiest person on the planet!
Then came SNAP… A 90 percentile I managed… Fluke again? Naaaa….. I always knew I had the ability to manage a 90 percentile even without studying… The journey from 90 to 99 was what was difficult… So SNAP was ability, CAT was fluke… With that conclusion, I moved ahead…
XAT!!! An exam I feared… I feared it so much that I did not want to answer it… 96 percentile… Now what in the world was this? Never knew I had ability to score 96 percentile in an exam like XAT… Luck again? Na! Not this time! I knew for sure… Certainly not this time!
So if this is not fluke, not luck, no lucky charm, certainly not hardwork, what is it? I thought hard… Still do not have a certain answer, but I put it as ‘The Time when I Stumbled upon Smartness’…
Today, I complete my 1st sem at Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management, IIT Bombay, which, rankings tell me is a top 15 college in the country! A Top 15 B School… Only about 2000 out of 3 lakh aspirants make it every year… Sometimes, I still feel, that may be, I’ll just wake up any minute… But until that happens, here I am, enjoying every moment of this leap of faith that I took while joining SOM…
Parindo ke saath udna hai mujhe,
Aasmaan ko choomne…
Manzil ki oore chal pada hun main,
Ik raah ko dhoondne…