Last week I appeared in one of the most tough exam on the face of earth. Yes, you’re guess is correct; I appeared for Common Admission Test (CAT). And I screwed it, sorry it screwed me.

Let me try to take you back with me to D-day.

I left from my home for the avenue at 0730, taking into consideration that my car tubeless-tyres can go flat, or there may be roadblocks, or whole city will be choked with traffic as forty thousand aspirants were only in my test-center-city. But like my preparation all my conspiracy-thinking proved wrong. I reached two hours before I was expected to, but contrary to my expectations there were already many cars outside the test center.

Slowly and slowly the length of unofficial and illegal car parking got increased to almost a kilometer and traffic became from bad to worse.

But still I tried my best not to get worried, even after realising the fact what two hundred and forty thousand aspirants means, when one test center out of probably 80-90 centers all over the country had this many people and everybody giving their best shots with that kind of serious faces.

CAT really tests you in every manner. As it is always conducted in middle of November where the changing-weather always brings you down, but still you are expected to do better than when you’re well.

After I entered my exam hall the first thing I did was to locate my seat, and after that the toilet, where I realised I am not the only one who was feeling the chill of the weather and the situation.

The feeling which you get when you see the faces of your neighbors in the exam hall is that you have really not turned over every rock, somebody is praying; somebody is meditating; somebody is revising the formulas in their minds; and I disturbing them with my devil-may-care attitude.

Hey we have the paper of our life with the instructions that you can’t open it! Okay now we can. Looking for the surprise, and the surprise is that there is no surprise as the paper is on the same pattern of the previous year one. CAT can shock you on the most unusual reasons.

I can’t describe what happened in those two and half hour, except that after an hour you are feeling that you are too slow for the paper; after another half hour you’re mind wants a rest as it is really not in habit of giving its best for more than that time but you can’t accede to its demand. Here lies almost half of the paper, in which you have to solve your most hated questions, and your left cerebral is already going on strike.

Last half an hour: questions in which a small word like ‘if’ can change the whole answer and options having all the right-looking answers, you realise you really need to speed up if you want to manage the cut-off. And how you can do that: by skimming through the questions and looking for your practiced territory. What happened next is obvious.

In the evening by which time every coaching institute has given its own answer key and expected cut-off, you realise that you are not making it to the IIM’s because you are not clearing a cut-off in one section. Why? Because in your hurry you missed the not-so-apparent-and-not-so-hidden words which led you to mishandle those few questions which you could solve. But now only thing that matters is that you have lost 15 marks because of those silly mistakes of yours. I can tell you from my experience that one should stop calling them silly, the word fails miserably in describing the effect of it.

Do you know what you have lost by that? You have not only missed admission in the best college of the country, but also a career, a group of friends who will be ruling the nation in few years, a name attached with you forever telling you that you are above the others by a great margin, a life where the ‘luxuries’ are taken as ‘necessities’, power of making sense even in speaking the most non-sense you can ever utter, a opportunity for you parents to gloat their friends by telling about the college where you are studying or working, an opportunity of having those eccentric lifestyles which is shown in movies, a world full of opportunities, a world in which you really have the power to decide what you wanna do.

Yes I missed all that and even more. Why? Because of the ’silly’ mistakes.

The lesson: CAT demands real ‘dogs’.