A few of my cousins gave their ICSE exams a few days ago, and it brought back the anxieties and nervous moments of that one long month. The tension to do well and perform in what is becoming a ludicrously competitive world. While most students sail through most papers, there is one paper that makes even the most hard working student quake with fear. It gives you sleepless nights and ghastly nightmares! The stuff that horror movies are made of.
Did I exaggerate much? Well…. Maybe. But this subject has been the bane of my life and wrought havoc on my mental framework. 'I'm sure it cant be that bad', you think. But then again, only the wearer knows where the shoe pinches.
The subject I am talking about is It-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. ‘What’s in a name’ Shakespeare said. M-A-T-H-E-M-A-T-I-C-S. Whew! The name itself is so long and scary! How can any mortal that walks this earth like Maths, or think it fun and easy?
Well, to be honest, at first it was just fine. We had Addition and Subtraction. Easy enough. 5 + 3 = 8. All you had to do was take 5 fingers and then take 3 more. And the sum was done! Then they decided to include Multiplication and Division. Still okay. Then they taught you tables. 4 X 3 = 12. But once it went beyond 13 times tables, I was beginning to get a little lost. Even so, I thought I would manage. And life moved on.
For a few years we stuck to this. The sums became tougher, but then so did my comprehension ability and intelligence (I think!). Then they decided to start with this thing called Speed, Distance and Time. I actually enjoyed the topic. It was easy, all you had to do was use the formula, and voila! You could find the speed, distance or time of anything. Whoever said Maths was tough?
But then the syllabus and paper setters started getting cheeky. They no longer wanted to know the speed, distance and time of just one object. They wanted you to calculate it for two or more objects! I still remember this sum that stared me in the face in my 7th grade, while I sat with my head buried in my hands. (Remember I said that Maths gives you nightmares?)
Sum: Train A leaves from Mumbai at 12:37 (Yeah, the time had to be something weird, it couldn’t be straightforward like 8 or 9, because that would make the sum so much easier! And torture students that much less!) Train B leaves from Hyderabad at 15:42 (Bring in GMT time, it makes the sum simpler!) Train A is travelling at a speed of 123 miles/hour (Of course, the miles adds that much extra calculation. More chance of you getting the sum absolutely right! It surely couldn’t have been kilometres!) Train B is travelling at 231 kilometres/hour. (Yes, they don’t believe in uniformity, what's life without a bit of a challenge!) If the total distance is 235 kilometres, find the time at which train A and B will cross each other. (By this time I have already lost track of what is going on. The tears and burying of head in hands follows shortly!) Why would I even care to know the time? I would be dozing in the train, not anxiously sitting with my watch evaluating what time Train B crosses my train!
So many of you, (my father, brother, uncles included) are sitting there wondering what the fuss is about. Is this girl insane? The sum is supremely easy. So logical. Sigh! You will never understand the torture of those who do not understand this subject. (And let me warn you, there are quite a few of us.)
So it was about this time that Maths started fuzzing my brain. It kept trying to hammer home the fact that I was worse at it than most ‘normal’ people.
Now when you study History, there is no element of Geography or Science thrown in it, is there? Do Literature and Language have calculations? No. Each stream is pure, unadulterated and has its own charm. Why then, must Maths be any different? I was struggling with numbers, did they have to bring in the alphabet as well?
And so began my tryst with ‘A-L-G-E-BRA’. Oh on that note, what is it with these weird names that topics have in Mathematics? T-R-I-G-O-N-O-M-E-T-R-Y? L-O-G-A-R-I-T-H-I-M-S? However, nothing could beat the fits of laughter that broke out when we were introduced to MENSURATION! (I mean seriously? They were adding eerily-sounding-biological names too?)
So we dealt with Quadratic Equations, and then to encourage us to multitask, we were taught Simultaneous Equations. Then it went on to matrices, where numbers began to be superscripted on top and we were asked to apply bizarre formulae like a2 + b2 =? And that’s when the fear of Maths finally seeped into my consciousness. Nothing would go into my head. It would just come out from the other side. And slowly, a mental block was formed. "YOU CAN’T DO MATHS", my brain told me. And I obeyed.
I thought I would rely on the Arithmetic part. That was logical. But the mental barrier in my brain refused to tell me what the Compound Interest would be in 10 years of a particular sum of money. And frankly, why should you bother, it told me. Aren’t banks there for precisely this reason?
And then came the biggest bane of them all. G-E-O-M-E-T-R-Y! Which combined numbers, letters, lines, circles, quadrilaterals, etc. The only thing I could appreciate were the tangents; after all I could identify with them, everything about this subject was going tangential!
Well, I could go on and on. Whine about a zillion things. Like why we were expected to measure the surface area of a partially shaded ground that was covered by something called an I-S-O-S-C-E-L-E-S triangle. (Err WHAT?) Or find some angle according to the P-Y-T-H-A-G-O-R-A-S Theorem. (Oh I forgot to mention that they also included Greek in the subject. How diverse!) Or learn by rote the different formulae of a hollow and solid cylinder and cone. Just when I thought I had mastered them individually, they put the cone into the cylinder, and added some metal marbles in it for effect. And of course, the entire thing was suspended in water. I could tear my hair out!
So what kept me going? How did I pass my ICSE? Well, every dark cloud has a silver lining. Not the right metaphor to use at all, but you get my drift I hope. Maths also had a few topics that I could understand. These actually penetrated that wall in my brain. Statistics, average, mean, median, mode etc. I loved drawing bar graphs and ogives on the graph sheet (that almost made you squint due to the extreme proximity of those green lines.) I attempted each and every statistics question in my paper. And passed with a whopping (yes for me it was a huge achievement!) 86/100. I was ecstatic.
But more importantly, I was relieved that I wouldn’t have to do Maths anymore. After all, I was planning to take up Arts and then do a course in Journalism. Maths was behind me, it was my past. Never again would it stalk and shadow me, ready to pounce every time I opened the book.
A happy ending you would think. But no, remember the mixing I told you about? Apparently Maths is not the only subject that likes to mix genres nowadays. I had to recently take a test to prove my worth as a journalist for a reputed newspaper company. And what did the last page of the question paper have? Maths! As those numbers swam in front of me, all those nightmares came flooding back! Will I ever be free of it? I don’t know. I really don’t know.
