essay assay

in school, i was pushed by my teachers to take part in various essay contests (i would never have gone on my own. come to think of it, almost all the co-curricular activities i did in school were forced on me in some way, but let's not digress :P). and some essays i wrote have stuck with me, some because of content, some because of the circumstances surrounding them, and some because i was praised for them (vanity, thy name isn't always woman :D)

->in std 7, we had to write this hindi essay in some class test. and end it with ' and i woke up'. or something like that. now telling me to write an essay on a dream was almost like giving me the license to kill [:P]! so i did exactly that. saved the entire school from a bunch of goons who had taken the students hostage. there were a lot of bullets and still more blood ( all on the thugs' side, of course!]. dunno what my ma'm liked - the sheer audacity of it all or the craziness - but i got pretty good marks in that, i think :)

->in std 8, we had to write an essay as part of some intra-school essay competition - some memorial prize, i think. it was voluntary but i made the mistake of telling my mother about it. and i was woken up at the unearthly hour of 4 pm to go for that ! [yes, 4 pm is an unearthly hour for me because 2-5 in the afternoon is my prime sleeping time!] i went and wrote something random. the results weren't declared until the annual day of the school and it was a big surprise to hear my name as the winner. but more pleasing was the prize of 300 rupees :D! i pooled that money with some other prizes i got, added some more of my saved pocket money, and bought my first scientific calculator and my first 'big' dictionary. [until that time, i only had my pocket oxford, which, if you've seen it, isn't really pocket-sized]

->in std 1, we had to write an essay in hindi on 'my mother'. well, not an essay exactly. more like five full sentences :P! and i could write only 3! i rejected most of my ideas coz they were too obvious! i wanted to write something extraordinary and ended up writing two less! so i went home with the question paper and my mother asked me if i had written the five sentences. and, like the good boy i am, i said that i had. but what i didn't know was that this school returned the answer scripts :D :D! what happened when i brought that home is better not said here !

-> then, there were the two times i figured in the top 15 of an essay competition that was held for ICSE schools all over india for students in class 9-12. and i won them at the beginning and end, in classes 9 and 12 :P! one because i started it with a stupid joke and the other because i ended it with a stupid poem! the stupid-joke-essay was really crappy and i think the evaluator must really have been out of his right senses when he chose that. but being nominated from the school was a bigger prize than the final selection for that one because it was chosen ahead of the works of other bigwigs of the school, all of whom were senior to me :).

->the intra-school essay competition i won in std 8, it was held for std 8 and 12 students. and i won it again in std 12. but more interesting than the essay was the circumstances in which it was written. we used to have a 'contact program' for brilliant tutorials' students in the city, where professors from the coaching institute came down to clear doubts. a date was decided for the essay competition but we requested our english ma'm to get it shifted because it clashed with the contact program. the good teacher that she was, she agreed to it. but we went and watched 'fizaa' instead, having informed our parents that we were going to the contact program :D [four contact programs and we watched four movies - kaho na pyar hai, josh, fiza and mohabbatein. more about mohabbatein later :)]. and some kind soul in the school leaked this news to ma'm. consider my discomfort the next day, when i was subjected to a lot of cold stares from ma'm, maybe because i had been the most vociferous of the group that wanted the thing postponed. but i made it up by winning it, i think :P!

->a school in our city conducted an inter-school competition (where they never played fair and always came first). an essay competition was part of the various events and i came first every time i went there, 3-4 times i think. i had figured out (and it was well-known) that this school wasn't particularly good in the english department. so i mugged up lots of quotes and peppered my essays with as many as i could :P! and this impressed them enough to give me the first prize every time :D!

->but the real gem was the time when we had to write an essay in hindi on 'my favorite movie' in std 12. i wrote on mohabbatein. and ma'm, after giving the marks, left a comment: kitne baar dekhi hai movie? :D :D that it raised my mother's suspicions, is another story altogether :P!