Ever waited for a moment in your life so eagerly that time seems to stop? It feels like eternity before you are able to see the long awaited result for your 10th / 12th / entrance exams…you suddenly start cursing the internet, then the results site, then the guy sitting next to you and while you constantly stare at that green progress bar increasing inch by inch, the entire examination day keeps reeling in your mind and you cannot help pondering over the probable worst results you may come across! Phew! That is indeed scary…I have had innumerable such awaited results in my life and yes, they still force my breathing to halt for a short moment, heart to start pounding at almost 150 beats/minute and beads of sweat to appear all over my face. I am pretty sure that many people who will read this blog will disagree with me that they never faced such situation and results do not give them cold feet. I can give this in writing that these people lie point blank and such species are all the more scared to read the line, “Please find your result mentioned below”. I always wondered what is it that makes these moments so scarily special, and then I realized that maybe it is not the actual aftereffect of these results that scares us more, maybe it’s the perception of people which bothers our sub-conscious mind, maybe it’s the over hyped expectations from our performance which is subtly expressed by our friends and families… If we are able to isolate ourselves from such “third person opinions” about our caliber, maybe the specialness of these moments will gradually fade away in our minds.
One more factor related to these results is a peer pressure in some or the other way. Some days back, I was talking to a person who had just finished his 10th exams and was not very happy with his result. When I asked him the reason, he told me that he had secured “just” 87% in the exams and was not able to get admission in the science section of the college of his choice because they had a cut off of a “mere” 92%!! Well needless to say, I was left speechless at this revelation. It became clear that the bar for meritocracy is getting higher and higher every day and it has become almost impossible for average performers to survive. So when normal people impatiently wait for their results, they secretly hope for a respectable result so that their peers don’t think of them as a “just average”. Still such people are also able to settle for some or the other good place in life and then the GenNext round of expectations begins when same people, despite of the fears they faced with results, start pressurizing their own kids to excel in every field of life.
C’est la vie!!
