Monday, July 10, 2006

My Time at Agrawal Classes.

Today I talked to an old friend of mine Kiran Pai after about 9 years, who I had met at Agrawal Classes during the boot-camp for our 12th Std exams and never saw him or talked to him after that till we met on Orkut a couple of weeks ago. It was fun remembering the old times and talking about what has happened in the last 9 years since we talked. I was really glad that I got a chance to speak to him.

It all seemed like yesterday when I got my admission in Agrawal's. I am not sure now but at that time it was like trying to get into Harvard or MIT with them having their own merit list of students that they gave admissions to. I remember at that time seeing some parents literally begging with the staff members to give them the admission forms but it didn't help. It was like a boot-camp where you had to go every day from 7 in the morning to 1.30 in the afternoon every day during the summer break. They would have made everybody stay the whole day but since they didn't have any class-rooms with them being in a place like Dadar they were forced to have two classes in the morning and evening. They had tried and tested techniques that they had practised over the years to churn out toppers one after the other. No matter students of which college came in the merit list, they had one thing in common, they used to be all from Agrawals.
They had legendary notes written by eminent professors which made you a celebrity in your class since everybody wanted to photocopy them. There was this one prof who actually asked you to learn by heart all the math formulaes and would fire questions one after the other and if you didn't answer them, actually made you to write them 100 times. One prof who liked to show off his skills by writing all the logarithmic values without looking at the log table. I still don't know how he used to do that, maybe he was so used to write the same stuff so many times on the white board that he remembered all of them.
And one prof who could go on a real tangent if you got him started on the Indian Political system. He used to have one of the most entertaining classes which we all used to really enjoy.

And Agru's had this really hard exams from time to time and they used to send the results along with the actual papers by post to your home address. That didn't make such good reading and I used to have a hard time convincing my parents that the exams were really hard. And coming back to my old friend Kiran, he always had scores in single digits and me in the low tens and we always used to have a good time discussing about them.
It was an enjoyable experience which took a lot of effort and hard-work but paid-off in the end and got me 96% which was a pretty good score at that time.
Also it brought back some old memories, things that just stay in your mind, the struggle, the effort which played a part in the journey to reach where you are.

-Muthu...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

single digits and me?? !! i was scoring around 90% on an average man in all Agrawals tests ...

those were the days ... will never forget the slogging (that we never did)

great read man ....

Anonymous said...

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