Saturday, March 19, 2005

Khul gaya Sim Sim!!

"Miracles do happen to each one of us in our daily lives", said someone. And I now believe that statement to be entirely true. Until the last week, I thought I was an exception. I never had any dazzling turn around of events....unless of course I didn't want them to or sometimes they would turn, skid, lose balance and crash into the nearest electric pole. I never had any bright strokes of luck or genius, only dark blotted smudges that resulted in a painting that could make a drunken monkey look the better artist. No, those bright ones are for the Newtons and Einsteins in this world with those millions of grey cells in their head. Me, the only grey matter anywhere near my head is a shock of hairs above my left ear. So, I thought, the above saying cldn't be entirely true.

Until now, all you people have had a wonderful miracle in your life, namely me. But now I have had my miracle happen too (hah...not you, you sucker). And about time too. As Sethi keeps telling me all the time, God has been really unfair to me in my talents, or the acute shortage of them rather. So miracles are what I generally invest most of my mom's prayers in. My mom, she must have been praying for one big miracle before I was born. All she does nowadays is pray for a lot of small miracles to support the really big one.

Anyways, on the 15th of this month, after a long night having watched two and a half movies, I was sitting in my room early in the morning and trying to decide whether it was worth walking all the way to the department just for the air-conditioning when I could just sleep right there in my own room. I was watching a few football videos of Roberto Carlos, his bend-it-like-me-not-like-that-playboy-beckham shots. I was thinking that had that bending goal taken place 200 years earlier, poor Mr. Issac Newton would have had his foundations shaken, and Newton's laws about that straight-line-me-hi-jaayega would have come 200 years later...only they would have been called Hemanth's laws. So anyways, suddenly there comes a real loud knock at my door. Now people around me know that its generally my time to go back to my sub-conscious world and so that thing rarely happens. It must have been someone's turn for a miracle I thought, or worse, my turn for the next catastrophe. Little did I know that the Almighty was on a roll that day. My number had finally arrived.

And thus did I come to hear the news...it turned out that I had managed to qualify in the GATE exam after all. Yes, I didn't believe it too. Frankly, its the fourth day after the results and I still go back to the results page at IIT Powai's website and keep entering my number to see if those people have realized there has been a mistake. And no, they don't seem to. 'Aah!!! Must have scraped through, you lucky guy' is what I hear you say. Well, for the record, my AIR is 92 and my percentile is a 90. something. So you see, for all ends of purposes, I have marched right down the red carpet. Boy!! Can you believe it?? In a given group of engineers in this country, I am above the surface, on the visible part of the iceberg. To people reading this blog and going crazy as to what the big fuss is all about, I am now eligible for the MHRD scholarship receiving roughly 60,000 rupees in the coming year. And before you even ask, I am already working on what to do with all that money. I just hope I don't kick the pot of milk in my sleep.

The best part of the whole thing was ringing up my people at home and breaking the news to them. Lord Almighty in return for the favour gets an entire week off from my mom's prayers. My sister is exuberant, my dad thinks that I should go party and my friends think my dad is wonderful. Most of the persons that I have referred to in the previous blog have also managed to romp through the gates in all glory. So there it is, a truly miraculous turn of events. And therefore, to quote Tolkein, "All is well that ends better". Well said, someone!!