Drain You

Sunday, July 05, 2020

Please raise your hand if you've been personally victimized by CBSE on your English score. 

If you did not raise your hand, I'd suggest you skip this post. For the rest, welcome to the first meeting of Burned Anonymous. The first order of business is talking about it. 

I think I was two whole years into writing this blog when I got my CBSE 12th-grade results and howled my eyes out. The space designated to the family desktop had me sitting on the main seat and my dad hovering around my back and my mother to the left of the "computer table". We were loading my result and nothing pissed me more than seeing a measly 81 in English Core. 

81? Eighty-one?

For all the merit certificates in language, for being the student editor of the school magazine, for winning more prizes in writing and for reading up a storm and knowing literary references and words better than anyone in my school around my age, and I got an eighty fucking one. 

I don't think I'd fully registered that when the phone kept buzzing. That had to be this colossal bitch, the Regina to my Janis Ian, who I had known for more than half my life at that point. 

In brazen words, she forced my mom who got the call to pass the phone to me. Between sobbing and being angry I told her, I did not want to speak to her or anyone and I needed space to process.

Clearly, being woke and asking for space is a wild concept for the same people who refused to take that one on one. 

Anyway, this person then proceeded to call another one and rant on the phone as to how "studying would have helped" which I apparently did not do. 

To a layperson, this doesn't sound like the worst commentary. 
To me, at that point, it was the worst dialogue ever uttered. 

You see, since we were in different schools and we had wrapped our board exams in time for a longer round of prep to the wretched main board exams, we were on two different studying schedules. I got a call at 6 am on the morning of her English pre-board to take her through the literature section, tell her the main points of each possible long question and take her through some of the chapters she hadn't considered important to study. This, during, pre-baords. 

Naturally, when I heard this out loud after the results, I was livid. 

That's an understatement. I was raging mad. 

A good researcher shows signs of their talent in their youth. With another friend, who's got just as much research acumen, we cracked this Regina's entire school's board exam result. Turns out, it took less than it takes a Bollywood hacker to do that. So much for CBSE making it a hush-hush affair. 

We were right in our speculation. Although she claimed she had scored something obnoxiously higher than us in the subject, she wasn't lying about it. Only a few more marks. Not in 90s as she'd said. 

What did irk us was the inflated score she peddled to us all. 

What followed was the worst three way call disaster one can imagine in 2009. 

We got Regina on a call and somehow added all our common friends; mutuals if you must. Very calmly, we started telling her how CBSE has made a mistake and that it took us simple steps to find our way in their school's CBSE exams grade card for all the students. The score she had told us? That was wrongly listed on the main CBSE website and that we were concerned for her. She needed to urgently raise this matter with CBSE and reinstate her inflated score per subject, including English that she was most proud of. 

The result was not shocking. She promptly blocked us all from social media; to this day, I remain blocked from all her social media. The few friends she had or who were made to believe my friend and I were evil spirits who descendended from the Hell above were made to block us as well. 

It's been over a decade since the episode and while I'm salty about CBSE fucking me over that one subject, it's heartening to have met so many new people over the last two odd years who were in the same boat as me and were fucked just as much. In 2009, all I did was rant, cry and possibly had the first brush of big disappointment with this. A decade and some more later, I know where I stand. In a corner with some of the finest people I know who were fucked by CBSE. 

Today, if I meet someone who wasn't fucked by CBSE English, I have very little respect for that person because if you don't know the struggle of raising your head amongst your peers for fourteen years only to eventually see yourself floating in a pool of 70s and 80s while everyone around you who couldn't string a single sentence in English flaunting their 95, you can't know allyship or pain. 

As for Regina, well, let's just say despite the years of tormenting me and everyone else around her for not being good enough for "Science" and research and everything else, last I checked, madam was running social media and other marketing strategies. Here's hoping, she's got better research and lying experience now more than ever as she does it professionally for her clients. 

Reason 243 why I find it hard to take "Digital Marketing Managers" seriously. 



(Title track; reference of the day)

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1 comments

  1. '...to this day, I remain blocked from all her social media.'
    This had me dying lmaooooooo
    Also I'm going to go check my marksheets to see what I got from CBSE English and whether I'm worthy of snobster respect or not.

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