Keep it UP!

Before you think our joint venture of writing this blog is all but over, no not yet!Just that I was pretty busy with personal stuff and Ranjit has all but given up and finally accepted that my marketing of the blog is pretty essential to take this forward and thus we have agreed upon a 70:30 partnership with me Vishal taking the larger pie, of-course.

So whats up for today? Report cards! Can never forget 2'nd May. This date haunted us for many years. To be honest, the eve of 1'st of May was usually a non-sleepy affair. I always prayed to god and muttered "Deva saglancha bhala kar..Majha pasun survat kar" (God bless one and all, though don't forget to start with me). Not that i was that bad a student and worried about losing a year or something but I guess the tag of "Can do Better" was more frightful than the "Passes and Promoted" remark. The beauty about "Passes and Promoted" was that at-least it did not invoke any false hope among the anxious parents. "Can do better" was always a questionable question. My parents were pretty upset with me about this whole "better" thing. They never understood the meaning of it and their rightfulness about asking "when will this happen " was never justified by me either. No one including the teachers would predict that, neither did they have any action plan .So the long story short, my report card consistently and shamelessly threw "Can do better" with no answers to when and how. It was like a do-while loop (programmers would know this) which never ended. And yeah, Ranjit's wasn't extraordinary either (that soothed me more than anything). But he had a better mugging capability which meant he digested the Geometric theorm's and proofs by heart and had a marginally better card than me. I am pretty sure he even by-hearted the essays, autobiographies , reference by context's and much more. Kudos!

My understanding of the two remarks was good, but I couldn't understand the meaning of "Keep it up!" which only a elite few managed. I failed to imagine why a scholar was asked to keep his report-card upstairs. I even went to the extent of keeping mine 'up' on my home shelf only to realize that it yeilded nothing but a few angry words for not keeping things in place from my parents. It was not until I reached puberty and someone told me the real meaning was to keep the performance up and not the report-card. Ah!, that was a some real relief. Of course, I never managed to get anywhere near to the elite group but once I did crawl the top ten list. I had tear in my one eye that day. The other was still in disbelief!