post script

General Somanathanus declared to one and all that my mid term submission was an exquisite piece of work. I’m really glad I wasn’t around to hear that. I can somehow never handle such situations without turning all colours of the rainbow and getting the sudden urge to hide behind my curtain of hair or bend down and re-tie my shoelaces before being swallowed up by the ground beneath my feet. But I was also slightly sad that I couldn’t bask in the glory of one of my rare academic achievements.

Dwip was the first one to inform me of this triumph. He really is quite sweet that way, enough to make me not hold his “bong-ness” against him. It was Lal who finally handed me the graded copy of my essay (after we performed a carefully choreographed sequence of bitchery about rohini’s flip-flop over the internal assessment scheme and how we were all doomed to receive the most abysmal of marks in the semester exam and that life is unfair and that we are the victims of an asinine system that rewards rote as opposed to intelligence and the world is a cruel cruel place blah blah etc etc… usual stuff). I re-read it and carefully recollected the race against time to submit it. How I took the four page printout from the placement cell printer and tortured myself for the next few days for dishonest use of it’s resources.

And all the background reading I’d done on Bangladesh, Matlab, birthspacing, child mortality, gender biases, breastfeeding. All the dust I’d inhaled in the RTL while looking up information on survey design, hazard functions, survival analysis, logit regressions, simulation exercises and all the hours I spent racking my brain over the seemingly countless and virtually incomprehensible dummy variables and zillions of model specifications till I knew the paper backwards and forwards and could recite it in my sleep. Such bliss...

At the time I was struggling to type the bloody essay out, it had all seemed like time wasted. I didn’t even reference half the papers I’d read (I don’t know why… I guess I just didn’t want to seem like I was sucking up or something). But I did enjoy it. The hunt for information, piecing the story together… my own little project, my baby.

These are perhaps 8 ½ of the most precious marks I will ever receive. In retrospect, the labour pains proved to be deliciously rewarding.