Memoirs of ISC 2007 – Chemistry Practicals

Chem is tree. Ha Ha. Funny joke huh? Well ‘Chem Pracs’ was a joke, an annoying, half-funny joke.

There was nothing exciting about our car journey to school except that I forgot that it was a Friday and that there would be no buses back home. Shit. But Ali’s parents came to our rescue quite brilliantly, and transport wasn’t a problem. Also Shayaan cracked a very harmless joke about “not-asking-Romit-but-Shrivats-your-doubts” which brought out Ali’s protective colours. He snapped back at the tall ‘pianist’, and basically, Romit, that’s a sign that you are loved, despite everything. =)

Once we entered school, the same old same old remained the same old same old. Wise-cracks and nerve-releasing laughter rang all around. Ritesh’s “ten dirhams” was a constant amidst all this. Nobody was really revising, though everyone had “sheets” in their hands. The same old teacher-brief followed when Dr Khan enlightened us with his wisdom. We made our entry into our laboratories after a short and sweet Mr Bloud prayer.

I began my escapade with titration. Soon I, and well we, switched into the same old panic gear. The titration required our solutions, which were in the conical flask to be heated, and there where no flames in the physics lab. Screwed. We did have water baths though, but they weren’t really working with the flasks. We did try, and Basheer did almost burn his hand, but all we got for our efforts were broken flasks, exploding stoppers, toppling solutions and a big scare. We were definitely not ready for this. So the whole jing-bang of “authoritative figures” came into the room trying to rectify this problem, with each one trying to outsmart the other. Special cooking-stove-like structures were then brought in. The water baths were satisfyingly manipulated, and 25 minutes later, the titration experiment actually started making sense. But it didn’t need to make sense, because “pssst, 20.1” – go figure.

Organic was easy. We all know why – as Omar (yes Ali, your brother) said, Basheer Zindabad! But even besides him and his great services, it was indeed easy. As we prepared to dive into our mixture analysis, another “psssst…pass it on” occured. So, anyway, mixture analysis was a breeze. We did show all our confirmatory tests to the examiner, now didn’t we? Everyone came out of their respective labs happy, showering wedding congratulations to our man Basheer, and greeting their fellow compatriots with toothy victorious smiles. Everyone got everything. Yay!

Shrivats broke all records today. He asked for an extra booklet to supplement his 16 pages. But my sources say that he wanted to “re-write” the entire paper in thirty minutes because he has scratched something out somewhere. Now something like that confuses me – Should I increase his odds or decrease them? Govind, Bharath and Unmukt seemed un-distressed, so umm, their odds kinda remain the same, though I have reason to believe that Unmukt has more drive, but as I discussed with you Unmukt, there is a fine line between confidence and overconfidence. Ali is getting full as usual and he might actually get additional marks thanks to his seduction skills, Ritesh is doing “brilliantly”, Tejas actually got everything this time, so I think I need to cut him some slack and get rid of one of his zeros. Romit, Yuvraj, Ashiq and everyone else I can think of did well. The girls also seemed happy and the “external examiners” were just awesome. Dr Khan was so tensed, until the end, obviously.

One of the external invigilators, who happened to be some football coach of some school came to me in the middle my grade 12 board examination and whispered in my ear, “So you finally get the cup, hai?”

Anish and Ali couldn’t stop laughing during the car-ride home.

P.S. Odds for “Who Will Top?” as they currently stand:
Bharath 3:1
Shrivats: 3:1
Govind: 3.001:1
Unmukt: 3.5:1
Tejas: 780800:1

Current Investments: 0 – you cheap bastards.