Break-up ke baad

He lay shattered on the bed on his stomach. He tilted his head towards right and the picture at the centre of the wall appeared before him. She was seated on a chair and he was standing behind her with his arms around her. They had taken the photograph at a studio and both of them had got it framed it and put up on their walls. "How lovely they looked together!", everybody had remarked.

They indeed looked great together but it was over now. He had texted her yesterday and clearly told her that it was time they parted ways. It wasn't an amicable break-up. They had had a huge altercation before that. And, altercations had become the norm over the past few months.

He decided that he must stop thinking about the past and move on. He switched his on laptop and opened facebook's log-in page. He stopped while typing the password; he couldn't even type her name anymore. Disgusted, he shut his laptop down and went to the balcony. He put a cigarette between his lips, lit it and took a long puff. He remembered she used to hate his smoking habit and how she used to snatch the cigarette from his mouth everytime he'd smoke around her. "God, single life is great", he thought. "Freeeedom!", he screamed. The uncle, sipping the morning tea in the balcony opposite to his, got startled. He smiled and went inside.

"It has been ages since I wrote an anything", he thought, "and they say that some of the best pieces of literature are written after nasty break-ups". He sat on his study table, opened a notepad and pulled a pen from the pen-stand. Now was the difficult part - he had no idea what to write. Several options lay before him, but he narrowed them down to a love story or a poem. The genre had to be romance because the artist in him wanted to extract maximum advantage from their break-up. The problem with stories is that it takes so long to build a plot that most of the time one gets bored and abandons the idea. "Poem it is then", he thought and put the pen down on the paper.

The next few lines went so smoothly that he was amazed when he had done writing them. It was as if someone had held his hand and helped him write.

" I fall down and I get up
I start running in a gallop
I hear footsteps chasing me and I look behind
She is following me but I think I've lost my mind.

It's impossible because I had left her far away
It's astonishing how she always knows my way
There's no stopping me this time around;
There're bigger things for which I am bound

I run longer than Forrest Gump
and when i reach a wonderland, I jump
on seeing people dancing and birds chirping.
It suddenly saddens to think of what I've been missing.

Never fall in love, they say
I object, I say "Nay".
Sure, love has played a hand
In helping me find the wonderland. "

Without reading the poem and feeling satisfied with the effort, he closed the notebook. He logged back into facebook, changed the password and changed his relationship status to "single".

IIMs' faulty scoring system, and why I'm pissed off

In this blog article, I’d only like to talk about the IIMs’ scoring system for boards examinations and graduation marks. The fact that they consider a heavy weightage for the marks obtained in boards examination as compared to the CAT score is another contentious issue which I’d like to discuss some other time.
A rough pattern of weightage of various marks for any IIMs’ scoring system looks something like this:
CAT marks: 60%
Xth: 10%
XIIth: 10%
Graduation: 10%
Work Experience: 10%
The score given for marks obtained in boards and graduation is a step function defined as: Score = 10 for %age=< 100 and >= 95, Score = 8 for %=<95 and >90 , and so on)
Here, I’d like to compare two candidates A and B. The differences between their percentages in boards and graduation is small and A has performed better than B in the CAT exam.
Suppose candidate A has secured 264/450 (A percentile of 99.85 overall) in CAT, 89.6% in Xth, 79.4% in XIIth, 84.2% in graduation and no work experience. On the other hand, candidate B has secured 253/450 (A percentile of 99.54 overall) in CAT, 90.4% in Xth, 80.8% in XIIth, 85.6% in graduation and no work experience.
In this case, IIMs calculate the score from the CAT exam by linearising it through the following equation:
Score = (Cat score / 450) * 60
This gets A 35.2 + 6 + 2 + 4 + 0 = 47.2/100, while it gets candidate B 33.73 + 8 + 4 + 6 + 0 = 51.73/100.
Instead of this, had the IIMs linearized the scoring system for boards as follows:
Score = (percentage – 75) / 2.5,
A would’ve had a total of 35.2 + 5.84 + 1.76 + 3.68 + 0 = 46.48/100, while candidate B would’ve got 33.73 + 6.16 + 2.32 + 4.24 + 0 = 46.45/100.
The candidate B is helped by the fact that his percentages are on the right side of the percentage range while candidate’s A percentages fall on the wrong side. As we see, unlike in the first case with the final score difference between A and B is huge, the first case makes their score comaparable. Hence, when we linearize both the CAT scores and boards, graduation percentages before adding them up, it gives us far more just results.
Also, it is a known fact that boards across the country are far from uniform in their scoring. So, it makes very difficult for a person from, say Rajasthan board to compete against a person from Andhra Pradesh State Board.
This faulty and unjust system has surely robbed a lot of candidates who did extremely well in CAT the chance of getting into and IIM. Since my marks in boards and graduation are similar in manner to candidate A and the fact that I can't go back to my past and write the board exams again or work harder for my cgpa, I don’t think I am going to write CAT again, knowing the fact that the top IIMs are always going to elude me.

[Certain data used in this blog post is based on the scoring criteria released by IIM C and IIM L.]