The Theory of Relativity

Ten days pass away, and the ultimate sense of grief and longing sets in… Grief, for not having written any blog entry.. And longing, for talking to my friends, which is not possible here as my cell phone is on roaming.. Of course, I have an excuse for not writing a blog entry.. I am currently pursuing the ever-so-difficult and inevitable task of finding myself a college and this quest has led me to New Delhi (that explains why my cell is on roaming), where I have put up at my cousin’s place and taken admission in Hans Raj College for the course of B.A Economics (Hons.)… Some may say that the excuse is hardly valid, coz I sure did have access to the net from this place.. But the saddest part is that my younger cousin has already exorbitantly exceeded the maximum allowed internet usage limit, and he requested me to curtail my net usage, otherwise he would be in some serious trouble…

So what have I been doing since the last so many days??? Getting bored, piss bored.. I did manage to do some commendable things, though.. For starters, I finished up Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children”. Amazing book by an amazing man… I was shocked to know about the realities of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi, and the oddities of her son Sanjay Gandhi (sterility drive and all)… All in all, a very good read.. I also started reading the Lord of the Rings, phinally… I had been waiting to lay my hands on it since a long time, but never had the courage to pick up the 1100-page mammoth.. So in the last few days, I finally overcame my fears.. This suddenly reminds me that my blog entries have been a bit too long, especially the last one.. So I will try to curtail it from the next time onwards..

Now, getting to the topic of the post, which I just thought of while typing the fifth line: I was a CBSE student in class XIIth, and many of my friends belonged to the ISC board.. It is not a very well known fact, but the truth about ISC is that the board does relative marking.. That is, the subject topper’s marks are made 100, and the marks of the rest of the students are increased accordingly… So if a person manages to top in all subjects, he will get 100%... On the other hand, CBSE believes in absolute marking, and therefore CBSE marks are never as high as ISC…

For applying to colleges in the Delhi University, the class XIIth marks play the pivotal and the deciding role.. In reputed colleges like St. Stephen’s, 75% weightage is given to the board marks, and only 15% to the interview performance, while in the other colleges the XIIth marks solely decide a student’s fate.. So there is an unfair advantage to the students from ISC.. I had heard that to counter this, the percentage of ISC students is deducted by 5%, but on asking the concerned authorities it was made clear that no such thing happens… I started wondering about this topic coz even after having a decent interview, I was only put up on the waiting list for St. Stephen’s College, while absolute gits from ISC (serious dung-headed gits) got through.. So this is where I got stuck… A very practical and logical question : Why is there a disparity in the marking standards of the two boards, and how to tackle it? And this gave rise to a new and more fundamental question : Why are there two (actually many more, if we start counting the state boards) educational boards, in the first place?? What is the need of having separate education boards??... If people say it is less taxing on the infrastructure and management, that is crap… On the contrary, the education system of the country would become less ambiguous and improved if unified… With this I would like to bring the post to an abrupt end (though I am not done at all) coz it is getting very lengthy and dragging, and throw the topic open to you all… All I expect is some comments and feasible solutions to this very basic problem from the readers…