zeros and my life.

Drowsy look, almost bald head, bulging eyes, dark circle and to compliment all these - stinking,dirty white shirt. The picture you get: a highly intelligent and nerdy studyaholic

But alas except for such a look on some days, I am no where near those last said adjectives.

Take 1: Pattern recognition Mid semester exam.

Only during exam I enter the lecture hall before time.Reason: to get those precious "safe zones" for sitting. But alas some crooks also thinks like me and there I was on the first bench!


Prof. come in with the holy grail, and distribute one drop in the most judicious way so as to save institute and his household a penny or more.
what?? was this in the syllabus, ...syllabus- there is nothing like that over here. Aha! I know the second one - but sh*t i forgot to bring the calculator. 3rd ,4th -the question itself is page long, i wonder how long would the answer be!!!....at least i should do the last question - what in the world is the projection of perpendicular to a hyperplane got to do with the margin of SVM(non techies:support vector machines, and no they are not machines! another computer naming gimmick )?????
The exam was out of 15 marks and I had to complete in one hour: well if did know how to complete those problems in one hour i would never have been here in the first place!

And before I could think(imagine!) one hour was over. If I was STUDYING the same subject it would have felt like I was sitting for hours even if it was few minutes, but during exam time its the inverse proportionality that runs!!!!

I never had a blank paper (off course everybody can lie and in gates of heaven, i know, he will forgive me for telling one more!).Prof gave me a stare after seeing my paper - I was ashed down and cremated to eternity then and there.

Thus came my FIRST zero(lord pardon me for this one too!)

Take 2: web mining and information retrieval Mid semester exam.

Mother called me in the morning to tell me that i am having a bad time according to my horoscope.She paid 250bucks for knowing that from an astrologer. Well I knew it two days before itself. Only thing to know was how bad it will get.

After a break of 2 days I was all pumped up(to run away!) for this exam.
Everybody said the paper would be nothing but probability and vector calculus, sounds interesting eh? (in a loud speaker:HELP!!!!!) . And to avoid mental blocks when you see that sign of nemesis (pr()- read probability of) you need to be calm and composed - well that was the advice from well pundits of this field. So conclusion was that to watch as many new releases possible and roam around the campus without taking a peek into at least the basic syllabus.
But things weren't that easy...How to make yourself composed when you are bombarded with poisoned arrow that corrupts your mind in believing just one possibility among N propositions - again probability theory .

When prof gave me the question ...uh question-cum-answer sheet i was surprised to see a THINKS TO READ stuff before the questions started.

1. Answers(if solved of course) should be given in the space provided
2. incoherent or illogical answer(if anything comes into ur woody brain!) will be penalized with negative credit and worse than not answering(you said you take it!)
3. Dont ask for extra rough sheet, given is sufficient(well i write in large font)

After threat and warnings I looked the black board. There was a caution " question are in approx easy first order". well that would save some time.

so I don't have to start from the last question as i do(Lord forgive me for that one!)

Question 1: is that english ? what language is that ? sure there is spelling or font mistake!! If this is the case for first question , god save me from massacre!
Question 2: contains 5 sub questions with each next pointing to the answer from the previous question - clever i would say. damn doesn't he want to answer any of these questions????
Question 3,4,5 - I didn't know any!

The more i tried to concentrate, i became all the more confused. The probability of choosing correct probability was thinning down with high probability!! And the only probability left to calculate after 2 hours was whether i would be getting a zero or a negative mark. But aint I smart ? I didn't answer any of them- phew! saved the shame of getting a negative mark(I swear I haven't got a negative mark in my whole life so far!!!)

Just when I thought 2 hrs is finally going to be over. Prof says in a stentorian voice " I know the paper was tough, so here is your bonus - you can take 90 more minutes." Oh man! the paper is seriously tough and damn I need to sit here for another one and half hours more.

So I sat and counted seconds inside those one and half hours dreaming about my upcoming zero.

Take 3: Now dont tell me I will be getting one more of that wonderful ancient Indian masterpiece !! Damn the one who invented zero, no wonder nobody knows him...after all he has been cursed so many times !