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[Enormous post alert]

JUDE BA admissions, ladies and gentlemen. The Greatest Show on earth, if only because it managed to sneak to the top for a few seconds while the list-makers weren't looking.

And a complete washout this year, the monsoon no-show notwithstanding.

Three years ago, I remember saying, "at JU, come admission test season, we have sheer, uncontrollable entertainment of the nerve-wrecking kind". We moaned and groaned about it, and justifiably so. Apart from the rush of sorting three thousand nervous prospective examinees--each armed with at least a Mummy or a Daddy--into their right buildings and right rooms, there were the 'human-interest' cases that provided fodder for addas weeks afterwards. Like this examinee who had been caught lurking in the men's loo in the Bangla department just before the exam began, and had to be dragged out of there loudly protesting. Yet he couldn't--or wouldn't--tell us what possible benefit his exam could derive from this little loo-retreat. There was that examphobic girl, who, when asked her name, forgot it in panic and had a complete breakdown, screaming her head off at Supchau and ADG. We've also had our fair share of imposters, fine moustachioed specimens of masculinity trying to pass themselves off as the delicate young flowers smiling up at us from the 4x4 picture box of the exam form (and vice versa).

My ever-memorable was the girl who was convinced we were trying to trick her out of sitting for the English entrance by sending her off to the Economics department.
"We simply cannot seat all of you in the English department," I tried to explain, but she waved it away like so much concocted excuse. After several minutes of struggle, I suddenly remembered the girl was from the West Bengal Higher Secondary board, and had what I thought was a stroke of genius.
"When you took your HS, did you take it in your own school?" I asked triumphantly.
"Oh no," said she, "I had to go to this school, you know, far away. It took a half an hour bus ride and then a rickshaw ride that took ten rupees--although the first day the man asked for fifteen, can you imagine, he thought I didn't know..."
"This is the same exact concept", I cut in hastily. "You want to get into the English department, so you must take your exam in the Economics department. All right?"
Her face lit up in comprehension, and I started walking away, totally patting myself on the back for this piece of absolute brilliance. Which was when I heard a sudden shocked gasp behind me.
"Yes?" I asked tersely, wondering what she could possibly have left to ask.
"So, if this is like the HS, and I should sit in a different department... then shouldn't I also be sitting in a different university? What university should I be at? What university? Tell me!"
At which point I ran away.

And then there were the parents. Always, always, there were the parents. For reasons we never fathomed, they were convinced that within the privacy of the exam-rooms, we were either ceremonially sacrificing their children, or extracting their entrails to dance upon. Or cunningly convincing them to snort cocaine. Or forcing them to perform the Kamasutra ("Performance as Text", eh?). Or inciting them to join the Sicilian mafia. Or encouraging them to become vegetarians and forswear biriyani. They were forever trying to break into the buildings, demanding to be "shown" that their children were all right. Most tried to strongarm their way in first (heh. We had five-people strong bouncer teams at every entrance for exactly such circs). That failing, they skulked in the building's shadows, trying to peek through the dirt-encrusted windows. Since the uni buildings are 'maintained' by government employees, the dirt has had fifty years to accumulate, making this an entirley pointless enterprise; but that's yet to deter determined parents, who enthusiastically make incomprehensible sign-language gestures in front of opaque sheets of glass. A smarter few actually manage to enter the building on the pretext of using the loo, and hide beneath ground-floor staircases waiting for the opportune moment when they can dash out and scramble up the stairs to where the exam rooms are. At least one examinee broke down into huge racking sobs when we firmly escorted her father down the stairs.

There was a reason BA admish. was called the annual disaster-management and damage-control day.

Then came Exam '09. Scorched in every previous year, we brought out the big guns. Entry had been divided up between three different gates. Crowd management teams were swarming all entry points. A large poster had been put up, warning stentoriously, "Abandon All Guardians, Ye Who Enter Here" [link=pic]. What we completely did not expect was that people would actually listen. A mild reproof was all it took for most mummy-daddy grandpa-grandmum pairs to back off, pushing the offspring forward with muttered blessings. The only case of slight resistance was handled masterfully (mistressfully?) by Supriyadi, when she insisted that a gentleman standing in queue for his daughter had to take the exam in her stead. "No no no!" said the nervous gentleman, backing away and waving his hands like windmills.
"Line e jokhon dariyechhen tokhon porikkha ditei hobe", said a firm Supriyadi, advancing. If you were found standing in the examinee's queue, you have to take the exam.

It's little wonder, then, that thusly disappointed by the crowd no-show, volunteers would read over the examinees' shoulders avidly to enrich the JUDE oral tradition of exam howlers. That was the only exam-pleasure left for the day. The first started making it's way 'round the campus within a few minutes of the exam commencing. "In place of 'Mother tongue: ___', someone wrote 'pink'!" ran the scandalised whispers. Names came next. "There's a girl called Sonali Mayur on my list... but she didn't turn up", said someone dejectedly. "There's a Samudra Gupta in my class!" said someone else. "Jude Judhajit!" chirped yet another. I walked into a class to say hello to my friend Hrileena, and found the invigilator asking 'Akshay Kumar' to sign the attendance sheet, please.

But the real hell broke loose after the answerscripts were collected, signed, and turned in to be coded at the end of the exam. The corridors were replete with "What did you see? What did you hear?" From the noise, it was clear that we had all heard plenty. Some of the credit certainly goes to the paper, which was delightfully clever. For instance, there was a section where the examinee had to pick the phrase in closest association with a given word, from a list of three or four phrases/words. For the given word 'barrack', one of the options was 'run for President'. And it had several victims from every room. The other killer was 'swine', which had the options 'influenza' and 'contagious'. A clever lad who had got it right was a little disproportionately gleeful about it. "I got it right, I got it right!", he sang. When people looked at him quizzically, he said that that particular question gave him great pleasure to answer. Just a few days back, he had been called a swine by a classmate, and not knowing the word, he had looked it up in the dictionary. And now he couldn't wait to meet said classmate. Called him swine, did he? Did he? Hah! The surprise hitword, I think we all agree, was 'kindling'. As astonishing number of examinees seem to believe it means 'baby human'.
My personal favourite of the lot, however, was 'cogent', and its wickedly misleading option, 'male accomplice'. I wonder who contributed that.

Then came the short notes.
Calvin and Hobbes. "Calvin was a great photographer and philosophist [sic.] which were his Hobbes".
Omkara. "Omkara is a story stoled from great poet Shakespeare who read original is not getting enjoy from the film which has many bad word and desi gaalis always".
Eliot. "Eliot was great poet who wrote a church in a country yard" (after such achievement, what need of architects?)
Lewis Carroll. "Lewis Carroll was a wonderful writer who wrote Alice in Wonderland. She wrote it for her little daughter". (I think this boy has a Barbie hangover)

Correct the following sentences:
"Blind by 1648, Fortune did not favour Milton" -- "Blinded by the number '1648', Fortune did not favour Milton'.
"Our cricket team batted poorly in the first inning" -- "Our cricket team batted poorly in all the innings". Can't say I disagree, unfortunately.
"I knocked up on the door..." -- this gets a mention simply because it exists.

Make idiomatic sentences by completing the following sentences (filled-in words in italics):
"Take yourself in the hand, and the pleasure the better".
"Better the girl you know than the girl you don't."
And the absolute gem from this category: "Workers of the world dream! You have nothing to lose but your souls!"

If only Marx had thought of that one.

All in all, though, I'd like the unruly mob back. A few torn hairs and clutched collars makes the Entrance stew taste just right. In fact, if we run another deficit next year, I'm perfectly prepared to round up a few of my batchmates and start a loud fistfight in front of the main gate. Or we could intercept the lunch packets coming in from Milonda's and sell it to the starved parents milling about. Anything for a rousing chaos. Just say the word.