lessons from college

a long time ago, i appeared for a practical exam in digital electronics. my examiner frowned ever so slightly when he handed over my question paper (we had individual questions for every candidate, and one had to pick her's from a set of question papers). i decided then and there that the question was a tough nut to crack, and the examiner who had also been my professor for a variety of subjects over the past 3 years, must have realised that i would flunk abominably.

i read the paper with a fluttering heart. the question seemed to be a sitter because i figured out the answer in a jiffy. but wait, it couldnt be THAT simple. there had to be some twist. so i started trying to figure out the twist.

(the question is reproduced here, for the benefit of any interested reader: "using 7 segment lcd display, device a mechanism that would indicate an odd number by 0 and an even number by 1".)

simple, right? just reverse the last bit of the given number and provide that as input for the 7 segment display system. but no, my mind was convinced that there was a twist. the professor was famous for setting complicated questions...and i was absolutely sure that he expected me to use all the bits of any given number (how on earth is one supposed to do that, given that there could be varying numbers of bits in random numbers, i still don't know) to generate the required input for the device.

and so i sat and doodled and scribbled for an hour. the prof signalled to me and asked, "hey, what are you fidgeting about? and here i was, thinking that you had got a sitter of a question and would be out of the hall in an hour"...

hell. so that was why he had frowned. he liked to throw challenges depending upon the faculties of his students, and obviously thought that this challenge was too trivial for me...my oh my.
a half hour later, i walked out of the lab, feeling totally sheepish, but happy that i would ace the exam.
to his credit, the prof granted me an 86 (deducting 14 marks for wasted time i'm sure, haha).

i never fail to kick myself when i think of the incident. why should i have bothered to discover a complication that never existed? why? simple...because i, like many others of this day and age, am so used to complicating things, that i can't accept something which is totally simple. like i often say to myself these days, "life is simple". but to think of the umpteen complications i have created in my life over the years...i'm learning to shed each one and day by day, life seems to become a bit more simple, and infinitely more lucid than the previous day. and on days when the devil rears it's horned head and shouts "it's got to be complicated, so keep looking for the twist" , i remember my 6th semester lab exam.

funny how college can prepare you for greater things than a degree...sometimes, it prepares you for life in ways that you may never think of :)