INVIGILATION BLUES !!!

Invigilating a room of 320 students is a walk in a garden of roses. The fragrance pulls you into a world of never ending happiness, a safe walk towards felicity, it is. Such can be the state of one’s mental faculties that aberrations may become reality and reality a farfetched, unfathomable trigonometric problem. Now, such symptoms cannot and should not be applied to all cases, they are specific and should strictly be related to only such places where an examination hall presents a picture of utter chaos, ultimate drama, and hell on earth.

 

With four so-called teachers, very close to epileptic jerks, monitoring without much success the adeptly turning heads of students, their suppressed calls and unreadable cues, the purpose of taking exams, kind of explodes into nothingness. Bah!!! You catch them cheat, and see their innocent eyes protruding out of their skulls, questioning the very suspicious gaze of the invigilator with such audacious skill that the teacher feels like a patient suffering from chronic paranoia.

 

I remember myself on the same seat, but fortunately I fail to recollect any such occasion of all hell breaking loose. Perhaps they were old times or may be its all about management. Whatever be the case, once you experience the agony, no balm can soothe your palpitating neurons, unsuccessfully forging their way out of your sick mind. Ahh!! And the time when the answer scripts are to be taken back is simply beyond description. The hall resonates with sounds you feel belong to another world, for a few seconds the teachers are found gasping for a life giving gas which the dementors keep sucking out of their lungs. And then a little while later, all feelings dissipate, for the body is by way of habit jolted and brought back to the world of action. Papers are taken amid cries of “this is unfair; I did not write my name, give me just a minute more, I forgot to write my section’. And not to forget the most popular, “miss, miss!!! Can I visit the loo plzzzzzz!!!!

 

This task when accomplished, the gates of the hall, as per orders, are closed for another never ending THIRTY MINUTES. One teacher, who unfortunately, never is me, is bade farewell with the ruthlessly snatched crumbs of papers, leaving the hall with just three zombies cum teachers and a unruly gang of souls waiting to tear each other into innumerable shreds for reasons unknown but definitely deserve a suo-moto in-depth research. All sorts of wrestling twists and turns, jumps and kicks can be witnessed without much trouble wherever the eye stays. 1 o clock and the gates are opened!!! Despite the teachers yelling out orders of maintaining discipline, the desperate herd, crushing all hurdles (desks and chairs) run into the open, now to be attended and controlled by the PTI’s.

And with this comes to close the long endured, criminal task of invigilating in the hall. The hall invigilators are easily discernible from the other class room invigilators of the school, lost in their own worlds, trying to reconcile with the circumstances fate has landed them in.