Thursday, October 18, 2007

The CAT that was never killed

The proverbial cat was killed because of reasons attributed to curiosity. Well, there was no good reason why the cat shall not be curious and neither was it ever mentioned that curiosity was so lethal that it could kill anyone who possess this cat-forbidden-quality. But, one good thing about this is that we know that curiosity killed the cat. Well, now it doesn’t take a genius to infer that I am now going to write about CAT in this silly-post-after-a-long-time. The CAT which I am talking about can never be killed by curiosity and paradoxically it might even prove that curiosity is the key for survival.
My decision to take CAT dates back to 2002, after trying different exams like GATE, GRE(results of which are not published for obvious reasons), I was crazy enough to be fantasized about taking CAT. My reason for taking CAT then was.....well very few things which I used to do then have some meaning. I took CAT because I just felt like. So, I took CAT 2003 and as usual my quintessential romance with bad luck started, heavens dropped shit on me and the CAT 2003 paper leaked. And you don need to be Einstein's clone to infer that I did not crack it then.
I moved on, got placed in an infrastructure development company, but the desire to kill the CAT never died, though it went through a phase of long hibernation of about two years, the desire to kill was always there. And in these two years, a lot of things changed, my profession (from Infrastructure development to IT), the company I work for, my girl friend, the city I live, the way I live, the way I looked and the way I look at things, everything except for one thing changed, it was as if I was infected and the urge to kill the CAT was always there in me.
But the things changed when I started preparing for the war that I have to wage against hundreds of thousands of people like me. Killing CAT means, killing the others who are trying to kill the CAT and in doing so you realize that you are not good enough to kill so many people, you lose confidence, develop dark circles, grow long hair and behave weirdly with your closed ones. You might even get to hear some philosophical lectures about ability and ambition and that these two must be in synergy for a person. And I am no exception.
During the last 4 months of my CAT preparations I have been through many things, the weekends AIMCATs fetched me a morale boosting >95%iles with the peak being 99.99%ile once and they even successfully managed to suck of my confidence like leeches with %iles as low as 78. There were weeks where I could not balance my personal life with my desire to kill the CAT and there were weeks when I was doing nothing else than preparing for CAT. There were weeks when I sacrificed my weekend discos and there were weeks when I was fed up and went out for a long ride. But, what I still have to understand is whether my curiosity to kill the CAT will help me killing the CAT or not. And with just 30 days to go for the D day, I write this post with a kind of low pressure regions in coasts of my heart waiting to become a cyclone and whether or not this cyclone kills the CAT? Well, I need to wait and so do you!