Before the start of the exam : oh yeah, 95+, easy
During the exam : Oh God, just give me 90+ and I'll be happy
Now(94.6%) : if only I got that 0.6% more.......
And that, my fellow CISCEians, is the circle of life. Whenever we reach a goal, we just set our sights higher, and start striving towards that, not pausing enough to appreciate how far we've come.
The mellifluous sound of Skillet's hero pierced through the quiet morning calm. "I need a hero To save me now I need a hero to save my life A hero will save me Just in time". Karan got up and groggily rubbed his eyes. He picked up his phone to see the time. 8 30. Shit. He'd already overslept for an hour. "What a fantastic way to start the day" he thought to himself. He knew he was being too hard on himself. The maths exam the previous day had wrung his brain like a sponge, extracting every theorem and formula from it until nothing remained. But small things like his physical and mental well-being were trivial, mere distractions, in the face of one of his first national level exams : the ICSE. For the first time in his life, his competition wouldn't be Alok, the guy who'd been solving Navier-Stokes equations since he was 12, or Spashtgyann, the guy who seemed to be aware every method of cheating invented by man, and then some. No, this time, it would be lakhs of students across the country, facing their first monumental exam, in this never ending saga of exams called life.
He got up from bed, brushed his teeth, drank a glass of black coffee, and sat down at his study table. He looked at his calendar, and crossed out another day. Today was the 6 th of March, just 3 days to go for his physics exam. For some reason he felt a weird premonition,a strange foreboding, As if something want just right, as if a disaster was just waiting to happen, but he just couldn't put his finger on it. He checked his phone again. 9 00. Another 30 minutes of his life gone, ruminating about things that didn't matter. He set a timer for 3 hours, and got to work. Just when he thought his brain was about to turn to mush, his alarm rang. A brief respite.
He sipped some water, and decided to scroll through insta to relax himself. "Only 10 minutes, no more. I've set a screen time limit of 1 hour, no way I'll exceed 10 minutes". Before he knew it, his feed was filled with dancing cats, random pranks, and motivational videos on how the toppers study. Suddenly, his phone vibrated. " It's been 1 hour, time to take a break". What the fuck? 1 hour! "I've to delete insta", he thought. But he'd already tried that a week ago, but he just reinstalled it during the next break. He threw his phone across the room. Fortunately, it hit his pillows, and not the wall. One hour left before lunch. Gotta make it count. He decided to prectice the numericals. He opened his 10 pyq and started doing so the sums he could see. He managed to finish 10 of them before his mother called. " Go have a bath Karan, it's already 2" . He reluctantly went to have a bath.
The cool water felt refreshing against his skin. After the bath, he sat down to have lunch. Rice, lentils, and mashed potatoes. He'd been eating the same thing for weeks at this point. He yearned for something tasty, like fried rice, chowmein, anything to break up the monotony. But all junk food was banned until the end of the exams. He sighed, and went back to his room.
Before he started studying, he took a quick glance at his vision board "ICSE 95+, Btech from IIT, MBA from IIM". This was what success looked like, or atleast, what society had defined success as. But how could he, the son of a govt employee and a school teacher, even think of something else? Dreams and aspirations were for the rich, who could afford to escape the rat race, while the middle class kids like him languished in coaching classes, hoping, maybe, just maybe, they would be the ones to get into IIT's and IIM's and make their parents proud, finally escaping the middle class trap, but deep down, they knew they were probably nothing more than fever dreams. He'd tried to look at other options, but had nearly fainted when he'd seen the cost of private colleges, especially management quota seats. 45 lakhs. 60 lakhs. More money than his family had ever seen in their lives.
He checked his phone again. 3 00. Ok. Time to start. He set a timer for 4 hours and got to work. By the end of the 4 hours, his brain was a blur of levers,lenses, pulleys, and prisms. He decided to call his best friend, Lata. She was his exact opposite.
Her father was the son of a steel magnate, who had constructed one of the largest steel plants in India, and her mother was the daughter of one the richest landlords of their state. Saying that they were comfortable would be a gross understatement. She was driven to school in a chaeuffered Mercedes. Once, she'd invited him home for her birthday. He'd been awed the moment he'd reached. He'd asked his dad to park his old splendor far away from the gate so that the other kids couldn't see it. They lived in a mansion, almost 10 times larger than the 2bhk apartment Karan and his parents shared. The walls were covered with artwork, and the floors, with edge to edge carpets. Lata had also invited some of her other friends. Looking at them, with their iwatches(in his mind, everything by Apple had an i before its name) and iphones, he felt out of place, with his old beat up Sonata and a hand me down galaxy J7. Maybe her friends assumed he was on a digital detox, or an old school cool aesthetic. Or maybe, it just didn't cross their minds that a world existed outside of their sheltered lives, with all the luxuries they could dream of.
She'd always treated him well. Although she'd been fed rice pudding that day with a golden spoon, she wasn't born with one in her mouth. She picked up the call. "Hey, how're you?" "Fine just wanted to talk about physics. Any last minute strategies you wanna discuss?""wait, let me facetime you." She cut the call. Facetime. That word felt like another impenetrable wall between him and Lata. 5 minute later, she called him back(on WhatsApp)."See this new thing my dad brought for me " "what is it?" It's a potato cutter. Can you tell me what class lever it is?" " Uh, 3rd class, right? "" Correct. You should always have practical knowledge. Afterall, who knows what'll come for the exam, am i right".
While saying this, Lata had a mysterious smirk on her face that Karan just couldn't place, but he thought nothing of it. They chatted for a few minutes, about physics stuff, like lens numericals, pulley drawings, and the likes. After sometime, the topic diverted to the maths paper leak. When Karan brought it up, Lata said "what's the big deal, must have been some rich kid with connections, nothing more." "Hmm, are you sure it isn't you" Karan joked." Ofcourse not, dummy"she shot back. There it was again, that weird smirk." Ok alright, time for snacks. Dad has brought my favourite avocado toast. Good luck". She cut the call. He was also feeling hungry, so he decided to have some puffed rice.
The next 2 days were a blur of revision. On the night of the 8th, he went to bed, his head buzzing with diagrams, formulae, and definitions."it's gonna be ok, I've prepared well, how hard could it possibly be" he thought to himself. Alas , deluded soul. If he Only knew how wrong he was.
The mellifluous sound of Skillet's hero pierced through the quiet morning calm. "I need a hero To save me now I need a hero to save my life A hero will save me Just in time". Karan got up and groggily rubbed his eyes. He picked up his phone to see the time. 8 30. Shit. He'd already overslept for an hour. "What a fantastic way to start the day" he thought to himself. He knew he was being too hard on himself. The maths exam the previous day had wrung his brain like a sponge, extracting every theorem and formula from it until nothing remained. But small things like his physical and mental well-being were trivial, mere distractions, in the face of one of his first national level exams : the ICSE. For the first time in his life, his competition wouldn't be Alok, the guy who'd been solving Navier-Stokes equations since he was 12, or Spashtgyann, the guy who seemed to be aware every method of cheating invented by man, and then some. No, this time, it would be lakhs of students across the country, facing their first monumental exam, in this never ending saga of exams called life.
He got up from bed, brushed his teeth, drank a glass of black coffee, and sat down at his study table. He looked at his calendar, and crossed out another day. Today was the 6 th of March, just 3 days to go for his physics exam. For some reason he felt a weird premonition,a strange foreboding, As if something want just right, as if a disaster was just waiting to happen, but he just couldn't put his finger on it. He checked his phone again. 9 00. Another 30 minutes of his life gone, ruminating about things that didn't matter. He set a timer for 3 hours, and got to work. Just when he thought his brain was about to turn to mush, his alarm rang. A brief respite.
He sipped some water, and decided to scroll through insta to relax himself. "Only 10 minutes, no more. I've set a screen time limit of 1 hour, no way I'll exceed 10 minutes". Before he knew it, his feed was filled with dancing cats, random pranks, and motivational videos on how the toppers study. Suddenly, his phone vibrated. " It's been 1 hour, time to take a break". What the fuck? 1 hour! "I've to delete insta", he thought. But he'd already tried that a week ago, but he just reinstalled it during the next break. He threw his phone across the room. Fortunately, it hit his pillows, and not the wall. One hour left before lunch. Gotta make it count. He decided to prectice the numericals. He opened his 10 pyq and started doing so the sums he could see. He managed to finish 10 of them before his mother called. " Go have a bath Karan, it's already 2" . He reluctantly went to have a bath.
The cool water felt refreshing against his skin. After the bath, he sat down to have lunch. Rice, lentils, and mashed potatoes. He'd been eating the same thing for weeks at this point. He yearned for something tasty, like fried rice, chowmein, anything to break up the monotony. But all junk food was banned until the end of the exams. He sighed, and went back to his room.
Before he started studying, he took a quick glance at his vision board "ICSE 95+, Btech from IIT, MBA from IIM". This was what success looked like, or atleast, what society had defined success as. But how could he, the son of a govt employee and a school teacher, even think of something else? Dreams and aspirations were for the rich, who could afford to escape the rat race, while the middle class kids like him languished in coaching classes, hoping, maybe, just maybe, they would be the ones to get into IIT's and IIM's and make their parents proud, finally escaping the middle class trap, but deep down, they knew they were probably nothing more than fever dreams. He'd tried to look at other options, but had nearly fainted when he'd seen the cost of private colleges, especially management quota seats. 45 lakhs. 60 lakhs. More money than his family had ever seen in their lives.
He checked his phone again. 3 00. Ok. Time to start. He set a timer for 4 hours and got to work. By the end of the 4 hours, his brain was a blur of levers,lenses, pulleys, and prisms. He decided to call his best friend, Lata. She was his exact opposite.
Her father was the son of a steel magnate, who had constructed one of the largest steel plants in India, and her mother was the daughter of one the richest landlords of their state. Saying that they were comfortable would be a gross understatement. She was driven to school in a chaeuffered Mercedes. Once, she'd invited him home for her birthday. He'd been awed the moment he'd reached. He'd asked his dad to park his old splendor far away from the gate so that the other kids couldn't see it. They lived in a mansion, almost 10 times larger than the 2bhk apartment Karan and his parents shared. The walls were covered with artwork, and the floors, with edge to edge carpets. Lata had also invited some of her other friends. Looking at them, with their iwatches(in his mind, everything by Apple had an i before its name) and iphones, he felt out of place, with his old beat up Sonata and a hand me down galaxy J7. Maybe her friends assumed he was on a digital detox, or an old school cool aesthetic. Or maybe, it just didn't cross their minds that a world existed outside of their sheltered lives, with all the luxuries they could dream of.
She'd always treated him well. Although she'd been fed rice pudding that day with a golden spoon, she wasn't born with one in her mouth. She picked up the call. "Hey, how're you?" "Fine just wanted to talk about physics. Any last minute strategies you wanna discuss?""wait, let me facetime you." She cut the call. Facetime. That word felt like another impenetrable wall between him and Lata. 5 minute later, she called him back(on WhatsApp)."See this new thing my dad brought for me " "what is it?" It's a potato cutter. Can you tell me what class lever it is?" " Uh, 3rd class, right? "" Correct. You should always have practical knowledge. Afterall, who knows what'll come for the exam, am i right".
While saying this, Lata had a mysterious smirk on her face that Karan just couldn't place, but he thought nothing of it. They chatted for a few minutes, about physics stuff, like lens numericals, pulley drawings, and the likes. After sometime, the topic diverted to the maths paper leak. When Karan brought it up, Lata said "what's the big deal, must have been some rich kid with connections, nothing more." "Hmm, are you sure it isn't you" Karan joked." Ofcourse not, dummy"she shot back. There it was again, that weird smirk." Ok alright, time for snacks. Dad has brought my favourite avocado toast. Good luck". She cut the call. He was also feeling hungry, so he decided to have some puffed rice.
The next 2 days were a blur of revision. On the night of the 8th, he went to bed, his head buzzing with diagrams, formulae, and definitions."it's gonna be ok, I've prepared well, how hard could it possibly be" he thought to himself. Alas , deluded soul. If he Only knew how wrong he was.
The mellifluous sound of Skillet's hero pierced through the quiet morning calm. "I need a hero To save me now I need a hero to save my life A hero will save me Just in time". Karan got up and groggily rubbed his eyes. He picked up his phone to see the time. 8 30. Shit. He'd already overslept for an hour. "What a fantastic way to start the day" he thought to himself. He knew he was being too hard on himself. The maths exam the previous day had wrung his brain like a sponge, extracting every theorem and formula from it until nothing remained. But small things like his physical and mental well-being were trivial, mere distractions, in the face of one of his first national level exams : the ICSE. For the first time in his life, his competition wouldn't be Alok, the guy who'd been solving Navier-Stokes equations since he was 12, or Spashtgyann, the guy who seemed to be aware every method of cheating invented by man, and then some. No, this time, it would be lakhs of students across the country, facing their first monumental exam, in this never ending saga of exams called life.
He got up from bed, brushed his teeth, drank a glass of black coffee, and sat down at his study table. He looked at his calendar, and crossed out another day. Today was the 6 th of March, just 3 days to go for his physics exam. For some reason he felt a weird premonition,a strange foreboding, As if something want just right, as if a disaster was just waiting to happen, but he just couldn't put his finger on it. He checked his phone again. 9 00. Another 30 minutes of his life gone, ruminating about things that didn't matter. He set a timer for 3 hours, and got to work. Just when he thought his brain was about to turn to mush, his alarm rang. A brief respite.
He sipped some water, and decided to scroll through insta to relax himself. "Only 10 minutes, no more. I've set a screen time limit of 1 hour, no way I'll exceed 10 minutes". Before he knew it, his feed was filled with dancing cats, random pranks, and motivational videos on how the toppers study. Suddenly, his phone vibrated. " It's been 1 hour, time to take a break". What the fuck? 1 hour! "I've to delete insta", he thought. But he'd already tried that a week ago, but he just reinstalled it during the next break. He threw his phone across the room. Fortunately, it hit his pillows, and not the wall. One hour left before lunch. Gotta make it count. He decided to prectice the numericals. He opened his 10 pyq and started doing so the sums he could see. He managed to finish 10 of them before his mother called. " Go have a bath Karan, it's already 2" . He reluctantly went to have a bath.
The cool water felt refreshing against his skin. After the bath, he sat down to have lunch. Rice, lentils, and mashed potatoes. He'd been eating the same thing for weeks at this point. He yearned for something tasty, like fried rice, chowmein, anything to break up the monotony. But all junk food was banned until the end of the exams. He sighed, and went back to his room.
Before he started studying, he took a quick glance at his vision board "ICSE 95+, Btech from IIT, MBA from IIM". This was what success looked like, or atleast, what society had defined success as. But how could he, the son of a govt employee and a school teacher, even think of something else? Dreams and aspirations were for the rich, who could afford to escape the rat race, while the middle class kids like him languished in coaching classes, hoping, maybe, just maybe, they would be the ones to get into IIT's and IIM's and make their parents proud, finally escaping the middle class trap, but deep down, they knew they were probably nothing more than fever dreams. He'd tried to look at other options, but had nearly fainted when he'd seen the cost of private colleges, especially management quota seats. 45 lakhs. 60 lakhs. More money than his family had ever seen in their lives.
He checked his phone again. 3 00. Ok. Time to start. He set a timer for 4 hours and got to work. By the end of the 4 hours, his brain was a blur of levers,lenses, pulleys, and prisms. He decided to call his best friend, Lata. She was his exact opposite.
Her father was the son of a steel magnate, who had constructed one of the largest steel plants in India, and her mother was the daughter of one the richest landlords of their state. Saying that they were comfortable would be a gross understatement. She was driven to school in a chaeuffered Mercedes. Once, she'd invited him home for her birthday. He'd been awed the moment he'd reached. He'd asked his dad to park his old splendor far away from the gate so that the other kids couldn't see it. They lived in a mansion, almost 10 times larger than the 2bhk apartment Karan and his parents shared. The walls were covered with artwork, and the floors, with edge to edge carpets. Lata had also invited some of her other friends. Looking at them, with their iwatches(in his mind, everything by Apple had an i before its name) and iphones, he felt out of place, with his old beat up Sonata and a hand me down galaxy J7. Maybe her friends assumed he was on a digital detox, or an old school cool aesthetic. Or maybe, it just didn't cross their minds that a world existed outside of their sheltered lives, with all the luxuries they could dream of.
She'd always treated him well. Although she'd been fed rice pudding that day with a golden spoon, she wasn't born with one in her mouth. She picked up the call. "Hey, how're you?" "Fine just wanted to talk about physics. Any last minute strategies you wanna discuss?""wait, let me facetime you." She cut the call. Facetime. That word felt like another impenetrable wall between him and Lata. 5 minute later, she called him back(on WhatsApp)."See this new thing my dad brought for me " "what is it?" It's a potato cutter. Can you tell me what class lever it is?" " Uh, 3rd class, right? "" Correct. You should always have practical knowledge. Afterall, who knows what'll come for the exam, am i right".
While saying this, Lata had a mysterious smirk on her face that Karan just couldn't place, but he thought nothing of it. They chatted for a few minutes, about physics stuff, like lens numericals, pulley drawings, and the likes. After sometime, the topic diverted to the maths paper leak. When Karan brought it up, Lata said "what's the big deal, must have been some rich kid with connections, nothing more." "Hmm, are you sure it isn't you" Karan joked." Ofcourse not, dummy"she shot back. There it was again, that weird smirk." Ok alright, time for snacks. Dad has brought my favourite avocado toast. Good luck". She cut the call. He was also feeling hungry, so he decided to have some puffed rice.
The next 2 days were a blur of revision. On the night of the 8th, he went to bed, his head buzzing with diagrams, formulae, and definitions."it's gonna be ok, I've prepared well, how hard could it possibly be" he thought to himself. Alas , deluded soul. If he Only knew how wrong he was.
pls ignore the small spelling errors, wrote this on gboard
The mellifluous sound of Skillet's hero pierced through the quiet morning calm. "I need a hero to save me now I need a hero To save me now I need a hero to save my life A hero will save me Just in time". Karan got up and groggily rubbed his eyes. He picked up his phone to see the time. 8 30. Shit. He'd already overslept for an hour. "What a fantastic way to start the day" he thought to himself. He knew he was being too hard on himself. The maths exam the previous day had wrung his brain like a sponge, extracting every part theorem and formula from it until nothing remained. But small things like his physical and mental well-being were trivial, mere distractions, in the face of one of his first national level exams : the ICSE. For the first time in his life, his competition wouldn't be Alok, the guy who'd been solving Navier-Stokes equations since he was 12, or Spashtgyann, the guy who seemed to be aware every method of cheating invented by man, and then some. No, this time, it would be lakhs of students across the country, facing their first monumental exam, in this never ending saga of exams called life. He got up from bed, brushed his teeth, drank a glass of black coffee, and sat down at his study table. He looked at his calendar, and crossed out another day. Today......
Thanks for all the support you guys have showed me. Here's a sneak peek of what's cooking :
The mellifluous sound of Skillet's hero pierced through the quiet morning calm. "I need a hero to save me now I need a hero To save me now I need a hero to save my life A hero will save me Just in time". Karan got up and groggily rubbed his eyes. He picked up his phone to see the time. 8 30. Shit. He'd already overslept for an hour. "What a fantastic way to start the day" he thought to himself. He knew he was being too hard on himself. The maths exam the previous day had wrung his brain like a sponge, extracting every part theorem and formula from it until nothing remained. But small things like his physical and mental well-being were trivial, mere distractions, in the face of one of his first national level exams : the ICSE. For the first time in his life, his competition wouldn't be Alok, the guy who'd been solving Navier-Stokes equations since he was 12, or Spashtgyann, the guy who seemed to be aware every method of cheating invented by man, and then some. No, this time, it would be lakhs of students across the country, facing their first monumental exam, in this never ending saga of exams called life.
I know this might seem a bit boring at the moment, but it's going to be long(atleast 5 episodes, I hope), so pls be patient. 🤗
BTW, alok is the GOAT, and spasthgyaan is clarify knowledge😝
Title. I'll write a story (probably not a short one, cause I suck at writing concisely) about the 2026 icse exams, using all the lore. Feel free too drop lore(like zaddy Emmanuel and lata,etc. Also, drop some lore related to commerce and EVS, if possible)and story points in the comments below.
Just got my calculator. What cool stuff can I do to pass time(I already know about the tic tac Toe trick and the 8008(and similar) ones. (Plz don't tell me to study instead of passing time😛)