It’s been a while since I’ve talked about myself. Specifically, my character. As I was rummaging past documents of mine, I came across my report card of class X. I don’t mean the final board exam results but the results of my school’s various internal unit tests and term exams (incl. pre-board exam) for class X. The results are not that surprising as in I was among the top 2 students in my class (not in the board exam, though… I think I was in the top 4 there!) with percentages hovering around 85%. See for example the marksheet of the first unit test.
What was surprising (after all these years, having forgotten all about it) were the remarks written down by my class teacher after this first test. Here’s the snapshot and the extracted text follows after that.
His mind is remarkable and is gifted with a natural aptitude for learning. He is brainy and has an excellent memory but is absolutely uncommunicative and lacks expression. He never comes up with right words to express different nuances. His desire for high academic achievement is always paramount in his mind. Dharmesh is committed and relentless in his effort. He follows correct methods of learning, no short cuts and is very methodical and systematic in his work. His attitude towards other students is uncooperative and sometimes selfish. Dharmesh needs to be friendly and not biased. He should sometimes relax and smile also.
I mean, “Wow! Just wow!”. Usually, people stress on giving a compliment sandwich: something good, then something bad and finally something good again. But what my class teacher has done is made an open sandwich: good, bad, good, shockingly bad, topped with sprinkles of well-meaning but ultimately futile advice! Regardless, what an accurate characterization of “Dharmesh Jain”. I He couldn’t have written it better myhimself, even after all these decades, even if I he tried. Even my superpartner says it rings so true after all this time. “I totally agree with these remarks… It seems you haven’t changed at all since class X!”, she says. What the hell is she talking about?
Anyway, let me review these remarks sentence-by-sentence in this post to add some context and/or nuances and discuss what I think about the accuracy of these sentences. “Why do this?”, you ask. “Am I bitter or sad or angry about these?”, you think. The answer to the latter is “Of course, not!”. I read/listen to all the “characterization” remarks about myself with great amusement because they do not mean much. They are a cross-section of that person’s view of me at a particular spacetime. Yes, I say a particular spacetime because such remarks rarely encompass a respectable interval. If they did apply to an interval, they’d have more “nuances” not just a list of adjectives, as will become clear below. The answer to the former question is “what else is there left to do in October of this year” and “did you forget this is my blog, which is a place for me to air out my thoughts about anything and everything” and some such cliché. Let’s begin:
1. His mind is remarkable and is gifted with a natural aptitude for learning. I have reservation about the usage of the word ‘remarkable’ to describe my ‘mind’ but overall the sentence is a good start. Accuracy: 4/5.
2. He is brainy and has an excellent memory but is absolutely uncommunicative and lacks expression. The phrase before ‘but’ is similar to the first sentence so I don’t have much to say about it. The phrase after ‘but’ nails it as those descriptors about me are true in general. Accuracy: 5/5.
3. He never comes up with right words to express different nuances. What? This sentence has a lot of hidden material to unpack. I don’t know where to start! I mean it’s like the right words aren’t coming to my mind. Oh… so that’s what she meant! Still, what does “to express different nuances” mean? I have no idea… Since my superpartner agrees wholeheartedly with these remarks, I asked her to explain. She said, “You can not (or do not) join in conversations in social situations, even when you’ve something concrete to contribute”. Well, whatever! Personally, I interpret it to mean “He’s tactless” and for that I assign Accuracy: 5/5. For my superpartner’s interpretation, let’s assign Accuracy: 4/5. For anything else, since there’s no context to decipher what this sentence really means, I’d assign Accuracy: 3/5.
4. His desire for high academic achievement is always paramount in his mind. Dharmesh is committed and relentless in his effort. He follows correct methods of learning, no short cuts and is very methodical and systematic in his work. I club here 3 sentences as they are thematically similar. The first sentence exaggerates my ‘desire’. The second sentence uses the word ‘relentless’ in a misguided way. The third sentence is quite close to the truth in general. Accuracy: 4/5.
5. His attitude towards other students is uncooperative and sometimes selfish. Dharmesh needs to be friendly and not biased. Again, I club here 2 sentences as they are of the form: problem & its solution. I don’t understand what ‘uncooperative’ means here as there’s no context provided. It could be that these two sentences have arisen out of the mistaken belief that friendliness equates to cooperation. Any logical person, after just a second’s thought, would realize that ‘friendliness’ is not a necessary condition for ‘cooperation’. Just ask my long-time collaborator P.M. Crichigno. Talking about the second half of both sentences, we again end up in similar turbid waters. That is, without context, it’s not clear what ‘selfish’ and ‘biased’ mean! In general, everyone is selfish to some extent in some of their endeavours. (Not everyone can be or should be the selfless and generous Karna.) So let me provide concrete contexts where all of these words may or may not be applicable to me. I’ve been ‘uncooperative’ with my ‘friends’ regarding eating our tiffins together in the short break as I used to have heavy breakfast in the morning before coming to school. I was not hungry at the time of the short break and ‘selfishly’ always (during the 5 years in this school) had my tiffin in the long break (which was the ‘proper’ lunch break, anyway). I’ve been ‘cooperative’ with my ‘friends’ whenever they asked for any kind of help with their homeworks. Even going so far as handing over my copies to them for ‘copying’ answers. This also shows my ‘unselfish’ nature. Sorry for revealing after all these years that I helped people ‘cheat’ but there you go. That’s the kind of person I was (or am). And I did this with no ‘bias’ as to who was asking me for help, whether it was a high-scoring girl or a low-scoring boy or a girl who has put some effort before asking me or a boy who knows ‘Dharmesh’ is a ‘sucker’ or a girl who I liked or a girl who liked me or a boy who sat beside me or a boy who talked to me only when he needed my homework copy. In short, I support(ed) ‘unbiased’ cheating. After wrecking my brain for more than a day, I have not found any instances of me being ‘biased’ to someone/something (at least) in the academic setting. If anyone can remind me or give me concrete instances, that would be great. In fact, my superpartner once remarked (to someone else that I overheard) that “I’m the most unbiased person she has ever met”. But then, she may be biased! So having said all this, I assign (giving benefit of doubt wherever needed) Accuracy: 2/5.
6. He should sometimes relax and smile also. Ah! the quintessential sentence every teacher who has ever taught me thought at least twice. Once when they first met me and the other whenever they saw me in my natural environment of just existing, which was quite often. But in my defense, I relax sometimes and smile too, and sometimes I even do these two things together. Accuracy: N/A.
Finally, to put a tasty cherry on an already mouth-watering character cake, here’s my character table for class X from my class teacher.
I can again go in detail about what grade I think is rightly or wrongly assigned to me but I will refrain from doing that as this post has become quite long even for a self-indulgent post. And nobody reads this far anyway so let me just make one comment about my ‘dependability’. I am more dependable than the above table seems to suggest, with the caveat pointed out by my superpartner: I’m dependable, if I’m well-informed in advance about when my dependability is expected. I totally agree with her; you don’t expect me to do you any favours at the 13th or even 11th hour. With that clarification, I will let you appreciate all the U’s appearing above. I leave you with my school where all these shenanigans went down.
