[NVIDIA and the last few days]

Yes, it happens tomorrow.

Before I begin on my love and affection for the company I'll tell you about hell. Before that I'll tell you about pre-hell. Let me begin.

Like all pre-hells, it sucked. Pre-hell is inherently defined as the time period spanning from 2 weeks prior to your major examinations to about 3 minutes after the last exam.

Pre-hell is also intuitively divided into two parts :- the pre-major period and the during-major period. The pre major period begins usually with a quiz or two for some of the course you unknowing of these quizzes' existence, took. This is mostly a "chill" period as the real brunt hasn't struck you yet.

Next up are those third minors/re-minors that innocently give you a "chance" at your grade, but since you are an IITian there are little reasons for you not to take this exam. There's no chance you did well in the previous exams hence if you want any thing out of the semester you'll need to do well here. Of course you couldn't do good in minors. How'd you do better here? You ruin these too.

Now that you've received mild blows of the fact that the semester is (finally) coming to an end, you'll be thrown with more such blows. There shall be lab tests. Lab tests for lab course, lab tests for non-lab courses. Lab tests for things that aren't even courses. Whatever it is, all your subsequent afternoons will be spent glaring at the a) thermometer, b) micrometer, or c)some other kind of meter. Rest assured your readings shall never come as expected, but by now you should have learnt the art of faking stuff you aren't good at. You do all that in style. All pre-afternoons, by the way, shall be taken up by a bunch of you's trying to understand the principles behind these readings, that shall still be fake.

There also exist submissions for courses you took to be the dirt on the lower end of your rotten floaters. And they are long, given the time-frame you intend to assign them. So you patch up 20 pages (that's 10 pages with double the font size) of something that adds up to something like one and a half sentences.

So you do them. You ruin those quizzes. You take those tests a bit to easily. You submit zoomed-in one-and-a-half-sentences.

And then come the last few days before your majors. Its like the silence before the storm. The quizzes are quizzed. The tests are tested. The submissions are submitted. There's nothing posing an immediate danger. But wait. The wave's rising. Its two days to what you call slot A.

You start being with books and notes. You grab books from people who don't (or so you think) need 'em, you get notes photocopied. You accumulate all the stuff you know if you're through with shall ensure a good run for the next few days. Then you spend time with the stuff.

You walk books. You eat books. You sleep books. You talk books. There's always some introduction to something or some advanced something around your elbow. Mostly pointless, but there's no guilt involved.

Finally come the majors. The first is usually your humanities for which you study the least. Also the one where you ruin the least. And write the most.

[to be continued due to shouting parents and lack of time generally]