26th November 2017. The day started in the best possible way. The cold morning breeze coming in through my window along with the shimmers of dawn, ushered in the day I've been waiting for nearly a year. It was time to bell the CAT! With all the confidence I had gained by scoring consistently well in my mocks, I looked forward to a helluva performance.
The kickoff :
Formation set, Adrenaline pumping, eyes on the screen, mind on the goal and the whistle blows. Again a good start. The RC section seemed a cakewalk. Passage after passage slayed! Managed the moderately tough VA questions, left others. No contingency of wrong answers. At the end of the first hour, Home : 1, Away : 0.
The momentum :
Then came the LRDI section. My favourite one. Though the toughest section of CAT17, still managed to solve around 3-4 comparatively easy sets and tried flukes in some non-MCQs. Again, confidence skyrockets. Home : 2, Away : 0.
Enters the dragon (read EGO) :
Quite a pleasing section QA, wasn't it? Little did I knew that it was about to be my Waterloo. Most of the questions were Arithmetic and Geometric. Easy-peasy Japanese-y! Solved 15 questions in first 40 mins. 20 mins were remaining and around 12 seemingly easy questions marked for review. Had this great feeling that I have nailed this too.
Soon, the confidence turned into overconfidence. There were these deceitfully intricate questions I began solving, whom even after minutes of calculating, I couldn't find answers to. Instead of letting go of such questions, my
EGO compelled me to keep on solving.
"You should not quit, you are almost there, you are too good to leave this question, etc", it said.
Minutes after minutes wasted as I bumbled through the labyrinth of questions. No answers but two in the last 20 mins. Conceded own goals. Landslide defeat in this time. Home : 2, Away : 3.
The result :
As expected, scored well in VARC and LRDI. Around 97 and 96 %ile in them respectively. But stooped at just 83 %ile in QA, thwarting the overall percentile at just 94.46.
Being a fresher GEM with this score, got left with nothing but thinking about the infinite possibilities that I would've had, had I left the unproductively tedious questions, instead of trying to solve them to gratify my ego. What if I had used the time right in solving the other questions I marked and could've solved easily.
Nevertheless, learnt the importance of
letting go, as I embark on my journey forward.