Everyone has certain fears in life. Most of those fears are silly ones like being scared of cockroaches or some slightly more serious like the fear of heights. Mostly harmless fears that remind you of their presence once in a while and otherwise lie dormant. Unless ofcourse it turns out to be a life-altering phobia, which I am guessing is relatively uncommon among most normal people. So, the point of ranting about the whole story of fears is - I have one. Its the fear of failing in a math paper. Now, you may say that its very common and most people have a fear or exams. Atleast most people who have gone through the Indian system of education are scarred through life with this incredible fear of exams. So, yes - I fear exams, especially exams dealing with numbers and mathematics. I wake up almost every night with a sweaty forehead and shivering hands believing that my life is doomed because I have failed a maths paper. It takes me a couple of minutes to realise that its just a dream and my life has other potential reasons to be doomed and the maths paper in question was long written and done with. And this is a recurring dream. Now this has got me thinking. Why is mathematics so scary? What is it about numbers that make them especially incomprehensible? Or am I just mathematically challenged?
In the summer of 1998, the construction of our house was just about complete and we had a house warming ceremony. Right behind our building, was a lake. People could rent a pedal boat and go boating on that lake at that time. Subsequently, water from the lake was drained out to a different lake and the boating stopped. I was about 14 at that time. Sravani and Sruthi, my friends whose houses were also in the same building were a couple of years younger than me. While the gruhapravesham was going on, the three of us felt particularly adventurous. We decided to go boat riding, but wouldn't be allowed to do it on our own if we asked for permission. Well, we decided to do it anyway. The three of us had a little bit of pocket money and we rented a boat. Our plan was to take the boat to the other side of the lake, closest to our house and surprise our parents and to show them, how capable we were to do it on our own. We would reach waters edge on our home-side, call out to our pare...
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