Exam time: Pressure Cooker Situation and the Parkinson's Law

Exams, especially in a country like India create a pressure cooker situation. The high degree of competition, your expectations from yourself as well your peer group contributes to an increased blood pressure. You can find lots of proponents of science and logical thinking processes making their children rush to temples before examinations, many seek blessings of all their elders.  No matters how confused you are about the importance of the exam for you, no matter how your parents and peer groups are confused about the impact of the particular exam on your career, you and all around you want you perform exceptionally good- after all an exam is an exam. The most of we Indian have been conditioned in manner as if exams are battle grounds. This adds to mental stress and pressure, in some cases, the exam taker breaks down under mental stress. 

Let me term the exam period as pressure cooker situation- you are boiling out of tremor inside, but no one outside can see you boiling. You want to move out (say, by an early exam taking), but the fixed dates would keep you in the cooker till the exam is over.  If you are not so lucky, to add to your pain the Parkinson's Law would prevail to ensure that you read, re-read, revise, re-revise the same boring topics of the book till your exam is over. 

As students, we have witnessed out Parkinson's Law- "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion" adds to the pressure cooker situation of exam days. 

When I introspect some my experience of exam time, I see Parkinson's Law has proved its validity again and again. Here goes some examples and personal experiences:

• Students negotiating dates of examination seeking an extension with the hope that they would be able to finish everything only if the dates are extended. Then the same same students complain either about (1) the additional pressure due to additional days of preparation or about (2) not being able to finish the course despite the extension (due to expansion of the work to fill the time available). 
• Students peeping into a book, note till the exam bill rings, their studying expands till the last minute available to them. Subjects like communication skills are no exception. 
• Even if there is an objective type paper, where you either know the answer or don't know- most of the students keep pondering about the question till the finish bell rings. Their effort to find out an answer out of the blue expands as they know they have time.
• Some students keep on writing their answer (yes, sometimes stories) till the invigilator comes and drags their answer paper

 It's understandable when  people want to expands their time span of pleasant situation. But why on earth many students love to expand pressure cooker situations like exam duration, postponement of exams, peeping into a book till exam bill rings? 

May be there is a need to make every student understand Parkinson's law, so that at least a few of them would try to minimize pressure cooker situation despite seeking an extension of exam date or duration etc.

Are Human Beings Programmed?

Yesterday I had a short but valuable discussion with one of my friends- Hemant. Hemant was confident that most of the human beings are programmed. Are we?

Programming is a set of instructions that helps a device to perform certain task in a pre-decided way to provide a predictable outcome. Don’t we behave in a predictable way when provided with a situation, problem or issue? Yes! Most of us do. Then are we really programmed? Who has programmed us? 

We all have been groomed in a laboratory like environment- a controlled environment where all the parameters like- what food we have to eat, what dress to wear, when to sleep etc. were decided by our parents. Just like the interference of experimenter to ensure that the controlled environment is maintained, our well-wishers have always interfered to make us stick to the provided set of instructions. We were made to follow the same routine, same set of instructions so that most of our activities started becoming spontaneous. Many of us feel sleepy at the usual time we go to bed, we feel hungry at the lunch time (doesn’t matter whether we had some food just an hour before). Aren’t these examples of programming? Societal norms, rules and regulations, expected set of behaviour- all are examples of programming principles, languages that we have been encouraged to follow. And most of us follow the rules for which many times society rewards us. 

Then the next question is – aren’t we rational minds, capable of taking our own decisions? The answer to this question is YES and NO. YES- because we have the power to apply logic to learn new things, to challenge the usual programming we were exposed to, to unlearn and relearn. NO- because in order to arrive at rational decisions we need to know the right kind of information and an open mind-set. Prolonged years of controlled conditions and laboratory set-up knowingly or unknowingly choke our minds. Even when the mind is open, the desire of the experimenter to maintain controlled environment distracts her to reveal the right kind of information- she knows that an open rational mind is capable of taking rational decisions. So in order to maintain controlled environment the inputs have to be controlled, no matter how untrue the input information are. In our life though we are made to believe that we are rational minds, our leaders, politicians, bureaucrats, immediate environment and its players- all are simultaneously working to ensure that the controlled environment is maintained. 

Shall we conclude that all of us despite the potential to take decisions interpret situation without a defined programme succumb to the programme set for us by the external forces? We need to understand that the external forces evolve and make us change. Mankind has been always blessed with great souls we have fought the external forces and have applied their own mind to interpret situations. They have ensured that the usual programme is modified, debugged and reprogrammed depending on the new information, fresh learning and experience. Some of these great souls have gone ahead to ensure that the larger world realises that the old programming is out-dated, full of bugs and needs to be re-programmed. In Indian context, abolition of Sati, widow re-marriage etc. are classic examples where some great souls ensured debugging and reconfiguration of the faulty programming that the society was conditioned to.

Devastating Decision and the Blame Game

In our day-to-day life, we many times arrive at decisions which are faulty and childish. Such decisions are, many times, an outcome of a perturbed mind, poor understanding of internal and external variables or over-consideration of causes and effects. The mistakes incorporated in the initial process triggers a chain reaction that ensures validation of Murphy’s law- “anything that can go wrong will go wrong”. But not all the decisions are devastating, only a few are. 

We all have seen people blaming external forces, others, the situation for the unfavourable outcomes. However, it’s absolutely painful to see people justifying their devastating decisions which affects millions of people saying- “So what? Other people are also indulged in such wrong doing? Why are you asking us?” It is even more disturbing to see such flimsy response from public personalities. 

“Godhra riots? Huh….why don’t you talk about 1984 anti-Sikh riots?”

“Assam riots? Huh….why don’t you talk about Godhra riots?”

“Coffins scam? Huh….let’s talk about Bofors? ”

“No auctions in our time? Huh….there was no auction in your time as well? ”

The devastating decisions of governments (I presume most of them are inadvertent) followed by a blame game is detrimental to parliamentary democracy. If I am caught stealing, let me talk about the other person’s stealing; once we both are in the same colour, the other one cannot even point out at my mistake. As a resultof this blame game, the public figures and organizations are at the brink of losing confidence of the common man. The common man is increasingly becoming more and more detached from matters of national interest. And the devastating decision makers enjoy their power at the cost of democratic values and public accountability.