At fourteen, while skimming through my English exam paper, I paused, puckering my eyebrows. One of the questions read, “Write a paragraph on the story of a little lamb.” I remember thinking, why on earth do I have to write about a lamb? Another question asked me to write a diary entry on visiting a school for special children, a place I had never even been to. And there it was again, an essay on how to maintain a balanced diet.
I always did this section last. Frankly speaking, it put me off.I wanted to ask CBSE a question that lingered in my teenage mind. Why should I spend thirty minutes of my exam time on creative writing? I even drafted a letter in my head, part protest, part anger. I never sent it though. Perhaps I was not confident enough in my letter writing skills.
However, this was not even the worst part. I hated the "Writing Skills" section all the more because I never got full marks. Not just me, hardly anyone did. For an eight-mark question, I always got six and a half. And if I got lucky, maybe seven. And if I ever did ask my teachers who gets full, they all would give the same answer “the one who wrote it perfect “ which no one is, hence no one can. So, for me, the moral of the story was, “just as the sun can never see the moon, creative writing never fetches full marks”.
Strangely enough, this conclusion somehow managed to change my perspective. I saw it in a different limelight. I no longer wrote just to score full marks. Instead, I started writing from my heart. Before I knew it, my puckered eyebrows had turned into my dimples at work. It became more than just a question to me. And as the Roman numerals above the class entrance moved up, I noticed the questions had changed too. They began asking things like, “Why is it feasible to advance in space exploration while there are potholes on the roads?”
I found my pen gliding on its own “The dream of a child to win the sky, to hold the stars in his hands, which you see in his eyes…”The ticking sound of the clock seemed feeble against my thoughts. While folding my paper, I found myself thinking, why did I save it for the end? I could have written so much more. This thought stuck in my head. I found it funny. How the writing section I once hated to write was now something I liked writing.
Wasn’t this what they called a paradox?
Henceforth, I started to write not just for exams, rather for myself. I started writing diaries, articles, essays and poems. More and more I wrote, because I liked to express my thoughts, to shape my opinions, to tell the world what I conceived in my brain.Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that writing could become a hobby. For your information, I was the kid who used to come up with weird abbreviations for every recurring word.
This had a robust effect on me. Every time I got carried away in my emotions, I wrote poems.Plausibly, as a teenager, I ended up with quite a lot of them. It helped me jot down my thoughts, my feelings and above all, helped me to communicate with others and myself ,better. I remember once, while pecking my pen on the table, stuck in the middle of a poem, I had a thought. Though writings are full of words, it taught me something words never could. They taught me how to be myself, to write what I see, to write what I feel, to express myself in a beautiful way to others.
Now if you have read this far and are still wondering how this competency of mine helped me in my career, take a pause. For I have become a poet, if your definition of this being is who writes a tonne of poems and publishes a couple.
As I write this essay it takes me back to those Writing Skills sections. I finally solved my paradox. All the pieces fell right in place. Why no one got a perfect score. Why now those thirty minutes felt too short.That tiny part of my English exam paper made me realise that writing is more than just a task for marks. It is a way to see the world, to capture a moment that is left wordless, to turn a thought into an opinion, and opinions into words and words into poems.
This is what the Writing Skills Section taught me. Hence now I can conclude, it is true, competencies go far beyond exams.
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