CAT is over and so is my dream by born4iim

I reached my center at 9.30 thinking that I am just too early but when I entered the gate of the school I thought I must be the last person to reach the center. More than 1000 nervous IIM aspirants were moving here and there. All the seating places near stair were filled. I went to the notice board to check out my room number. After being fully assured that there is no place to seat down I went out of the campus but the place near the gate was too heavy with cigarette smoke to my dislike so I went back inside the campus and waited for the first bill to ring. We are allowed to go inside at 10am. The omr sheet was given to us 15 mins prior to the question paper for filling up the reg. no and other details. I was shocked when I saw the OMR sheet with 5 options of 120 questions. At that point I decided to answer minimum number of questions while giving priority to the accuracy. As the total mark was doubled I knew the total cutoff will be in higher side. In all my mocks my target was always to score 1/3rd of the total score. And the cutoffs always stayed in that region. I set my target for CAT 2006 as 100. Later I saw the negative mark as 1/4th and was a bit relaxed with it. First I started with Mathematics and must have attempted 10 out of the first 15 questions with in 30 minutes. I was sure about the answers of all and that gave me a lot of confidence knowing that I have scored around 40 in 30 mins and with another 2 hr in my hand. Till then I had seen nothing of DI and EU section. After staying 30 minutes in math sections I turned to English and after few glance I though of starting with an RC and I started with second passage. I went through the first paragraph with all my concentration but while reading the last line of first passage I realized all the words are just going over my head. I really don’t remember for how many minutes I lost my thoughts but during that small span of time I had visualized many things which I would never think in my normal life. All the confidences of mathematics were gone by that time. I looked at my wrist watch on the desk and realized I had wasted around 10 minutes with out attempting a single question. I had no other option but to sit there and try some thing else. I looked at last five questions they were about finding out facts, inferences and Judgments (Few sentences were given and I had to fig out which sentence is fact, which one is inference and judgment). After proving me that I am an idiot, the EU section was trying to show me – my true potential. I stopped there and moved to DI section. I started with the question on class x board examination. To my surprise the questions were not that tough (or may be I am good with numbers  ). I answered all the 5 bits of that question with out much trouble. Another look at my watch confirmed me that 1 hour of my allocated time to show my worth is over. First 30 minutes fetched me 40 marks and next 30 minutes 20 marks (or that’s what I was thinking till then – All the questions that I have attempted are correct). The EU fiasco was out of my mind for the subsequent 40 odd minutes that I spent in DI section. At the end I have read all the questions in that section and came out with an attempt of 19. I thought of giving a much needed break to my mind and started marking all the questions that I have attempted on the omr sheet. After marking all the questions I went to EU section once again. I did not have any courage to look at the passages so thought of attempting the questions on paragraph competition. I marked all the questions just thinking that the negative mark is 1/4th so even if I mark all the questions wrong except 1 the net score will not be less than zero. After that I had no other option but to look for another passage. Thoughtlessly I went through the passage on communism as like I was reading a new gossip column on ash. At the end I saw 5 questions and some how I managed to attempt 4 out of that , though I was not sure about any. After spending few more unpleasant moments with the EU section I went to my favorite mathematics section. Mathematics has never disappointed me and that was true in CAT2006. In the last 12-15 minutes I attempted 6 questions on math. The bell rang when I was reading the last question on mathematics the question was on geometry. I stopped reading the question not because I was supposed to do that but all the part of my brain had stopped functioning. I knew CAT is over and so is my chance of making it into IIM. By born4iim