ELEVENTH HOUR !

Its midsem time: exam fever all around. Tension ruining the lovely ambience of the mid February air… Hmm… Valentine’s week!!! But alas! Who has the time to care about that, with exams hovering an inch above your head. All you bother about is “rattoing slides”, getting solved tutorials and photocopying notes… It seems like an unusual phenomenon is taking place is the campus on those “fatal 3 days”. When else can you spot people walking on the DPT carpet with eyes stuck to a “magical formula”, people gorging food in mess with heads engrossed in books and library flooded with students…? People even turn up late to the examination hall – busy cramming notes at the “eleventh hour” reasoning themselves with the conception “turning up 5 minutes late for exams proves beneficial when weighed against mugging up 5 formulas”

Eleventh hour – the most crucial hour in the course of any event!!!

The eleventh hour is an expression referring to the last moments before a deadline or the imminence of a decisive or “final” moment. Usage of this term may be traced back to the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard” as given by Jesus. In it, Jesus says that any "laborer" who accepts the invitation to the Kingdom of Heaven, no matter how late in the day, will receive an equal reward with those who have been faithful the longest. And also to the last moments of the First World War, which ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th Month of the year 1918.

While in school, most of us used to be in the good books of the teachers, who spent the last week before the exams revising our portions for the third or fourth time (real ghissus !). But as we cross the threshold of IIT, we learn the skill of doing things at the last minute. Most people feel vaguely guilty about this; when the topic comes up in conversation, they make sweeping statements about how much better and more admirable they were before they came to IIT, and how appalling it is to complete everything desperately just in time.

But is it really a bad thing?

The last minute – the period of time when you know that you absolutely cannot delay any longer – is extraordinarily productive. Everyone who has studied a semester’s worth of portion in the hour before the end sem will know that their power to grasp “never seen before concepts” increases exponentially in that time period.

And what distinguishes an IITian- is the skill of mastering this eleventh hour.

“The night out”, an IITian’s solution to everything, is another example. Anyone who has ever stayed awake all night with a group of people, working against a two – week old deadline, will testify that almost any task can be concluded in a fruitful night out. A week before its release Ren-Spice saw many night outs, and believe me a month long commission was completed in a jiffy!!!

Even in event management, the law of the eleventh hour works. Most events that happen in here are hastily put together at the last minute, and the organizers exchange glances during the event in disbelief that it is actually happening. We have a belief that everything will happen the “ho jaayega mantra” and, miraculously, most things do happen. Often you are provided with some miscellaneous stuff and asked to put them together to bring out something prolific. (Behind the scenes concept: “You are IITians, so use your brains!!!). And all you can do is gape sceptically at the commander of the orders…

Perceptibly, it is not always true that last minute effort is a proficient approach towards an objective. Academically, it is almost always correct that those who have spent a large part of the semester studying diligently perform better than those who have desperately crammed a list of tutorial problems into their already crowded minds on the day before the exam. They also retain more – no last-minute specialist ever remembers anything the day after the exam. The thing is, not too many of us plan our last – minute time usage. Those who have become really good at it are known by various combinations of the words “phodu” “bond”. And ironically enough, those who are busy preparing for exams throughout the sem are known as “ghissu” “maggu”.

Thus, the main argument against eleventh hour exertion is loss of quality. The focus in such an endeavour is always to conclude one’s undertaking at any cost, and evidently one doesn’t get the time to reconsider the attempts. Most of us would appreciate the fact that, whenever we put in sustained efforts to do something, we do experience a sense of accomplishment. It would seem logical that we stop last – minute work altogether, but it certainly has its discrete significance. After all, what else can allow you to write a Business Management report, complete Material Science tutorial and study for 3 exams all in a few hours?