I am really gonna miss that place , I am gonna miss my coaching days...

I just cant stop writing about my IIT JEE coaching days, write now in my college my comprehensive (final) semester exam are going on still I find myself recalling things and penning them down .

I loved the atmosphere in my coaching classes ( Bakliwal Tutorials,Pune) . It was fun going to the classes .If I am not wrong I hadnt missed even a single class at BT. Often our Physics teacher Mr.Vaibhav Bakliwal used to say "Yaar mood banao yaar , koi puzzle hai kya kisike pass ? ". Then we used to spend loads of time solving tricky puzzles and thus improving our logical thinking. The class timing was supposedly 5 30pm to 8 30pm but trust me the class never got over at 8 30pm J. Most importantly we students never minded that because we were having a wonderful time. He was crystal clear in his concepts of physics and followed the bible of physics “Concepts of physics by H C Verma”. I still have the book with me in my hostel room and sometimes in my free time do look at the pages all scribbled with pencil , small comments on topics, doubts and questions written by me, some of them even funny .

I remember the beginning wasn’t very good for me. In 11^th when I started attended the classes a new physics teacher, “Rahul sir” started teaching us and he was very polite so the class was getting indisciplined. At that time the class was very crowded everyone from my school had joined these coaching classes. As a result I could only get a place to sit at some last bench, so I couldn’t ask any doubt and sometimes even couldn’t hear the teacher. Even the company around me was not at all interested in studying and came to the classes only because their parents had forced them to. Due to all this I was under-performing, but gradually as the classes went on for a few months the population of the class decreased and I could find a better seat and communicate with the teacher. We at our institute also used to celebrate birthdays of all students by bringing a cake to the class. Oh, and we never even spared the teachers to give us a treat on their birthday. I remember sometimes on some occasion when we were having fun in the class, Rahul sir used to say “let’s hear a song from Karan” . Then I became the singer of my batch and gradually even the topper of my batch. We used to have these “Grand Tests” every month and even the name seemed so scary to me that one day my mom said, “Stop calling these tests Grand Tests just call them GT so that you don’t get tensed psychologically”. That was a bit funny on her part. Then there was one more very interesting character in the BT faculty, Mr. Chandra Mohan M. usually referred to as CM sir. He used to teach us organic chemistry and in a very interesting way . There could never be any student in his class who could feel sleepy during the lecture. Let me give you an example of his teaching method, how does a homolytic bond cleavage happen ? By the TTMM rule i.e. Tu tera main mera. Sharing 1 e- by both the atoms after bond breaking. There were many more things but now I have forgotten but he sure made everything very interesting. Then his most favourite line “‘Baarish ki raat’ suppose an electrophile attacks this double bond, then what will happen?”. This is how fun my coaching classes were. Much better than my whole school life of 12 years.

Then as I came in my 12^th the class which consisted of 60 people was now accommodating just about 25-30. That’s how people give up on their JEE coaching but even after getting pathetic marks in my coaching classes in 11^th and scoring just about 70% in my 11^th in school I still didn’t give up on my coaching. I never really bothered to study for school or for that matter even the board exams. After being thorough with JEE Physics, chemistry and maths school PCM is damn easy but the only place where I used to lose my marks was how to present the solution. Still I managed to get 84 % in boards and 88% in PCM. Thanks to these marks I am now in BITS , cause BITS had a cut-off of 80% in PCM in 12^th. At some point in life I even feared whether I would be able to get 80% in my boards as in my pre-boards I was scoring 60 -65%.

In my class 12^th apart from the classes in my BT batch I started attending classes for physics(my love) in the toppers batch and the repeaters batch. Once Vaibhav sir had asked me to take a test of physics which was made for the repeaters with the repeaters batch and there too I had scored marks in the top 5-10 students in the class of 40-50 repeaters. Before JEE our maths teacher, Mr.Pradeep Nagar was taking the toppers batch to a movie so even I accompanied him and watched the movie “3 Idiots” with the IIT JEE toppers of 2010.

Once Karthik , a fellow IIT JEE aspirant asked me when we were in 12th " Yaar , tujhe kya lagta hai hum JEE clear kar paayenge ?" . I had replied “Yaar clear to kar he lenge , its just that if it is our day we will get a rank in top 1000 or else if we screw up then we will get a rank in 7000-8000."

Karthik did not clear JEE that year and took a drop. He re-attempted JEE in 2011 and is expecting a score of 354 which can easily get him a rank in top 200.

After JEE was over Mr.Vaibhav Bakliwal, founder of the Bakliwal Tutorials took all the 45 students who had cleared IIT JEE to a dinner at a high class restaurant. And students were given cash reward as per their ranks. I got Rs.1000 for a rank of 6871 but this wasn’t the only reward I got for clearing IIT JEE, apart from FIITJEE test series I had subscribed to T.I.M.E test series so even T.I.M.E gave me a price of Rs.4000 for clearing IIT JEE and the funny thing is I had subscribed for the T.I.M.E test series at a price of Rs.2000. So I actually made a profit of Rs.2000 out of it. Coming back to the dinner Vaibhav sir had taken us to, he suggested me there to take a drop and give JEE in 2011. I told him I would consider it sir. To this he replied, “Karan, you should consider it strongly cause I believe that people who deserve to be in IITs should not compromise on anything less than that”. But I never compromised, as now I am studying at BITS-Pilani Goa campus which is in no way a compromise infront of the IITs. In the end I would like to say “Enjoy the work you do, there is divine pleasure in hard work”.As commented by my dad in my last post “The journey is more beautiful than the destination” and thats all matters even if I dint reach my  expected destination atleast I enjoyed the journey.

Thanks for reading J

Signing off

Karan Singh Mann

B.E(Hons)

Electrical & Electronics Engg.

BITS-Pilani Goa Campus.