Of course assignments can be very helpful. Students are supposed to go through all the possible reference books, collect material for every answer, and finally write the answer in the assignment. That would increase a student's understanding of the subject to an extent that would enable him to be a researcher of world class standard. But if the students did actually do all that, then it would probably take a semester to finish one assignment. Doing 30 assignments is out of question. And the professors would have anyways never understood the answers that had such painstaking research behind it. If they checked the assignments, that is…

So instead what happened was a complete parody of learning and education. Assignments usually got over in two levels. Someone, a leader, a forbearer, a champion of knowledge, wrote the first assignment of the class. Most of the times this would be compiled from the class notes by skipping any diagram that was too complicated. Certain paragraphs, chosen at random would be absent too. At times, whole questions would be missing. And at times, out of a certain measure of guilt, some would replace a tougher, longer question with a shorter question so as to keep the question count constant. The objective was to make the assignment as short as possible. Quality of the answers could be compromised. Which does make a lot of sense, considering that the only person who would possibly read the assignment would be the person who borrows it to copy his own assignment from. This was the first tier of assignment completion.

In the second phase the followers would borrow assignments from the people who finished it first and copied it word for word. These got passed in turn… and the cycle continued till everyone had finished the assignments. The last person would complete the assignment a day later than the last date. And unless this person had been kind enough to photo-copy someone's assignment, he would cause great grief to the person whose assignment he had borrowed. Because, the "borrowee" too got the late mark along with the borrower. And in our college that was reason enough to break friendships.

And typically, you will find people finishing assignments everywhere in any college. At least at PCT you would. Students would sneak in some precious seconds in an ongoing lecture to write a few words in the assignment that would have to be submitted in the next lecture. We would write assignments down a hidden staircase where one day a praying mantis decided to give us company and all hell broke loose when it stopped praying and started jumping about. Pratik would finish his assignments on his shitting pot as he completed his daily morning activities binding on all bipeds. Why, oh why, did I ever borrow his assignments???

And then came the matter of checking the assignments. That was totally professor dependant; actually, professor-student relationship dependant. If you had ever passed on a radio, or desi alcohol to the professor, the assignment checking wouldn't be an issue. But if you had ever dared to displease the venerated, expert-in-his-field professor (sarcastically speaking) chances are you would have to keep visiting him for time immerioal to get your assignments signed. For students who fell in neither category, assignments would be checked at the professor's table as the student stood watching, with bated breath, flipping the assignment as quickly as possible to the last page, hoping that nothing would seem amiss and the prof. would sign and get done with it. It worked even in extreme cases where some students would write leaving a two inch margin on either side of the page, then leave some space after the margin and write only two words in a line, and still have lesser than average assignment pages, with virtually no complete, grammatically correct sentence. That happened in a subject called communication skills. And the criminal escaped by engaging the teacher in a very emotional story of her sons and their racing skills. I happen to know the criminal quite well and thus didn't bother to blow the whistle. There were other ways to fool the professor too. Once when Dipti lost all her submission files, she would have had to write them up all again, beginning from scratch. But we PCTians pride ourselves in optimization. What Dipti did was, she took the assignments from previous batches, ripped the last page with signatures, and just wrote that one page. And presto, the submission files were ready before a lot of other people who were still diligently and legitimately completing the allotted work. Then all that had to be done was take signatures on the rewritten pages and work done, file closed. We all would be great criminals if we decided to be one.

On the other hand, if someone decided to screw students up, no force on earth could stop them. For instance there was this Computer Programming submission when the professors decided to play the super-villains from outer space. Drunk with power, they resorted to tearing assignments, which had the slightest flaw. Submissions got delayed as time lost direction, sense, and existence as we waited and waited. Milan took the professor head on. And it paid. He was one of the first to leave triumphantly. Students complained to the main boss, Teku. But since there was no fine collection involved, he let it pass. And the students were on their own. Nothing to do but keep visiting the profs with till they accepted the assignment. There were KT exams immediately after submissions. And there were plenty of students who had these exams to give. But that did not instill any sympathy or forgiveness in the hardened, emotion deprived professors. The educational version of crucifixion continued. Some of the submissions happened after the KT exams. This was just one example of people in PCT getting a kick out of being more powerful than the students.

Talking of submissions, that was the final leg of the assignment saga. You write them. You get them checked. You submit them. And submissions are an experience in themselves. Especially in first year. 240 students running helter-skelter to submit 8 subject files… you can imagine the scene… it looked like something that would inspire the movie maker priyadarshan to include in one of his typical chaotic climax scenes. Those huge drawing sheets, the ten-ton, colour coded files, lines everywhere to submit the files, the index pages, the certificates, numbering the assignment pages.

All of it was so stupid. So pointless. But still we indulged in it. To reiterate something from a previous section, unlike Neo's problem, which was choice, ours was the lack of it. Hell, internals were at stake. We tried and optimized, the assignments did get a bit shorter. But life didn't get easier. The slogging continued throughout the four years. We mastered the art of writing assignments while watching movies, eating, and in some cases ejecting waste materials out of the body. I guess that's the whole point. All that did help in the development of a very important skill in us. The skill called multi-tasking.