Finally! I Wrote the GATE!
It was on the first Sunday of February, my gate exam had been scheduled. I applied for it nearly 3 months back but never prepared for it. I was wondering if I had to write the exam at all. Anyways, I decided to attend the exam and downloaded the hall ticket just 3 days before, and found that the centre was far away from our home. It was at Jaya Engineering College near Thiruvallur. The exam starts at 9 AM and I had to be at the venue half an hour before the commencement of the exam.
So we decided to stay in a hotel nearby the venue and booked a room using Oyo rooms at Amrita Inn at Senthil Nagar near Kolathur. We started at 6.30PM the previous night with the baggage, traveling by Cab and then by Metro and again by bus and reached the place by 8.30PM. We had to search for the Inn and found it strangely located on the top of a marriage hall. We checked in, kept our baggage in the room and left the place, searching for a browsing centre to make a printout of my hall ticket. We had to walk a long way for that and on the way back we found a small hotel named ‘Thattu kadai’. I wanted to taste the food there and we got a parcel of ‘thattu idli’ and went back to the room. It was a big idli in the size of a plate and hence the name. It tasted good, maybe because we were hungry. I wanted to prepare for the exam at least at the last moment and I started glancing the pages of my Engineering Mathematics book so that I can recollect few of the forgotten topics, while my husband was playing a game on his laptop. I was already tired and the pages of the book made me even more sleepy and so I slept knowing that last minute preparation is not going to help for this exam.
The next day, we woke up early and checked out of the hotel by 7.30 AM and booked a cab to Villivakkam railway station planning to catch a train from there. On the way, we were a bit doubtful if we can catch the train and so we went by the same cab directly to the college which was situated interior from the city. We reached there by 8.15 and decided to have our breakfast. We went inside the canteen in a doubt whether it’s working or not, as it was too dark inside. But to my surprise, it was working and there were people eating in darkness. We bought one plate of food, ate a little and had to waste it, as it was really not good. Then I went inside for my exam completing the verification formalities and my husband had to wait for three long hours outside with his laptop and phone.
It was an online exam, and I started attending questions from the General aptitude part as it was the only section I was a bit confident. I solved the questions as slow as I could because I knew that I will be having ample time to attend the questions I know. Then I came to the technical section and to my surprise I could recollect a few concepts that I studied nearly 6 years back and attended a few questions. Then I waited for it to be 12 PM and came out of the exam hall thinking of the possibilities of getting qualified in the exam. Then we got a cab from there to Pattabiram railway station, but, on the way, we saw a bus to Koyambed at a bus depot. We got the cab and found that the bus goes up to Velachery. We happily got into the bus and traveled back home and thus ended the gate journey.
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