Hall-Ticket

Hall-tickets!

In the Indian education system the term brings to mind a period of temporary upheaval caused by school or college examinations. Everyone of us who studied in India has had them.

Essentially these are the admission passes or entrance passes or admission tickets (or basically hall tickets) for you to enter an examination center (known during the British Raj as the Hall) and prove to the authorities that you are authorized to take the examination.

These are not the typical classroom exams.

These are state exams, board exams, basically any one of the 12000 different exams Indians can take in their lives to get 12 steps ahead.

To clear class 10, or to clear class 12.

To get an engineering seat.

Or a medical seat.

To get an MBA seat. 

To get a seat.
To sit.

The logic is there.

After all people need a way to track your attendance in an examination or test.

Most of us got our first hall-tickets when in Class 10.

These were our first board examinations, though I knew of some school districts in our country where they scared the child in Class 7 itself.

I remember when our class teacher told us to collect our hall-tickets at the end of the day.

It was 3 weeks to go for the big Board exams.

The arrival of the hall-tickets was like the final nail in the coffin - your preparation time was up.

You were either going to be doomed. Or you would crack the exams.

For some though, it would be the wake up alarm that they could not snooze anymore.

They would be seen frantically spending the rest of the day trying to understand from other classmates what the syllabus was, when the exam was going to start, which class they were in, what was the name of the teacher who taught the subject they never understood, what the never-understood-subject was, and who was the best girl in the class who could solve all their problems!

The sincere students would make a bee-line to the school office.

They would collect their hall-tickets and then place them in a notebook (usually the one where they got 10/10 five times the last 6 months).

And would go home.

The adventurous ones would pick it up only a few hours before the actual board exam coz they feared they would lose it. Some students would campaign for the school management to warehouse the hall-tickets as it was burdensome for students to remember their trigonometry, chemistry, history AND their hall-tickets to the exam center.

These students would never succeed in getting their way.

But most of them are well on their way to become trade union representatives or squabbling Members of Parliament.

Some of us would collect the hall-ticket and worship them in the family temples and take blessings of the Lord. My mom would take a flower from the pooja room and place it on my hall-ticket. It felt sacred. It felt blessed.

I remember wrapping my first hall-ticket (class 10) in plastic to avoid any water or oil or air or sunlight or breeze from affecting it.

For most of us, the hall-tickets were the first official and important identification documents.

Not that they would be retained for use forever, but for the time that they were valid and important, they were useful modes of identification.

They carried a picture of you - a photo id.

Most guys looked like minature versions of Tarzan - thin adolescent moustaches, sloppy hair, white teeth.

Some guys still had baby faces like when they were toddlers.

If the school uniform required ties, then that was captured in the photo too.

One or two guys would have pictures of their baby fancy-dress competition as their photo-id.

Not sure if this was by design coz I think i saw some guys dressed like Popeye the Sailor during the examination.

The girls would typically have their hair neatly braided or combed.

Some of the girls looked as if they were born in the chemistry lab. Their faces were so excited that it appeared they had drunk a bottle of hydrogen peroxide the night before taking the photo.

When the examinations would begin, students would normally use their hall-tickets to fill out their details on the answer sheet.

Most students would have memorized their their hall-ticket number.
They would close their eyes and fill it.
And open their eyes to confirm.

If it was wrong, they would start crying. Anxiety. High blood-pressure. Everything!

The most irritating aspect would be the exam invigilators coming around to verify your hall-ticket and ur answer sheet details.

It often rankled me coz it always took up 2-3 minutes of your time.

The worst is if an invigilator finds your surname interesting and starts asking you about the origins of your grandfather and whether he owned a farm-house.

My sister told me one girl in her class stopped bringing her hall-ticket to the examination after the 2nd paper of the 6 paper examination in her board exams. Apparently she had the hall-ticket in her bag but did not want to bring it to the exam hall. When questioned, she mentioned that her photo in the hall-ticket was in black-n-white and distracted her when she was writing the examination. Guess the girl eventually contested for Miss India.

After the examinations got over most students forgot about their hall-tickets.

Till another examination came along.

And another...

Its insane: I recently bought a movie ticket to go and watch a movie in a movie hall.

And i heard the ticket collector say "Sir! Hall-ticket?"

LoL!

PS: image sourced from the internet