It's CLAT time of the year again!

The only good thing CLAT has done is that it has given an easy acronym for the law school entrance exam. Anyway, yesterday was CLAT, and Law School was apparently a center for over 700 students (they had seated people in the corridors of Training Center even!).

As I stepped out of my room after lunch to head to Nags, I knew that CLAT was happening, but somehow it didn't occur to me that there would be people all around. Seeing all the students who had come to write it, accompanied by their parents, and in some cases siblings and grandparents, caught me quite off-guard. And it was a little moving for me as well. For one, it was the last CLAT I'd witness being given in Law School, as a student of this institution. And it reminded me of my law school entrance exam. Of all the prep, of the final exam date, the morning before the exam, the light lunch I had before going for it, when I went with my parents to the RK Puram, Delhi center, the duration of the exam that flew by, meeting my parents who were waiting outside, going back home with a feeling of apprehension and relief that it was over. To use the cliche, it seems like it was just yesterday, and yet it feels like another life time.

When I saw the many many parents waiting in the shamiana, outside Acad, under trees, at Chetta, in Nags, I was reminded of how dutifully both my parents had accompanied me to the entrance exams, how worried they used to be, the countless discussions I had had with them about alternate career and backup options if Law School didn't work out. I felt a great deal of longing for those simpler times, and a flood of affection for my parents, who had patiently waited for me after coaching classes, picnics, entrance exams and what not. And then, from nowhere, a totally unexpected thought hit me. That in 25-odd years, I would be taking my child to his/her entrance exam, waiting in the sun with a soft drink while s/he toiled over the paper, hugging him/her when s/he came out and frantically discussed how the paper was, his/her hopes and fears. I am not really sure why this thought of a distant future came to me, and I am not really sure how I feel about even thinking it. But it certainly stopped me in my tracks and made me look at all those waiting parents once more.