Charaiveti: An academic's journey-3

'In general, in popular culture all around me canniness was implicitly or explicitly highly valued', says the author

By the time I started regular school, my father’s home-schooling had prepared me enough to sail through the various half-yearly and annual examinations relatively easily. Indian exams, certainly then and to a large extent even now, do not test your talent or learning ability; they are mainly a test of your memorising capacity and dexterity in writing coherent answers in a frantic race against time. I found out that I was reasonably proficient in both, and that it is for the lack of proficiency in these two qualities some of my friends, whom I considered highly imaginative and creative, were