The collective sigh of relief echoing across UAE classrooms isn't just about finished exams - it's the sound of generations bridging educational divides. As students pack bags for college admissions back home, my mind wanders through corridors of memory where education wore a completely different face.

Generation Alpha with their air-conditioned buses and iPads would scarcely recognize the schooling of yesteryear. Ours was a world where career options stood like rigid signposts: medicine, engineering, law, teaching, banking - take your pick or inherit your father's tools. The coconut plucker's son rarely grew taller than his father's climbing reach, while junior carpenters apprenticed at grief's doorstep.

Malayali education painted in paradoxical strokes: "public schools" run by private benefactors while government-funded institutions hid behind "aided school" labels. Much like how plastic bag bans coexist with manufacturing licenses - peculiarities that make Kerala unique. Our classroom walls held four distinct ecosystems - missionary convents whispering Hail Marys, government schools echoing nationalist slogans, elite private institutions grooming future leaders, and aided schools straddling both worlds.

The specter of examinations still walks my nightmares decades later. In our time before child psychology found its voice, teachers spoke through canes and rulers. Your crime determined the punishment geography - palms for minor offenses like forgotten poems; backs reserved for graver academic sins; lucky offenders got away with reddened ears. Rain-soaked kilometers to school without uniforms or sometimes even textbooks made every exam season an endurance test against circumstance.

Parent-teacher conferences followed grim scripts: "The boy shows potential but lacks effort." To which my mother would cheerfully respond: "Then beat it into him daily." Home offered no reprieve either - a gauntlet between backyard loafing accusations and front yard idleness charges until you either buried yourself in books or became human scarecrow guarding rice harvests.

Campus politics salvaged my college years when physics formulas remained cryptic as ancient runes and chemical equations might as well have been alchemy. Yet through this academic fog emerged clarity about life's true curriculum - that (a+b+c)³ wasn't just an algebraic formula but the sum total of dreams pursued plus efforts made multiplied by outcomes achieved.

Now when morning alarms ring forty years later, phantom exam anxiety still prickles my skin like first-day math class dread. Yet nostalgia softens those memories into something almost sweet - like finally reaching those forbidden fruits on high branches after countless scraped knees from failed attempts.The fear remains but so does the triumph, written now not in report cards but in every morning I choose to face life's unending examinations anew.suresh@khaleejtimes.com

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