Gandhi Jayanti 2019

Naheed Siddiqui

Naheed Siddiqui’s ‘experiments with truth’ came as a welcome departure from the homilies associated with Gandhi Jayanti today. A woman of few words, her candid confessions on the years she spent in hostel at Aligarh Muslim University took us by surprise and generated much mirth during the post-exercise session this morning.
As Naheed was to reveal, she used to be particularly weak in mathematics and resorted to “all possible means” to obtain the required pass marks of 35/100 in the subject. “I would even memorise the solutions to questions,” she said.

Candid confessions on the days gone by

“It was sheer chance that those questions had to come up in the exams. Somehow, I got lucky.”
She however, clarified that unlike many girls, she did not turn up at the examination hall with notes written all over her body. “But smuggling in chits of paper under your clothes and stealing a look at the answer sheets of other students in the hall were par for the course,” she recalled.
Finding Naheed unusually frank and chatty this morning, everyone chipped in with vignettes of their student days they would otherwise not reveal to anyone. Much of the disclosures were of course, old hat, but we got the opportunity to travel back in time and reflect on our childhood. “C’mon, who hasn’t cheated in exams during their school days?” Yusuf Rassiwala laughed. “We are all in the same boat.”
Bihari Milwani said that the only subject he did not require to cheat in was mathematics and had scored 100/100 in his school finals. “In the theory papers, especially English language, I was a below average student,” he confessed.
This explains why Bihari has always had a way with numbers – unlike Naheed Siddiqui.