The quest for Trinity

As my high school education neared its completion, we were handed a self-evaluation form by our guidance counselor, who wrote our recommendation letters for college application. It was pretty big deal since the rumor was that our guidance counselor relied heavily on those self-evaluation forms for writing recommendation letters, allegedly due to his indifference and reluctance to write more than hundred unique reference letters. My seniors had confided in us about his notoriety for indifference and this fact obviously worsened our apprehension while denting our hopes of getting into a good college. The first part of the form had the space for self-description using three words, mind it- no more, no less. And that was how the lofty quest for those three magic words – ‘the Trinity’ began. Soon, all of my classmates seemed to have plunged in introspection for the next few days, trying to identify what three words described them best. If I walked by some quiet places in the evening, I would realize creatures, frozen in space and time in lotus poses were not dogs as popularly believed; instead, they were our own little BNKS ‘Bomjans’, my own classmates, apparently meditating for the Trinity- the three enlightening words.

Those who meditated and indulged in deep introspection came up with pretty reasonable words. Everyone realized that unless their words were fancy, they had to go back into their meditation. Complexity was a virtue. This opened up an academic discussion amongst us involving rich vocabulary and we began to hear unworldly words that were heard once in a blue Moon, and usually reserved for Newsweek articles read few times a year in our General Paper (English) class. We knew simplicity was unacceptable. Settling with simple and three common words to represent one self would have spoken tales of weak vocabulary and an implicit laziness to strive for quest of fancy words. Some even feared quoting common words would hint an aberration from normality and entail the notion of modest ambitions. Upon repeated meditations, many of my friends realized Googling their brains returned simple and common words no matter how hard they tried. The law of economics prevailed and the demand for thesauruses soared. But this was soon overpowered by the scarcity of thesauruses in an elite school, naturally being elite did not help, it was still in Nepal and that mattered the most.

The law of supply dictated the thesaurus market more than the law of demand. The only thesaurus on our floor and possibly the only quality thesaurus in our residence hall, Byasrishi House belonged to my roommate Yunesh. With this, his stock among my friends soared. He had the magic potion that everyone wanted. Defying the law of economics by superimposing it with his generosity, he never charged anyone for the use of his thesaurus. At least he could now quote altruistic as one of his three words. Had it not been for the greed of this fancy word, he could have easily made a fortune. As you can imagine, the line outside our room waiting for his Encarta thesaurus never seemed to end. I often had to squeeze my way out whenever I had to get out of my room. I wish there were some fancy word to describe this phenomenon. Had it not been for the strict discipline of an elite school like Budhanilkantha School, his thesaurus would have easily been tore down by a mob of ‘fancy-word hunters’ as would a sack of rice by a mob of hungry people at a UN camp in Africa.

It did not matter if the word truly represented the person; all it mattered was the word had to be relatively alien and unheard of, most importantly to the guidance counselor. The stranger the word, the better impression it would carve. Benevolent? Not quite. Munificent? Magnanimous? You’re getting there. A sample quoted the three words as “1) inquisitive, 2) innovative and 3) amiable”. Everyone lied. Naturally, ‘Honesty is the best policy’ ones were left behind. The guidance counselor was pretty adept at spotting lies so, he had ruled out words like hard-working, friendly and smart. We overrode this limitation by finding fancy synonyms as alternatives. While friendly was unacceptable, amiable was perfectly acceptable; similarly, while smart and hard-working were unacceptable, ingenious and diligent respectively were acceptable and desirable. The rule of the thumb was that the words would be acceptable if the guidance counselor had to take asylum with the dictionary for at least two of the three words. Of course, more often than not, he took refuge in the dictionary world for all three of the words. As you can imagine, he had the dictionary within arm’s length every time he read our evaluation forms. A student testified seeing an Oxford dictionary fall from his pocket while our guidance counselor was having lunch in the school’s dining hall. If you think by the end of reading these hundred or so evaluation forms, he would have learnt three hundred new words then let me remind you that many of the words were repeated since most of the people thought they were diligent, amiable and ingenious or its synonyms. Obviously, he enriched his synonym bank.

If I were the guidance counselor, I would not be surprised with words that did not appear in any dictionaries, after all that would be a testimony that the students indeed meditated and achieved enlightenment in the form of three magical and creative words as meditation entails creativity and originality.