Did you enjoy reading Indian folklore comic strips by Chandamama and Amar Chitra Katha? Every 90s kid has read these graphic novels or comics at least once. The generation after that was not so much in touch with these. Dr Sridhar Guda at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode wanted to change that and make the end-semester open book exam enjoyable for his students. So he came up with a 21-page booklet for the Sales Management exam.
The question paper is not just about the questions but has detailed illustrations from the Vikram Betaal series of the Chandamama comics, with attribution, and comes with a story for each section. "I just wanted to focus on these lost comics. Our heritage has a lot of amazing stories which are no less interesting and I think we should revisit them," said the professor. His students and even alumni took to social media to talk about this unique question booklet, and they were funny too.
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Setting the question paper was a nostalgia trip for the professor as well. "As a kid, I have read these comics vigorously. Not just me, even my father was an avid reader of these comics," he added. The booklet starts with a prologue about why he chose to base the questions on Vikram and Betaal. "The relationship of Vikram and Betaal is much like that of a set of questions and their answers. That's why I thought this fits the best," he said.
The quirky instructions to the paper come with a Sanskrit shloka and their meaning attached to the instructions. "Your right is to work, but never to the fruit," reads the explanation of a shloka. The instruction attached to it reads, "Your right is only to write the answer. Not to the marks. only correct answers get marks." Who wouldn't like to go through a paper like that?
