Part - 1

Head churning? Seeing bright stars in broad daylight? Trying to reason out everything audible? Timing (to the extent of seconds) your breakfast, lunch and/or dinner?

If answers to most of these questions are in affirmative, you have certainly realised that the C-Day (the CAT-Day) is at hand!

Nervous??? Yes. Great - the best part is that approximately 1,49,999 others too are feeling the same right now!

By now you have gauged yourself against the best of students taking CAT 2008; now RELAX! Stop worrying! Put your anxieties away! Why? Let us tell you why! You have taken your Mock CATs. You might be having any ranking in them, you might be having any kind of a score on your FLTs (Full Length Tests); ALWAYS remember that at any time and at any score, there will always be a few thousand students with the same skill level in Quant, Verbal, Reasoning, etc., as you have. Those few thousand students would probably be scoring the same; must be sweating out the same way, and must be as competent as you are. The obvious question now is HOW to gain an edge over those competitors of yours?

Now, the important answer - Successfully get over your anxieties while others can't. If you are TOUGH in your mind, the battle is won (and the CAT has been surely belled). By doing so, you have left thousands behind.

You must have heard the saying of a wise wood-cutter (maybe he had appeared for the CAT some time in his life) - "If I have 12 hours to cut a tree, I will spend 10 hours sharpening the saw." The 'hours' thing might be too much to spend by the standards of a CAT aspirant but the gist is undoubtedly worth following for.

See, CAT is your battle where you have to fight like a General not like a soldier because it is the General who ultimately leads to victory and a soldier almost inheritably ends up following. So, be a GENERAL, that is, in a nut-shell, STRATEGISE!

Think, do you have your game-plan ready for a CAT question paper with 3 sections, 4 sections or may be no sectional division at all? If not, be ready with it. CAT is full of surprises and you never know what will confront you on 16 November 2008. You can't afford to, we repeat, CAN'T AFFORD. To be befuddled and worried on 16 November 2008 - honestly speaking, remember a gospel for CAT -

"TENSION ON - CAT GONE!"

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The article is written by Munish Kumar & Tawanpreet Kaur; Quant & Verbal Assessment Experts respectively at a leading test preparation organisation.