Coming Back to Life: A Much Needed Heads-up!

It’s been a while. We’ve got numerous mails and calls asking if we still remember CLATGyan. To be honest, it is not because we have been immensely busy with our own lives. In fact, we haven’t been more jobless than this in the last three years. But, it’s our last year at law school and writing about CLAT feels just a little infantile. I must admit that I now have my first reason to respect the coaching centres. It does take a lot to teach the same torts, reading comprehensions, and sentence corrections, again and again, year after year! There is got to be some (some!) saturation point. But again, I feel this, perhaps, because I cannot imagine myself making a living out of this sort of work. For those who make their livelihood out of this, it must be work (and not fun). On the other hand, for us, CLATGyan has been a creation of joblessness, an experience that meant a lot of fun, activity, engagement, and very little work.

At the same time, we’ve all become a little mature (if that’s what it’s called). When someone sends us a one line query asking how to prepare for CLAT, we try to recall what we did, and what we see is an immensely dark blackout. It has been so long since we took the exam that we almost run out of words to reply with. More importantly, it is somewhat irritating to answer a question that has been answered through hundreds of articles written on this website, by us and by subsequent CLAT takers. CLAT takers who seem to have forgotten CLAT and moved on with their lives better than we could. For the same reason, it is also depressing to think that while CLAT was just an exam that many people took and left, we are here, still stuck with it, to give advice on how to go about it. To achieve what end? Yes, to give that little help to those who are taking the exam and are sincere about making it through. Have we done well to achieve this? I do not know.

Philosophy and abstract wisdom aside, the 2015 edition of CLAT is around six months away. The nearer it comes, the sadder I become, for it is also the month I would’ve graduated from law school and would be expected to deal with the insecurities that lie ahead. But for those who are taking that exam and might end up occupying the rooms that we leave at NALSAR (sigh), how do you prepare? Like they all say it, hard work knows no shortcut. We have, time and again, written about how you should proceed with each and every section at various stages of your preparation. We know that there are plenty of people who are preparing for CLAT along with you, at school or at the coaching institute. It could be demotivating to see that many of them also seem high on confidence and, should I say, a little arrogant when it comes to their faculties. But that’s the last thing that should bother you at this stage.

Remember that there are very few who’ve cracked the exam with a month’s preparation. Those who do are exceptionally talented or exceedingly lucky. But to make sure that you reach where you want to be, there is no choice but to start right away if you haven’t already. It will be stupid of you to waste the valuable time you have and regret about it later. There is no use in wondering as to how an online CLAT exam is going to be conducted. Things will take their own course and become clearer as and when they should. No matter what new experiment CLAT Committee tries, the syllabus is going to be the same. On that note, we must state that the CLAT Committee is a champion when it comes to overestimating its own capacity. At the risk of sounding skeptic, I wonder how an exam which screwed up something as simple as bar code stickers one year is aiming to be so progressive that it wants to move its entire platform online the next year! But, we’ll see how that goes. For now, it’s prep-time!

This post is merely an attempt to get ourselves back at being active on CLATGyan. While the test series has been going as scheduled, we know that compendiums are something that we haven’t updated in a while. We are working on it and they will be uploaded by the end of this month if not before. For those who need personal mentors to help with your CLAT preparation, sign up for the test series here. For all queries, there’s clatgyan@gmail.com. We hope that the best of you make it through and replace the class of 2015!