There was a time when the aim of each and every Fertilizers And Chemicals Travancore (FACT) limited employee and his or her spouse was to get their kid into Udyogamandal School. An admission in Udyogamandal was a matter of personal pride and prestige to them. Only a lucky forty, who crossed the barrier of the Entrance test managed to get an admission to the "English speaking", ICSE-ISC affiliated school. So at a wee age of five I had to write my first entrance test .

So when there's an entrance test there should be coaching centers too.The nurseries in the township took up this role and trained the 4 to 5 year old to crack the first entrance examination of their life. I was a student of the then most successful coaching institute, managed by the ladies club of the township, known as ladies club nursery school and my batch came out with a Bansal, Kota like performance managing to secure more than half of the 40 seats.

Talking about the school, it was located in the FACT Township in Eloor, the Industrial belt of Kochi, a place which Green Peace considers to be of the top toxic hotspots of the world. The dead fishes popping up once in a while in Periyar evidence to the toxicity of the place. Eloor is in fact an island surrounded on all sides by River Periyar.FACT was the biggest of all the factories in the area and had four schools under its management, the most important of it being my school.

 
Well there is little I can remember of my first entrance exam. One distinct memory of the entrance exam was the part when all the kids appearing in the test were taken to a room full of images and models, and on returning back to the examination hall we were asked to write down the name of the object we could remember, a memory test in fact.

Years have passed by and now the rat race is all over. The deteriorating economic situation of the company prompted it to give the school on lease to a different management. The change in management prompted many of the staff to move on to better private school. The new management opened more divisions making the entrance a mere formality and in a few years the exams were stopped.