A quick aside. Once, while waiting with my wife in an optometrist’s cabin, I decided to have some fun. The optometrist had stepped out, so I closed my eyes and recited the entire chart to my wife. Perfect vision—20/20! Just as I was nearing the end, the optometrist returned, spoiling our fun like an untrained cook ruining a perfectly good dish with their undercooked attempts. Our laughter was rudely interrupted, and the optometrist, looking confused and possibly a little upset, resembled someone dealing with constipation.

New charts began popping up over the years like wild mushrooms, and at some point, when even the thickest lenses couldn’t help me read, I gave up on memorizing them. Now, like a defeated boxer, I find myself struggling to make out whether the blurry shapes in front of me are letters—or are they numbers?

Times change, and so do methods, but the discomfort of this ordeal—like climbing a slippery vertical cliff—remains. These days, the chart is read in a completely dark room with illuminated screens displaying the letters. After having my eyes assaulted with bright, merciless light, as powerful as monsoon rain, I’m left blinded. How am I supposed to read? And when I fix my gaze on one letter, it merges into the next. My eyes dart around like a nervous deer. "E" looks like "F," "C" becomes "O," and "5" resembles "6." After a while, the optometrists give up, much like the fox who couldn’t reach the grapes.

Then come the fingers. "How many fingers?" they ask. And the insult is that they keep waving them around. No light, no stability. I have to request, "Give me some background light." But even with that, the waving fingers—like a dismissive ta-ta to an overstaying guest—become impossible to count. My darting eyes struggle to make sense of the constantly moving shapes.

As more days pass, the irritating fingers get closer and closer with each visit, furiously reminding me that my eyes are becoming unwelcome residents in the house of vision. Eventually, something is jotted down—a fraction, the dreaded result of refraction.

Slight changes in procedure appear too. With a frameless lens, they shoot a beam of light through my tired, overworked eyes to roughly determine the power needed for my lenses. Then the "lens dance" begins—one lens placed, then replaced, and the inevitable question, "Which one is better?" With such minuscule differences, how am I supposed to answer? This back-and-forth, like an ongoing soap opera, continues until, whether I’m satisfied or not, the optometrist declares they’ve found the perfect power. "No change in power, sir. Your vision can’t be improved."

If that’s the case, why waste so much time? And now, they only check one eye. The other eye, no matter the effort, can't even see sunlight up close, having sunk into itself like a deflated Mumbai double-decker bus.

But I can't stop here. I'm speeding along like a Japanese Bullet train... so let’s talk about other instruments of torture.

Continued in 168. Testing Times - Part 3