I am old enough to understand the joke as well as the system used in the past for measuring temperature. India went metric in 1956 and since then we have used only the celsius for measuring temperature. I distinctly remember the struggle that we had in converting the measures to understand distances, weight, currncy etc.
The first sentence refers to the score of top scoring students in our public examinations. Since I was mostly a back bencher, I was more often than not in the bottom set of scores.
The joke here takes me to another peculiar development in the last few decades. In our time we were comfortable with percentages. Now we keep reading about percentiles. This I think, is a significant change in preparing our young to be super competitive. Quite whether this is the right thing to do to them or not, I do not know.
What do you think?