Tag: Life

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College Life Entertainment Personal Worldly Matters

Updates as of 3rd May, ’09

Part 1

Plenty of things have happened ever since the humble beginnings of this semester that just ended with my last exam 4 days ago. Let me try summing up how things went this semester – which should’ve been my last semester here in my campus. I’m still unsure of the current state (OARS likes to keep secrets from me until a select date, what can I do?)

Right before this semester started, I remember partying* almost everyday. It was the winters I stayed back for to jumpstart on my second part of the BTP, but it turned out to lead me on a whole different path altogether. The semester starts and a few classes were attended. Soon, the “everyday partying” mode kicked back into our (the ones who were partying) lives. I’ll refrain from mentioning any detail regarding the others. This new way of life was, well, new to me. Partying everyday only to end up lethargic enough to not do anything else for almost a couple or more months during a semester – woah! How irresponsible and devoid of self-discipline I must’ve been. I was the kind of person who was largely amotivated and had no long term goals at that point. To keep up with my lethargic life and give time to partying, I cut myself off from other activities I kept myself busy with.

In the second half of the semester I had reached such a crazy state that I couldn’t sleep well without partying that night. It took me some self-realisation, re-orientation towards my purpose in being a student at this campus and most importantly, strong-minded individuals to help me get back on track. And boy was it a good one. It feels good to be reborn this way. Makes one think about the future once in a while rather than live completely for the present.

Evenings spent with a certain individual thinking back on how things went helped me reshape myself. The “everyday partying” mode that I had been in wasn’t completely a bad thing, it had its own share of pluses and minuses. The decision I made was to stick with moderation and to give up on certain things altogether. I’m just glad I’m making my own decisions. People aren’t the only things that can influence the state of mind. There are other things too.

I blame nobody at this point. It’s quite unfortunate if I’ll have to stay back in the campus for a while longer. But I’m glad I’m a different person today. On the other hand, maybe I wouldn’t have minded my “everyday partying” mode much had I been better off in life. You know? Like an owner of an island off the Pacific or something. Living my own life. But that’s not the case. I’m a student. I need to dedicate time to being one.

partying: wasn’t really celebrating anything, started off purely as a recreational activity and turned into a daily, dull-ish chore. Mind altering intoxicants were involved.

Part 2

This section is dedicated to observations I’ve been making on the people around me in this not-so-normal (temporary) human settlement. Let me list a few characteristics of the environment: The weather here ranges from one extreme to the other. Everyone gets a share of their favourite weather. Food – good for some, bad for some, unbearable for some. Totally skewed male-to-female ratio. Amotivated students. Motivated students. Good faculty. Old-school faculty. Comfort-oriented, make-lots-of-money-as-soon-as-possible kind of students. Whacky, I’m-the-next-avatar-of-Lord-Vishnu kind of students. I’m-perfectly-right-and-everyone-else-is-a-retard kind of students.

This list doesn’t end so easily. This place, as an environment to aspiring engineers, scientists and researchers, consists of a wide variety of inhabitants where plenty of them genuinely require help and constant evaluation at regular intervals to help to re-orient themselves to their true purpose in being here – as a minimum requirement. I mean, come on, this place is supposed to serve a few purposes, quite specific ones at that. Once a student is able to focus with that, if he’s got the time, he can go in directions that don’t affect his focus as much as he pleases. Actually, I’d have loved to refer to a document of sorts that lists what is expected of of a student in this campus. I’m unable to find it on the institute website and if such a document really exists, it’d be a good document to look into once in a while.

These are, at best, observations and suggestions. I don’t want to make judgments on any individual. I prefer humility and losing once in a while rather than having to go off my top and belittle a person because it didn’t fit my view of things or whatever it is that should’ve made me boil with anger or fill me with the need to “correct” a person so I can “satisfy” myself. Or maybe this is how some are accustomed to satisfying themselves. It’s pretty messy towards people who haven’t learnt to adopt a nonchalant nature when it’s called for. Washing dirty linen in the public? No thanks.

Part 3

The undergrad students in the newer batches seem to be a lot more focused compared to the ones in my batch. A friend of mine went “just as I thought” when I mentioned this to him with the anti-ragging initiatives in mind. He says (and I agree with him, empathise even) that the “ragging” sessions that take place during the first fifteen days of a fresher’s stay here is detrimental to their lives in various ways for the rest of their lives here and beyond. One of the ways in which it affects the not so careful fresher is his being accustomed to a mediochre student life. Missing classes, gaming, movies, tv series, intoxicants, and so on are some of the obvious side effects of these “interaction sessions”.

I belong to the Y4 batch and I’m in touch with students from the younger batches (Y5, Y6 and Y7). This semester (and the previous one) I happened to witness certain things that were quite different from how things used to be in the Y4 and Y5 batches. The anti-ragging initiatives were active from the Y6 batch onwards. Lucky chaps. You can see them attend a lot more (CS classes, I happen to be in the CS department so I’ll refrain from talking about the other departments – some departments are known to drive students in their final years crazy) classes, with plenty of scoring A’s and living a decent student life. Man! I wish I had been in their batch.

Things have begun to look a lot brighter now. The newer, younger faculty too are just as sincere and simply superb. It relieves me personally to think that these faculty won’t lose hope and continue to give their best in this symbiotic relationship that’s supposed to exist in this place. Had such faculty been initially exposed (and continued to be exposed for a few batches down the line) to batches such as ours who’ve been “ragged”, who knows, they might lose hope in students down the line and turn harder or rigid.

Note to self: Exercise your body (that includes your brain) regularly and stop being a prick.

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College Life

Bas das minute lEga

Yeah right. We were fools to believe such a statement.

It all started on a lazy Saturday afternoon when Vishnu returns from the mess empty-stomach’ed complaining “it’s the same old crap again, let’s go somewhere else”. Having seen a tiny cockroach in the food I got in Hall 1 canteen, I expressed my desire to avoid the canteen as much as possible and go to the Campus Restaurant instead.

Vishnu, who had taken an oath not to go to the CR ever again, surprisingly agreed. He probably considered anything to be better than the sort of food we get here sometimes. The SBI ATM in front off Hall 3 was non-functional. During the registration time I had taken out money from the adjoinig UBI ATM and had failed to notice and surcharges, I thought we should take it from here again. I wasn’t ready to spend that extra 50 Rs. we thought would be charged and instead took our chances of finding the SBI ATM at the ShopC working. Bad luck, or was it procrastination on Vishnu’s part? The ATM wasn’t working!

We step into the bank and enquire about the ATM. ‘bas das minute lEga’(should take ten minutes)  was what one of them told us – to which Vishnu said, “shall we go and order our food in the CR then?”. After such a re-assuring assurance he had given us, he goes “woh mat karna! (don’t do that! LOL)”. Fine, we decided to wait. We even had a lecture on GIMP we wanted to attend at CS101 – for which I had personally put up posters at places inside the campus. We waited from 2:15pm to about 4:15pm. Yes, we did. We were probably jobless. Not really. We probably wanted to behave like we were jobless 😛

So, why that long you ask? Well, there did exist a cash-counting machine (German-made, 700 million Indians don’t have sanitary facilities – it’ll take another century for India to make a cash-counting machine) and the person whose sole job was to put cash into the ATM whenever need be was counting 500 rupee notes by hand! When Vishnu asked a co-banker why the cash-counting machine wasn’t being used, the reply he got was “he has already used it, he’s manually checking it to see if the machine was right”

“…”

When we had just reached the bank, India had beaten Australia (cricket ODI, don’t really care) and people were celebrating and congratulating each other (yay! Harbhajan made another fortune in this match, let’s be happy and continue to shit on roads). This banker whose sole job appeared to be “taking care of the ATM” was apparently watching the match in the bank – yes, there was a TV in the bank, not in public view. And just when India had won, he had stepped out of the bank to buy sweets for the family to celebrate the glorious state of their toilets which happens to be funded by Harbhajans earnings in each of the matches he plays.

There was a characteristic colour of incompetence painted all over this character. Apparently he was nearing his retirement – according to the watchman. This watchman was considerate. He appeared to have gained wisdom by observing people. Soon, other co-bankers on looking at our pissed-off faces, helped get 1000 bucks out of the ATM. So much for the “A” in the ATM. (Forget about the cash-counting machines)

Finally, we ate.

And Praneeth showed up. He joined us to watch a documentary movie (Q2P) on the state of public (female) toilets in the metros. This was Umang season BTW, film-festival.

We walked through SAC on our way back to Hall 1. Got eliminated in the preliminaries of the investigative journalism contest. What a day. Mid-sem exams in 10 days. Two major coding-assignments to go.

Categories
College Life Navya

So… what’s been happening?

Yes, it’s true – I did sleep for over 27 hours at one go.
I remember closing my eyes at 4 am on 14th of August only open them at 7:55 am of 15th.

I’ve been attending classes, trying my best not to miss any. LT601 – Introduction to Lasers, by H. Wanare is an interesting course. The course outline says:

You will be penalized 1% of the total for a missed lecture below the 80% gross attendance with a maximum of 15 %. Any absence can be condoned only when you have obtained official leave from the DUGC/DPGC.

Well, not a bad deal given that the classes are at 10 am (thank god it isn’t 8)

PSY458 – Organisational and Administrative Psychology. The professor is a cool one. Lectures are mostly interesting.
CS455 – Introduction to Software Engineering, by TVP. A lot of talk happens in the one-and-a-half hour lectures. The professor is easily derailed and it isn’t a good thing.

As part of the CCCC in the campus, we had a meeting yesterday and the CC would like to get hold of around 20 students who’ll need to make themselves useful for managing various issues in the CC after the recent Gymkhana decisions on LAN ban and stuff.
Did I mention that Navya will be getting a /new/ server with 8GB ram and a dual core AMD64 with somewhere around 350GB storage? 😀 Server class!

Later in the evening we had a Navya meet and spread the good news. Kapil Shukla, an alumni showed up. He was delighted to see the state of Navya. A lot of things have been happening – LDAP, Jabber, and so on. We’ve not publicised them well enough to get a sizeable user-base yet. That should happen soon.