...in the inter-hostel Light Music competition. If there are enough singers from my hostel already, I will sing as a non-comp. I don't sing great, but I am sure no one is going to throw chappals or rotten eggs at me when I hold the microphone and do vocal exercise on stage.

It so happened that yesterday, I came to know that there were only three guys from my hostel participating. The upper limit from every hostel is five. Now, this was bad. So, I decided to go ahead and increase Narmad's count. Heck, I would enjoy doing that as well.

However today, two secon yearites suddenly popped up. So, now there were three guys who wanted to sing. Ah. The social-secretary said he would have an audition to select best five singers. LOL! That's weird because I am no singer. I had decided to do it for fun. But I had indeed practiced a particular song quite a few times. I had also roped in a studd tabla player to play beats for me. So, one thing is for sure. I shall be singing.

What song do you ask? Heh, if you know me, you should have guessed that only a post-event video can best answer that. :D (Anyone willing to shoot me? :P )

Update: Event postponed from 29th Oct to 30th Oct. Also, dear friend Prasun has agreed to shoot me and KG seems to be serious too. :D Great going.

We cracked a total of six wing treats. The last one was thrown by myself, Anshu and Kallu, the three Dual Degree fourth year folks who gotta stay for one more year. And luckily, all three of us are in the same class!

Memories of these treats shall stay for a long long time! I wonder if all of us will ever meet again together! Sounds unrealistic given that five of the twelve of the faces you see above wont even be in India in few months! Ah!

My class. Parting time is up. Only few of us will be staying back for two more sems to complete our masters in Infrastructural Civil Engineering. It's a strange feeling. It's strange to realize that four years have passed!

Here lies a guy who on his first orientation day walks up and makes a speech to his branch mates discouraging them to try for BC. He later admitted that this was a strat for him to eliminate his competition for BC. He ran for Gen sec post of Sarayu and as a part of his campaigning he put up a poster of himself on the notice board with the Question “Who is Amrit Vatsa?”. His love life began on the very first day of college and within one week he became an election candidate. And within a month he got himself a comp. Its safe to say he was off the blocks fast.

He developed an obsession for a certain girl whom we shall call Pepsi and did all sort of outrageous things to woo her like staying back in the winter for the net connection, painting a Mona Lisa version of her, becoming class rep and many other such futile attempts. On coming to our hostel he became a volunteer for every secretary around and soon got a reputation of an enthu putter. He put enthu and found a script for the hostel drams but got bumped himself in the auditions. He bought himself a cheap digi cam sometime in second year and spent all day taking pictures of himself in different poses.

During this time he was slowly developing into one of the finest artists of the insti which got him a design coordship in Shaastra 05 despite not being either a vol or coord for any of the fests prior to that. He would later go on to become Design core for Shaastra 06 . He was also the creative brain behind most of Narmad’s prior events like Fete and hostel nights. He had been again elected Shaastra Design core. His spirit will live on for another year with us. May his soul rest in peace.

Introducing some of my wingmates.

Bhaju




Dhakkan





Nanny & TND




Mohnot




Pandey




Viggu




Kallu




Buffass




Sappu




Bulby




Siva

Though I don't pass out this semester, almost my entire wing does. Only four guys in Narmad(a) are fourth year Dual Degree students. And that means that there are going to be only four fifth year guys next sem onwards. Life of course wont be the same. The four of us will definitely miss the great company that we had.

Anyone who is free is welcome to enter the Narmad Graveyard. I cannot ensure free grub but I will try my best to get you free ice cream. More than anything else you will get to hear what the juniors have to talk about me and the rest of us. And I am sure they have hazzar to talk about!

Looking forward to Narmad Hostel Nite.

Some of the guys-who-rule-insti had been asking me to make a poster. A poster with a message. Yeah and the message of course was to stop food wastage.

We, the students of IIT Madras dine in a huge mess. It used to be called Giga mess before they renamed it Himalaya! The name suits the structure.

Most of us waste food. We don't care. Will a poster really help? I am not sure. But nothing wrong in giving it a shot. Some of you reading this blog might actually come up with some idea for a poster. Do share them with me. But keep this in mind that the posters will be be put up in the various halls of the mess. The food in mess is anyways not too great. So it wont be a great idea to put up a frightening poster which scares away guys from even eating properly.

Let me share with you a work in progress. Let's see if we can together come up with something good.

Life flows. From here to there. From there to somewhere. It keeps on flowing. I have no clue what's happening to me. Someone up there is testing me. Someone up there is trying to kill me. Or rather, trying to see if I can survive any shit I am thrown into.

I sometimes wonder how do people really know how strong they are? Breaking up doesn't prove you aren't strong. It just proves that you are broken up. You might be ready to gather pieces of your flesh, lying around. You might not.

Life is a fucking fight. Every moment. And for some reasons, you can't stop being a fighter. You can take a pause, cry out loud, run away. And when that's done, you gotta be the fighter again. You just can't escape that. Till you are dead of course.

Oh what a mystery death is. Death is pure bullshit. It IS the only truth. No denying that. But it's the end. The fucking END. But don't we like the end to come fast when the movie starts getting boring? If you are sitting in a theater, you can as well walk out, if you are so sure that nothing's great is really going to happen even you sit till the very end. Sometimes you are just so damned sure. At other times, you just keep waiting. If you are watching the movie on a comp, you at least have this option of fast-forwarding. Move the mouse. Click here and click there. You just managed to escape the parts that you didn't want to watch. Life aint like that. You either face every second of it. Or you just quit it. The option is all yours. Oh really?

Ok, enough of bullshitting about life. Naah I am not pissed off. I think it's the dead effect. Dead effect? Ok, I described my death today to one and all. To cut the crap, today was the monoacting day. The IIT Madras inter hostel competition. A lot of people came. And most of them put up brillinat performances. Mine was ordinary. All I really did was cry, cry, weep and then cry. I wasn't really acting out there on stage. I was crying. And that got me a seventh place. Good enough! Yeah, I did speak for sometime whenever I found some time away from sobbing. You really wanna read that?

Debate Topic: Should the Government direct its investments towards primary education than setting up institutes like IITs and IIMs?

Here I go...

The Government! Today’s topic for debate, ladies and gentlemen, revolves around the Government. I take the freedom to assume that my friends in the coordinating side of this event had the Indian Government in mind, as far as this debate is concerned.

So the question is: where should our government direct its investments? To the upgradation of the highly inadequate primary education infrastructure of the nation or to the development of many more IITs and IIMs. The inherent assumption here is, the government isn’t rich enough to do both the tasks at the same time. It has to decide. Pick one over the other.

Let me be very clear about something. India as a nation needs both. It for sure needs a much much healthier and efficient primary education network and it of course needs more IITs and more IIMs.

Why primary education?
Because primary education lays the foundation for a more productive labor force through promoting literacy and numeracy. It also provides the foundation for secondary and tertiary education and training. Research has clearly shown that primary education has direct and positive impacts on earnings, farmer productivity as well as health and poverty alleviation benefits.

Why more IITs and IIMs?
Though this could be a topic of yet another debate, let me just quote McKinsey's ex-MD, Rajat Gupta, “In 50 years, the IITs have barely doubled. For a country that aspires to grow at the pace we want, it’s choking the opportunities for our young people.” There are in fact less than 300,000 graduates of IIT at this time. This sure is an extremely small number in the context of a population of over 1 billion people.

The only issue for today, which in my opinion, needs to be sorted out is the role that the government needs to play. And I strongly believe that the Indian Goverment should take the responsibility for the primary and basic education rather than letting its limited budget flow away in setting up high-level high-brand-value institutes. But since India also cannot afford not to have premiere institutes like these, the government should at least let the private players take care of higher education arena. Let me now go ahead and substantiate my stand based on a simple concept of economics.

It is generally accepted in the literature on public economics of investment that there would be a case for public investment if an activity or area shows a greater social rate of return than the private rate of return. On the other hand, if the private rate of return is greater, then that activity could be left up to individual private investors. And every related data that you look at will clearly tell you that the social return of setting up basic education facilities always exceeds the private rate of return.

To put it in simplest of words, if the Government is not going to work for the primary education, who else is going to? If you don’t setup a new Indian Institute of Management, someone else will come and build an Indian School of Business in your country.

But if you don’t setup a school in a remote village and ensure that the teacher sent there does teach, no child from that village is ever going to know what IIM stands for. So tell me, is the decision, really that hard to make?

If it doesn't get postponed anymore, it will be held this Sunday. But the better news is this: I finally found a piece to perform which just rocks. I like it. Had there been a soft copy of it, I would have put it here in this post, right away. But it's there in a book and neither do I have the time nor the energy to type it all. I hope someone takes a video when I deliver it on stage so that I can upload it and showcase my exceptional acting skills. Anyone there with a cam ready? Watch out for me.

IIT Madras, watch out for me. :P

The editing of the video put below was finished today, on my DELLruba (that's what I call my comp). No, I didn't do much. All I did was provide clips that have been used in the first few scenes of the video (the clips were shot by me last sem, including the monkey that you see :) ). I of course also brain-stormed with the guys who were in-charge, but couldn't come up with any nice funda which could have been implemented in the limited time that they had and also given the pain-max cam that they had. Definitely a wonderful job. But you are the better judge. Leave comments. By the way, last but not the least, I offered DELLruba's services ;)

My room has also been featured in the video! Great! Thank you guys! This video is one of many that will be shown during the PAN-IIT Global Conference to be held in Mumbai from Dec 23rd to 25th. [news link]

They were so many of them, all dressed up in 'proper' formals. Most of them had put down a tie; some of them had even gone to the extent of wearing coats! The campus today was looking like the headquarter of a multi national firm, with executives-resembling-crowd doing the show throughout the day. They were there in the coffee house, in the canteen, on the campus lanes, and just almost everywhere.

This is what happens when two i-banks shortlist about two hundred folks who are all desperate to get placed as fast as they can, and hold the interview the same day. Moreover when yet another 'hot' company has about 120 guys lined up for final selection for a plush job (also the same day), and two more companies ready to interview yet some more, such a change of scene on campus is all but natural. So today the dirty rotten smelly t-shirts were elegantly replaced by pure cotton full sleeves, the God-knows-when-washed-last pair of jeans discarded for neatly pressed finest textured trousers, and the could-give-way-any-moment-hawaai-slippers substituted by shining leather shoes. :)

The good thing is that some of my friends will be getting jobs finally. The job-treat season begins. Today! :)

Encouraged by Lakshmi's comment on this post, I was tempted to try tea for a change. Hot lemon tea with honey.

I somehow knew that a shop which has 'cafe' and 'coffee' as its first two words cannot possibly serve as great a cup of tea as a mug of coffee. Once the hot lemon tea with honey had arrived, and I had taken the first sip, I petty much knew that I was indeed correct. It was very ordinary, nothing that can't be made yourself with a mug-heater, a lemon, some honey and fresh water. Or may be, I am such a coffee freak that anything that doesn't have coffee in it, doesn't really excite me. Anything but Granita! Granita is the best cool drink I have had and the credit goes to the crushed ice pebbles than anything else.

And well, about that shopping stuff: A CCD coffee powder named Black Forest, kept on display had been catching my attention since a couple of days. The only powder that I have used to prepare coffee myself has been Nescafe Classic. So I was happy to find some new stuff. I took the black, attractive coffee box in my hands, adored it for some time but then gently placed it back on the shelf. Somehow, I was still not sure if I really wanted to own it.

As I was about to finish my HLT with honey, one of the cafe-boys came up to me and inquired.

Boy: Sir, you were looking at that coffee powder. Would you like to buy that?
Me : May be.
Boy (Bringing the coffee box to me): Here it is sir.
Me (looking at the box, not sure): Hmm..
Boy: Try it sir, it is available only in Tamil Nadu.
Me: It's 125 bucks right?
Boy (brought some chart and confirmed): Yeah, here it is, 125 for 100 gm. Yes.
Me: Ok, I'll take it.

I didn't know what a blunder that 'yes' was going to be. I also decided to pick a 70 bucks mug from CCD. I had broken the last mug that I possessed in the beginning of this sem. Almost at the same time, my stock of Nescafe had finished. For reasons not too clear, I didn't replace either of them. Or in other words, black coffee took a back seat. I used to have the normal, milk based 5 bucks Nescafe at the Nescafe outlet (which I still have at least twice daily) or tea at Tiffanys.

But things had changed over some time now. I was back with myself. And I was missing my coffee. Coffee to me is my companion with which I can be in peace. I have to. It gives me energy. With a mug of coffee in my hands, I somehow feel closer to myself; don't have to feel lonely. Books might be your best friends. For me, it's my coffee.

Coming back to what happened yesterday: after going for the big ceramic mug, I spotted yet another object of affection. It was a 110 bucks small good looking blue plastic jug with a black cap. I inquired if it could be used for shaking coffee. I should tell you that if you shake coffee, and do that well, before adding hot water to it, it tastes better than directly mixing the powder. But then, good shaking should ideally be done in hot water. So you need a mixer which can withstand hot water. When I used glass bottles to shake the stuff, it would crack in two or three uses. The plastic bottles that I had were never strong enough to resist from deforming if you poured hot water in them. So this jug, looked interesting and I took it.

Shopping was done. I was in my room; anxious to taste this new flavour: Dark Forest!

I opened the box. A black plastic packet was lying inside. I took it out, and broke the seal. The water in the mug with a mug-heater placed in it had started boiling in the meantime. I transfered some water from the mug to the blue jug with the black cap. I then, transferred two spoonfuls coffee powder from the packet to the jug. The coffee powder looked creepy. It was too fine and too sticky. Was this really coffee? I wondered.

No sugar. No milk. That's the mantra. Once the coffee powder had met the hot water, the cap of the jug was closed and the shaking process initiated. Hey bhagwan! As I shook the jug to mix the coffee, I realized that water would come out from the cap, leaking beneath the plastic slider provided in the cap. This was just-another-jug and not a coffee-mixer. 110 bucks!

The better discovery was yet to be revealed. Once, I 'some-how' manged to get the mixing done (basically by reducing the frequency of my vibration, to avoid spilling), it was time to open the cap and taste eternity. I opened the cap. Hey Bhagwan! The coffee powder, was floating inside the jug! It had refused to mix!

This was not an instant coffee and jusssht would not mix with water! Filter Coffee! Oh my God! 125 bucks! Why didn't it strike to me earlier?

I could not throw it away. That would be sin. My love for coffee gave me enough power to consume filter coffee made without using any filter. Gravity helped me by forcing the non-dissolved particles to settle down at the bottom of the mug. It tasted so dilute and so un-cofee-like. And I finished it to the last sip. I am a freak.

Well the only thing that didn't shock me was the coffe mug. I am left now with roughly 90 grams of filter coffee powder (or may be more), without any equipment to make filter coffee; a jug which spills the liquid if you try to shake it; and a mug which I cannot use for driking water of course. Poor me :(

OK. Yet another post on yet another CCD-offered-coffee. I am surely a coffee nuts.

Grande Mug costs you 26 bucks but it tastes much better than the 20 bucks Caffeine Kick. It is strong enough and yet easy on the taste buds. It surely is good stuff for its cost especially if you are in need for some good black coffee but don't want to go high up for the international drinks which cost close to half a hundred rupees.

My priority number is 405. Why me? You have no clue what I am talking about? Read the next para. Others who got the drift, can skip it and move on to the para which follows the next.

Although IIT Madras is an engineering college, there's this Humanities Science (HS) department here which offers a lot of absolutely non-engineering courses. As with all IIT's all courses have some credits (its okay even if you don't get the funda of credits) and for us its compulsory to obtain some minimum number of credits to get our engineering degrees. The bottom-line is: every one has to do some HS courses. The only relief is that there are a lot of options to choose from. Till two years back, the students used to choose whatever HS course they wanted from the options available and generally got them.

Things were running fine till few Profs realized that hardly any students opted for some particular courses. And these were probably the Profs who were supposed to teach those courses. Now this fact (which kept on happening year after year) psyched them so much, that the otherwise not so creative species called Professors, out of nowhere came up with this annoying idea of a magic number. They called it priority number (PN) !

This is what the new idea is, in a nutshell. Every student now gets a sheet of paper which has names of all the HS courses written on it in a tabular fashion, with boxes along the course-names, where in one can fill the order of preference. Besides, that same sheet of paper also has this randomly generated PN, which can (if you are 'the' luckiest) be '1' or some large number (the maximum value being equal to the strength of students in the batch). The funda is that once all the filled sheets have been collected back by the department, the department will start allocating the choices based on the PN. The one who has PN=1 will be considered first and what that means is that (s)he'll obviously gets whatever course (s)he opted for. More so, an upper limit has been put to the number of students in a class. So, by the time the chance for those with a PN like 405 comes, almost all the options are closed save some stupid courses which no one wanted to take.

What a smart way of curbing the free will of students! Why me? I am not horrified for no reasons. Just read the names of some of the courses that I am sure will be the only ones left, by the time my option sheet will be processed.

Indian Classics & Cultural Values: Look, some one is already fainting.
Contemporary German Philosophy: I 'Kant' ask for anything worse :(
Literature & Values: Who values this course anyways??
German studies I: Why do they want to make a Hitler out of me?
European Union Studies: How will that benefit Europe? Or anyone for that matter?
American studies-I: I have already seen F.R.I.E.N.D.S !! What more?
Aspects of western philosophy: (The good the bad and the) ugly...

Unlucky me! Even with some exceptional luck, the maximum that I can hope is 'Indian Fiction in English', 'Drama', 'Basic Mathematics', 'Indian Economic Development' or 'Applied Economics'. These are at least doable but to get even these is such a nice try!!

And wanna know all the good ones that I just cannot even dream of? Oh boy there are many. And I can't get one of them. I am doomed. 'Environmental and Resource Eco', 'Industrial Trade & Finance', 'Financial Eco', 'Technology and Development' and 'Development Problems and Alternatives' (my no. 1 choice).

Why me? :(

The heavy rains since a couple of days have screwed up the place. This city sucks when it rains.

The insti somehow looks like a natural jungle. Although the streams of water flowing here there and everywhere add to the jungle-look, for the not so junglee students like me, it's quite irritating and annoying. I already had a three days fever (that too during quiz time) because I got myself wet in the rains enough number of times, and not once though because I actually wanted to!

But the best part of this weather is the temperature. I mean it's just perfect! So I am not so unhappy if I can save myself from getting drenched in one of those all-of-a-sudden downpours. Aftterall most of the times, when the rain is not falling directly over my head, I can be cool :)

Medha Patkar of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) fame, was here in insti this Monday, to share her piont of view with us, the IITians. Since I happen to be doing so many case studies this semester, which involve in some way or another the resistances offered by activists and environmental groups, I was particulary interested in hearing to what she had to say. And oh my holy lord, she had to say a lot. She is an extremely effective orator. She knows how to put forward her points and how to fight back against so many powerful forces.

She was here in Chennai, basically to oppose the airport expansion plan, which if initiated would displace about five thousand households. I wont go into the details of her speech (as if I remember everything she talked about in that something more than an hour duration), but I would definitely like to share some points that are worth pondering over.

Before writing any more, I would like you to recall that I am being trained as a Civil Engineer. So you see, guys like me come up with engineering solutions in the form of Dams, and Airfields to meet the needs of the society. Guys like Medha on the other hand, just brush aside our otherwise appreciated projects. So there's supposed to be an inherent conflict between our ways of thinking. All I would like you to do is to keep this in mind while you read my arguments so as to make a better assessment of the affair.

She questioned the meaning of development. Do rising shopping malls in cities, or the increasing number of airports or the construction of hydroelectric power projects really signify development? She said no. And she said she belived so, because these activities lead to disparity. These so called parameters of development, leave behind the poor who are not included fairly in the policy making processes. She asserted that every individual matters and so any infrastructure project should not be given a nod, till every affected 'citizen' is happy with it.

She is no different from the other activists who fight for the plight of small sections of society who so often get negatively affected by the process of so called development. Though she never explicitly mentioned, what she was talking about was 'Economic Development'. And Economic development indeed includes all the stuff (especially the infrastructure realated stuff) that she talked about. It includes any thing and everything that leads to improvement in the overall economy of a nation. So if the Govt decides to invest in a project that will lead to an increase in power generation, it indeed is a step towards economic development. Doesn't matter what Medha Patker thinks of it.

But yes, her issue about rising disparity is true. Economic Developments often tend to increase the gap between the rich and poor. The section of people who are directly going to benefit from say increased power generation are the industrialists who are in real need of power to run their machines. Why should a villager who doesn't even have a power transmission line crossing his village care about it? He care's about his land, which gives him rice and wheat and maze and sugarcane and what not. That is all he wants. And so if a dam at an upstream spot is going to sink his land deep inside water, he is going to raise his voice. What we are talking about here is a trade-off. Scarcity of resources is the concept on which the whole theory of economics is based. So many times, it happens that to produce A you have got to give up B. So how do you decide then? Tricky question.

It felt good when Medha did admit that some kind of econimic development was definitely needed. But it should be done in fine balance with the social develeopment where the benefit of any project trickles down to the lower sections of the society. A fine balance! Well, it makes sense though it does have one problem. Being almost always surrounded with the affected groups, she wont ever be happy with any kind of balance that guys like me come up with. What kind of balance is really the best? It's really a difficult question to answer, more so because here we are two different sets of people looking at world from different places. The more we listen to one another, the better we will be able to appreciate each other's concerns. And look, that's happening! :)