added a theme

source/_posts/2011-08-19-hello.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Hello, R-Land."
+date: 2011-08-19 17:14
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+There comes a time in the life of every website, when in the face of alarmingly infrequent updates, positively atrocious coding skills, characteristically low creativity, staggeringly low hits, and pretty much, lack of anything else to do, one is forced to resort to extreme measures - Put up pictures of naked chicks on the website. Unfortunately, this brilliant idea was vetoed by all the other members of the team. So, we present to you the next best thing – the WONA blog. All the news, views, reviews that you never wanted to read in the first place, are now available on one website, so that not reading them has never been easier. It gets better- this time around, the WONA blog is open to all.
+
+So, whether you’re in the mood for a little Monday morning rant, or a Ayn Randesque post about life, the insti and everything, or whether that google search for ‘random funny blogs about hostel life by authors not very fussy about copyright infringement’ finally gave a valid result or you’re just plain jobless, you know that WONA’s loyal readers (yes, all three of them) will religiously follow your every post, and spam the comments section.
+
+
+
+As you can see from the above corny lines, there’s only so much creativity in this world, and most of it is in other people.
+
+
+
+P.S. Appreciative comments are welcome.
+
+P.P.S. Unappreciative comments are also welcome but will only be redirected to the recycle bin.

source/_posts/2011-08-22-the-illusion-of-choice-how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-matrix.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "The Illusion of Choice: How I learned to stop worrying and love the Matrix"
+date: 2011-08-22 17:19
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+If there is one human activity that's older than human existence itself, it is (the art of) cribbing. Our ancestors, the venerable Amoebae vented out their frustration by dividing into two.  Millenniums later, in a parallel universe, Rene Descartes is rumoured to have said, "I crib, therefore I am". And why else would a baby's first home be a crib if not to prepare him for a lifetime filled with the same.
+
+A recent survey[1] established that cribbing is the third most popular activity in IITR after,
+1) Bugging seniors for chapos
+2) A certain activity that takes place in the dark inside hostel rooms under sheets. (I was talking about sleeping, you sick pervert)
+It is no secret that finding the words 'satisfied', 'Roorkee' and 'IITian' in the same sentence is as common as finding Salman Khan with a shirt on. But I digress from Salman Khan's attire.
+
+One of our favourite whineyards is the absence of good electives. Every semester before the endsems, IMG (now Campus Skunk) opens its floodgates exposing the naive R-ites to hitherto unheard of terms like Cosmetology, Snorkelling and <a href="http://entomology.oregonstate.edu/" target="_blank">Far side Entomology</a>. The experienced lot are forced to disown trivialities like interest and learning in favour of easy proxies, no backs and the absence of an 8AM class. I recollect <a href="http://wona.co.in/index.php?option=com_rubberdoc&amp;view=doc&amp;id=16&amp;format=raw&amp;Itemid=42" target="_blank">an article from my first year</a> in the moronic magazine, aptly titled "Hobson's Choice: All roads lead to the earthquake department". But no more! With the influx of many a young turk, the days of gerontocracy were over. The institute had final woken to the sound of the clarion. New electives with fancy names were floated by departments above the slope, and held in class rooms that were actually near Nesci. The times, they were a-changing.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+"Enough was enough", I came to a conclusion. "I am in an IIT to learn, and learn I will". So I registered for one of those baroque, hard-to-pronounce electives offered by the MIT return. Four months later I enter my first class five minutes late, having missed 3 classes the previous week. Cold walls and the icy demeanour of 20-odd enthusiastic (read ghissu/muggu) juniors greet me. The young lecturer coolly informs me that I have missed five attendances as he had to take two extra classes the previous week, and a even a single case of absenteeism hence will result in my not being able to write the exams. "Oh and by the way, we have extra field trips too. Two hours every week in a field pulling strings to understand what String theory really is", he added with glee. Any wise man in my situation would have decided to go on and take the bull by its horns. But that wise man was not I. And so I decided to throw the towel.
+
+2 Days, 101 signatures and a few thousand applications later, I was one of the teeming millions in an elective offered by a department dealing with disasters. "But sir", I argued. "How can anyone not appreciate the subtleties of Fire-Extinguising 101'. An argument that he could never refute thanks to generations of farzi* seniors who had populated the course and proven beyond doubt that Fire extinguishing was indeed every engineer's ultimate fantasy.
+
+My close encounters of the fourth kind had me thinking (mostly during class hours when I couldn't be bothered to listen). Given that most of us have as much an idea about our future as Arnab Goswami has about shutting up, not to mention the delusions we seem to be harbouring, do we even need a choice? After all, isn't the illusion of choice yet another exercise in futility till we realise that we don't really have one. China, which forcibly united its provinces under one language and culture seems to be thriving enough to buy Greece whereas democratic India is floundering under the banner of disunity in perversity. Maybe we are better off with the blue pill, and without questioning whether or not it is air that we breathe.
+
+Maybe, maybe Hobson's choice is better than Sophie's after all.
+
+*farzi - Having lost all interest in any form of technical education and can currently be found spewing out management gibberish
+
+References
+1. "Bakar and Cribbing: 2 sides of the same coin", Thashi Saroor, Kamal R. Khan and Satan Bhagat.
+
+From:
+
+The Chronotron, Shreyas Sekar.
+
+IV Year, ECE.
+
+

source/_posts/2011-09-04-living-in-the-ivory-tower.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Living in the Ivory Tower"
+date: 2011-09-04 12:26
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+I swear,
+“I never was the purple cow
+I only got to see some
+But I can tell you anyhow
+I’d rather be than see one”
+
+An early Saturday morning is a seldom visited neighbour. It’s home every weekend and you plan to catch up. You’re always looking forward, excited about the rendezvous. Then you miss it. And it’s gone for a week. But, sometimes, you get to say a ‘Hi’. This was one of those days. The Sun was seeing the morning off, when heaving and huffing, I landed at the library. It was library, because my mind equated seeing the morning with lunacy. The glaze had already started hurting. So, I considered a sojourn. Inside, the building was empty. On another day, I wouldn’t have picked on a stray stack of newspapers, an unsolicited reader. Why, I have my own newspapers for company all the time.
+But, since no one was about and I had no real purpose of hanging around the place at that time, I bent to look through the bundle.
+<strong>“Stop it! Leave it there! Who told you to touch them? ”</strong>
+Surprise, and then, a fit of amusement so took me over, that I simply scurried my way out.
+If JEE has got to your head, I’d suggest you wait for an encounter with the staff in Roorkee, or arrange for one. These people have just the right antidote to bring you back to ground. Vanity is not too good too long.
+
+P.S. It is on hearing of such episodes that I consider trading places with PC for the sheer joy of first-hand laughter and some serious stimulation for soul-searching to find out if we live in an Ivory Tower.
+
+<strong>From,</strong>
+
+Mrinal Tripathi,
+Chemical III year.

source/_posts/2011-09-04-watch-out-for-more.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Watch Out for more"
+date: 2011-09-04 16:05
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+
+There comes a time in every person’s life when he is asked to bark like a dog in front of a few extraordinary gentlemen, his selection into their beloved organisation conditional on him performing said demeaning task. He can choose to swallow the ignominy in silence and leave the scene without making a fuss. Or he could accept the challenge as his forthcoming baptism by fire, and get ready to unleash the canine within him in all its guttural glory. Either way, he risks getting stuck with a life-long regret. On an eventful early August afternoon 6 semesters ago, some higher power decreed that I throw caution to the winds and bark my heart out. In a life characterised by idiocy and imprudence, that remains one of the wiser decisions I have ever made.
+
+That is not to say that not being a part of WONA would have consigned my life to ruin and despair. Far from it- there were ways, from using this rejection to launch a rival magazine of my own (which in the company of a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1066671645&amp;ref=ts">good friend of mine</a>, who would be the brains behind it, would have probably overtaken the original in all but name by this time) to using all the free time to set alight the ghissing arena, obliterating academic records left, right and centre, and earning semester exchanges, foreign interns and a Presidential scholarship to boot for my pains. Ah, what a life that would have been. <em>Truly despicable and utterly loathsome, not to mention downright sickening and grotesque</em>- a tiny voice inside my head whispers.
+
+<!--more-->
+
+3years, about a dozen issues (most of them printed), countless night-outs and so many incredible hours spent working with the lads and lasses later, I cannot even begin to imagine what it would have been like had I chosen the other pill. But as things turned out, here I am now- all geared up for any menial post-retirement obligations that might be thrown my way. Making some sort of modest contribution to the new and promising WONA blog seems to be the first of it. And true to the nature of those who engage themselves in the service of this great magazine, I am a good fortnight and more late in doing it.
+
+Indeed, between lazing away all night long in front of our comps on the pretext of formatting and spending day time either sleeping or gallivanting with the mates, it is a miracle that we bring out a couple of issues every semester. Like a cash-strapped football club with a threadbare squad that somehow manages to avoid relegation on the last day of the season courtesy an injury-time goal by the striker who is set to leave, we manage to escape not bringing out the mag by the skin of our teeth every time. The disapproving frowns of dear seniors turn into reluctant smiles once they hold the published matter in their hands. We find our chagrin in the skeptical half of the campus, and delight in the appreciative half. And we never fail to promise in the end- <em>Watch Out for more!</em>
+
+Had he been dead, our founding father’s corpse would have turned in his grave looking at the levels of degradation that have crept into this news agency. Where once a pencil and a few charts of paper in the hands of a dedicated half dozen were all it took to bring out the “news-letter”, we are talking online news and Facebook publicity today. The concept of a blog was unheard of at the time of our inception more than 15 years ago; now, I can sprawl on my bed and post my views about the admin’s insanity up on the website, and remove the feature later if word of it reached one of the top dogs. Gone are the days of hand-made news pamphlets and notice-board snippets. Technology has made slothful asses out of us; people are now demanding campus news on a platter. They deserve a good measure of entertainment as well.
+
+And that is what this blog will hopefully help achieve. Anything and everything related to the campus is welcome here- preferably with a dash of humour. Profound stuff is appreciated too, but will contribute lesser hits on the site than perhaps uploading lectures and tutorials would. I shall be posting once in a while, as will be my fellow pensioners. For those who can’t get enough of my deranged ravings, the <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/mannodiarun">greatest social networking site in the history of mankind</a> could be of some help. For others- well, if it’s any solace, I am hardly a man of my word and I will probably be taking more rides in the Dean’s car than I'll be posting here. Regardless, watch this space.
+
+<strong>From</strong>
+
+The First Speaker, M K Arun Kumar
+
+Meta, IV Year.

source/_posts/2011-09-19-Ghissu-Ban-Gaya-Gentleman.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Ghissu Ban Gaya Gentleman"
+date: 2011-09-19 17:13
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+Not so long long ago was a man of great valour. A bastion of strength. A man with a  spirit to conquer the world. An astonishing urge to dominate the world. Stand what may come attitude bolstered by a unprecedented determination, flaring through the eyes. No one even lurked near him, such was his aura. After a worthy yet connoting introduction I present to you ladies and gentlemen the protagonist - GHISSU .
+
+Ghissu was a boy of straight  A+s. He demoralized the professors (!) of his college by hitting a spot on, bulls eye, perfect 10 SGPA in the first semester. He had achieved this unique feat all thanks to the qualities described above.
+Determined to take a revenge and turn tables, the professors connived to break him. To break his dream of perfect 10 cgpa. They succeeded narrowly. They managed to degrade his grade in one of the subjects to 9. That was it. The dream had shattered. The horizon became dark for Ghissu. A hush set upon his life. He pondered as to what had invited such a comeuppance. As Ghissu was reeling through the reverberations of the dreaded gradesheet the professors had a merry time  absorbing a feeling of satisfaction from the nearly impossible feat they had conjured up.
+<!--more-->
+As the aftershocks of the result bypassed, he regurgitated the facts of his first semester. He had valour but only in the face of examinations-ready for head on collisions with the questions from the tutorial or the exercises from the textbook. He was a bastion of strength but only in the realms of academics. He didn’t have the spirit to conquer the world but the spirit to conquer handful of classmates that too through vomiting out mugged up notes and tutorials. He stood tall in the face of exams but faltered when a practical situation aroused. His eyes weren’t flaring determination but had become scanners for class notes, textbooks and tutorials. Nobody was near him, not because everyone feared him or respected him but because he had been a narcissist self-centred smug who kept on changing his radius of proximity with others according to his petty needs and expectations.
+
+Finally he understood what he was and chuckled at himself for being distraught thinking that 9.8 was his problem when all along it was 10 that was the problem !
+
+After this insightful finding he set out, to become a real ‘person’. In the past and even in contemporary times we have seen people travelling seven seas to the foothills of the Himalayas in search of the inner self, wasting decades in dedicated penance. But our Ghissu wanted results fast. So instead, he went out on a search for a brain transplant. He plodded through the corners of the world to satisfy his newfangled caprice. Finally he set his mind on a 5 pointer. This was the ideal mind to see the beautiful world around him, to follow mercurial paths of life rather than follow the mundane and now obnoxious routine of lectures and hostel timings.
+
+After a 10 hour surgery he was ready.
+
+Same old body but a racing mind which ‘really’ wanted to conquer the world.The mind was always working, noticing the small things around, reasoning, concluding- how the nature works and not how the CGPA system works. He remembered how his old mind had a kind of switch which went on only when he sat down to cram the piles of books in front of him. The new mind was instinctive, mercurial. Nobody was its master. Neither the teachers nor the parents not even the low grades could compel him to cut back and sit down and mug. Ghissu wondered how would his old mind have felt if he would have gone into an exam not solving the tutorials or the exercises. Just knowing the concepts but no practice at his disposal. It gave him chills down the spine. No solving of tutorials every alternate nights nor running in a frenzy to be first to submit the files. It was a relief. He had unplugged himself from the robotic life he had been living for the past years.
+
+Khule sandh(bull) ki tarah daudne ka maja kya hai voj aaj use samaj aaya !!
+
+<strong>From</strong>
+Hetu Ashara,
+II year, Electrical Engg.

source/_posts/2011-09-23-rkb-resident-mistakenly-updates-his-status-to-rkb-muradabad.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "RKB resident mistakenly updates his status to 'RKB Muradabad'"
+date: 2011-09-23 11:14
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+
+<strong>Roorkee</strong> The day when his fellow inmates were hailing the newly operational 1 Gbps internet by putting up status updates on the social networking site Facebook, a 3rd year B. Tech student at Radhakrishnan Bhawan, IIT Roorkee created an uproar in his hostel wing by putting up a controversial status.
+
+The student, Peter Parker is an occupant of a posh Cautley-facing room on the seventh floor of the highrise. When this floor became the first to get 'sarkari' internet access amongst all the floors of the Bhawan, students blissfully logged in to their Facebook accounts to break this news to every nook-and-corner of the world. They posted congratulatory messages while those with Twitter accounts tweeted this development to Chetan Bhagat.
+
+However, Mr. Parker, instead of going with the flow, updated his Facebook status as "RKB murdabad!!". As soon as this status went online, it flared up tensions in the nearby rooms on the seventh floor. Patriotic students forcibly took him out of his room and administered him a generous GPL amidst slogans like "Inquilaab Zindabaad!!" and "Anna Hazare amar rahe!!". As this news-flash trickled down the floors of the Bhawan, more inmates joined the commotion, resulting in a 400 people-strong mob. The grand open-for-all GPL ceremony continued for another 20 minutes when a mysterious sage-like old man came out of nowhere, appealed for peace, and disappeared. Suddenly, there was calm, and it appeared as if the students had been influenced by the hermit's aura. Afterwards no untoward incidents were reported. Later some students argued he was none other than the Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh, who had tried to guise himself in a Batman robe.
+
+Meanwhile, the IIT Roorkee administration is contemplating to slap a 10-marks discipline fine on the accused (victim) student. 
+
+<em>(Names have been changed upon request)</em>
+
+<strong>From</strong>
+Bhavya Vats
+III Year, Meta.

source/_posts/2011-10-19-unknown-destiny.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Unknown Destiny"
+date: 2011-10-19 13:19
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+
+Yesterday morning I had found my cycle punctured when I had already been running late to class by five minutes. Irked at my cycle's betrayal, struck by the sudden realization that I had no time for an afternoon nap, having the accuser in me smirking at the guilty mulling over how nothing useful had transpired during the vacations, I was convinced that that was the best time for apocalypse. In fact, I was so convinced that I  removed the  otherwise pointless drawing sheet with very ugly views of die-casters, acting as a sun-shield, from my head, in a move to encounter whatever, head on. Stumbling feebly across the road, there was a puny little kid, who, in a series of serendipitous events, was evading being hit by vehicles honking and zooming past her.
+
+She seemed too little to even stand firmly on her knees and as one would expect, the bystanders were too busy to care. I noticed, while crossing the road, how a few of them spared the wailing kid a benevolent smile and walked past very kindly. Minutes later, the mother, visibly shaken, came to collect the kid, seated on a small bunk in the security guard's chamber inside KB and crying her eyes out.  I walked to the mess leaving this particularly voluble guard to enter into an expected soliloquy.
+<!--more-->
+R, like all the other places in the world, has its lot of desolate and needy people. More than a year ago, I met an elderly man, bent with age, staggering along the corner of the street. As we walked back to where I presumed his house was, he spoke slowly of was and when and I politely nodded whenever he paused. Perhaps talking to someone who had no clue what he was saying was the closest he had got to a conversation, in days. I spotted the same old man walking alone months later. It was bitterly cold and a passerby, a godsend, offered him a ride when I had been looking around helplessly, holding him to provide balance.  Perhaps, I was thinking while having lunch, I could manage a few brilliant replies and even engage him in a lighthearted conversation in Hindi, if I see him around now. I chuckled at the bazinga.
+
+I poked around the spoon in a plate of dal and rice, pensively for a while. One of the reasons, people- me , you and everyone, can't be bothered with societal change, is that we believe there are 'others' entitled to do it. If the kid had got under a car, it would have been most unfortunate. Surely, *someone* must have noticed her. Security guards and the callous mother are to blame. Given that the kid looked pitiful in rags and with snot on her nose, I wasn't very excited when I picked her up. Besides, the world is full of mishaps. Misfortune turns around in a vicious cycle no one has the power to reason with or stop altogether.  And of course, hasn't Rand asked us to immerse ourselves irreproachably deep in our own business ? Didn't she say, altruism is nothing to be proud of and on the contrary, selfishness will make you a paragon of virtue? Never mind what she actually meant, never mind if the context was entirely different. After all, in a world where half the people thinking 'Anna is India' haven't read through the propositions of the lokpal bill, understanding weird philosophies isn't a common trait . Everybody is a classy theorist on social issues. Giving a rupee to a child begging on the street is bad encouragement . Buying a candy from Aunty's Burger shack is not very morally incorrect , but, what happens to a million other hungry children? There are other fascinating, tenable justifications that sprout out of the highly empirical mind.
+
+Whatever the reason for nonchalance is, if the world's providence is dictated by its karma, making post-apocalyptic plans doesn't really seem inappropriate.
+
+<strong>From</strong>
+Nisha C.,
+III Year, Mech.

source/_posts/2011-10-24-bulldozed-emotions.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Bulldozed Emotions"
+date: 2011-10-24 04:56
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+You told me to observe and learn from everything that happened around me. That way you said I would grow up to be an intelligent man. But of late it feels I have seen enough. Every new thing is not exactly new. Every event differs from its predecessor in the mode in which it occurs. The underlying sentiments somehow seem to be the same everywhere. I want to share something with you.
+
+<!--more-->
+Just next to my hostel, in college, there is a small playground. It’s not actually that large to be called a playground, just a small stretch of underutilized land. At one end of this stretch there are a few residential quarters, allotted to the mess workers. Twenty steps from these quarters is a small Shiv temple. From the bathroom of the floor I live in, one gets a clear view of the temple and the quarters. So every time I went to brush my teeth in the mornings or to take a bath, I would come across their life, their style of living. Basic stuff they did in the morning. Men of the household sipping tea, reading the newspaper while the women used to cut vegetables sitting by, preparing breakfast. Watching them do all this stuff became a routine for me as well. Nothing of that was much of my interest, except for one thing. Every day the old lady of the house would walk with the youngest kid to the Shiv temple and offer her prayers. The kid absolutely oblivious of what his grandmother was chanting would just close his eyes and bowed his head down. This scene reminded me vividly of how I as a kid used to travel to the nearby temple with grandmother. This thought made me happy and somehow it felt as if the day had begun well.
+
+All of this happened before I went home for the holidays.
+
+The house does not stand anymore.
+
+When I came back all that I could see was rubble. At first it reminded me of the destruction I saw during the Bhuj earthquake. But my hostel and all other buildings in the locality still stood tall, so it could not have been an earthquake. So was it a U.S drone attack? You see it’s not my fault entirely. These days any kind of destruction or war instantly reminds one of the U.S. I was eager to find out what actually had happened.
+
+On further inquiry I came to know that the housings had been demolished to create space for a community center, a state of art community center. I personally feel that it’s ironic that homes have to be demolished to create a place for the community. I somehow feel really bad about things that have transpired.
+
+Now let’s talk about another episode. You know pretty well how farmers, villagers, commoners all across the country have been agitating and fighting to protect their land. At some places there is a threat of a SEZ, at other places it may be due to the construction of a nuclear power plant. This particular issue of land acquisition has been dominating the political discussions of late.
+
+To me both the issues seem intricately connected. Maybe I have not grown up to be as intelligent as you expect me to be. Both the cases are examples of somebody trying to trade emotions with money or facility. Let’s say ours is a honest society and every dislocated family is reimbursed fairly. Is it still fair?
+
+How many of these people would actually leave their homes for the same money, in case they were not subjected to the pressures of development. Development is important but it has become costly. We are paying too much of a cost for it. Governments at best can provide a better house but what about the home? How can strong and sturdy concrete structures replace the web of emotions? We as a society are so busy improving the standards of our LIVING that we have ceased paying importance to LIFE itself.
+
+I don’t know the best way to handle this situation; maybe an intelligent man does. I know one thing for sure I would miss seeing the grandmother with the kid.
+
+<strong>From</strong>
+Abhishek Pandey
+III Year, Meta

source/_posts/2011-11-22-the-curse-of-being-in-meta.markdown

@@ -0,0 +1,28 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "The Curse Of Being In Meta"
+date: 2011-11-22 06:14
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+
+Our institute takes a rather ambiguous stance on the attendance shortage rule. While technically, a student should be forced to repeat a course if his attendance falls below that magical 75% mark, this dictum seldom comes into play owing to general leniency shown by professors and departments. Unless the figure under consideration has reached unspeakably abysmal levels, in which case the student probably knows what’s coming. Regardless of the course or professor or department in question, students generally breathe easy if they are somewhere near the 65 to 70% mark.
+
+This myth was shattered in one fell swoop by the pride of the Metallurgy department on Friday the 18th of November, when a certain senior professor decided to unleash his full fury upon unsuspecting final year students who had naught on their minds but graduating out of this institute in 6 months time without any major incident. That was not to be, for they are being debarred from sitting for one particular exam because their attendance is below some limit the prof dreamed up in his spare time.
+
+<!--more-->
+The protocol to be followed in such situations, regardless of the course or department or professor in question, is to go the professor and request him to reconsider before it’s too late. This happens all the time and it works all the time too. Any prof in his right mind would be loath to <em>fail</em> an academically excellent student just because he missed a class or two more than what is lawfully permitted. And no prof with a modicum of sense would play a cruel joke like dishing out year backs to final year students right on the cusp of placements/higher studies. Apparently, someone was out to change things around in the Meta department this time.
+
+Students with hitherto unblemished records suddenly found their names on the attendance shortage list, which came to their notice late evening on the last working day before the end-term examination. Naturally, they rushed to the professor’s office to catch him just as he’d be leaving for home. Did it come as a surprise that their pleas fell on deaf ears? Frankly speaking, yes. Pity the fools who thought not ruining the students’ future would be anywhere on the minds of the teaching community.
+
+So they have been told at the eleventh hour, when nothing can be done to redeem the situation, that they cannot sit for the exam with everybody else this year and they’ll have to repeat the course next year. Will this affect their placements? Will this show in their applications to universities for higher education (which all of them no doubt are worthy of)? I don’t know. Did the professor think about that for a moment before sending the list out to the Acad Section without ever caring to put up a warning sign in the department? I think we all know the answer to that. There is also the small matter that no other department is giving attendance backs to final year students.
+
+Whilst it can be argued that some fault does lie with the students for not showing due seriousness towards a course they opted for and taking the professors’ forbearance for granted, this severe punishment can also be seen as a case of making an example out of some people to prove a point to everyone. It is no laughing matter that half the insti could end up cooling its heels during the exams were the same rule applicable for all courses in all departments. 
+
+Very selfishly, my reaction (like everybody else’s) at seeing the attendance shortage list was one of massive relief. I have no idea what I would have done if made to face the possibility of staying back in R for one more year to clear a solitary course. It is a sad fact of life, but sympathy for the misery of others is always mingled with the small comfort of not being on the same boat.
+
+This is not a senseless rant meant to sully the reputation of my department by highlighting one isolated incident. Neither is professors’ insensitivity a newfangled development borne out of sheer boredom and getting high on too many Cuban cigars. The plight of students is the same everywhere and at all times. R is no longer the university where the entire student citizenry would have risen up in arms to fight against any atrocity. We are but helpless puppets in the hands of the higher powers who are living in some dystopian paradise of their own. They sure do know a thing or two about breaking a man’s spirit right when it is at its lowest ebb. 
+
+<strong>From</strong>
+An Anonymous Crusader
+(A Graduate of Batch 2012, now pursuing his PhD)

source/_posts/2012-01-11-basti-live.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "Basti Live"
+date: 2012-01-11 15:37
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+
+The summers are always long. No matters how good a family you got, or how much money to spend; they do at some point or other start boring you. The point is everybody starts looking out for unconventional ways of killing time.
+I am 21, single, with no interest left in my education. I am miserable. Therefore my drive to find crazy ways to kill my time is much stronger than the rest of the population. One such way is dirt biking. I usually take my bike out in the morning or late evenings and set off to far off villages. Well most of these villages are not electrified, neither does any of them has roads laid out. I believe that these villages can be developed as great dirt biking locations, although I am not pretty much certain that they are fit enough for human settlement. During one such expedition I came face to face with what movie analysts would call dark comedy.
+
+There is this hamlet called Haidurganj on the Gorakhpur-Basti highway. This Muslim dominated locality is exactly like the dozen other villages spread across the highway, except for the fact that it has a mosque which is more magnificent than any other you would find in entire Gorakhpur. The floor is entirely laid with high quality marble. The marble was specially imported from Rajasthan for the construction of the mosque. There is brilliant calligraphy done on the inner side of the dome wall. It would make Steve Jobs proud.  Rahman Chacha tells me those are verses from the Quran. He knows the best. He did it.
+
+However it’s not the mosque which brought me to this village.
+
+One evening while trading with speed I saw a huge crowd encircling a farm tractor. It seemed that the entire village had suddenly developed a reverence for that vehicle. Actually it was Azlaan Shah, an octogenarian from the village, who needed some serious medical attention. He had been ill for quite some time now. He was being carried to the medical college. I noticed something peculiar about the direction in which the tractor left. 
+
+It went in the direction opposite to that in which the Gorakhpur Medical College was located. 
+
+So were the villagers really tired of Azlaan and wanted him dead? On further inquiry a few people present around told me that the vehicle had left for the medical college. That either meant there were two medical colleges, or I was wrong. I had full faith in my knowledge and more so in the government’s inability to open two medical colleges in the same district. Armed with conviction I went to the only source of reliable information I had, Rahman Chacha. What he told forms the crux of the story.
+
+The facilities available at the state run Gorakhpur Medical College are so unreliable and the treatment so costly that the villagers had lost all trust. The only option they had was to rush the patient to the capital, PGI Lucknow. Such was the state of affairs that the villagers had actually named the Basti-Lucknow stretch of the highway as the Medical College Road. To supplement my dose of enlightenment Rahman took me to a village tour. Characteristic of any eastern UP village there were a large number of rice fields all around. After every half kilometer the crop seemed to be greener, denser and thicker. It appeared as if those five by five stretches were better nourished. 
+
+Rahman had an explanation for this.
+
+According to the village custom the dead were supposed to be buried in their field. After the burial was done that five by five stretch of land was cemented and a stone raised in the honor of the dead. The stone had a few verses from the Quran along with the name of the dead. This should be done when a villager dies. The cementing prevented any further growth of vegetation on that stretch and rice plants would make their way along the boundary of the grave stone. 
+
+In this village the grave was dig as soon as the village folks knew that an elderly was ill.
+
+The villagers knew that the guy would be dead before he could reach Lucknow. A six hour journey was asking too much from the patient. Mourning would invariably start once family members saw first signs of critical illness. The Gorakhpur Medical College was a half an hour ride nobody undertook.
+
+There is always a twist in the tale.
+
+Some disobedient fellows time and again manage to escape death. They were brought back to the village amidst great fanfare. What happened to the five by five stretch of land?
+
+During irrigation the dug up part of land had a lot more water accumulated in it, than the adjoining areas. Water retention being the key behind a good harvest, the crop there would be thicker. 
+It was not extra nourishment through Urea, rather the unused grave which brought about the surplus harvest. The harvest one year, Rahman tells me, was so good that the Panchayat even considered applying for the “Ideal Village Award”.
+
+That was my last visit to Haidurgunj, perhaps I was disgusted, and maybe I lacked courage. I would never know what happened with the grave of Azlaan. 
+
+Peepli Live may not be fiction. Look around.
+
+From the pen of <strong>Abhishek Pandey</strong>,
+Chemical, IV Year.

source/_posts/2012-08-24-the-lost-paper-trail.markdown

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "The Lost Paper Trail"
+date: 2012-08-26 21:07
+comments: true
+categories: 
+---
+
+“An educated person is one who has learned that information almost always turns out to be at best incomplete and very often false, misleading, fictitious, mendacious - just dead wrong. “
+Russel
+
+B.Tech in Pulp and Paper Engineering, the brochure reads. Placements have been good in this field in the recent years. And as a small aside- the course is run in Saharanpur Campus, 50 km from Roorkee. The descriptions of  Polymer Science and Technology and Process Engineering with MBA, run along the same lines.
+Every year, groups of students who clear the JEE, but only just,grab this course along their only path to become an IITian. Sacrificing the chance to learn their favorite courses at rather less reputed institutions, they put all their faith in the hallowed name of IIT, sometimes leaving their homes thousands of kilometers behind. Alas! Fate is cruel to them- they get a rude shock soon after arriving to take their place in the halls of their dreams. Nothing in their worst nightmares could have prepared them for the mental distress which plagues everyone in this institute. Isolated from their classmates, unrecognized as IITians even by the shopkeepers nearby, they are soon struck by the realization that this was certainly not what they signed up for, and definitely not what they deserved.
+
+Soon plagued by the contagious depression that infects this campus,they start feeling imprisoned.
+IIT should be a place that gives wings to our dreams, where we can take flight and discover newer realms of success. This naive description of an IIT might be for several other students who cleared the prestigious JEE, but the 500 unfortunate students who set their feet in IIT Roorkee's Saharanpur campus can never truly agree with it. This  continued crushing of dreams has an adverse effect on almost every student. Those who are unable to survive this find their escape in intoxicating substances while others just resign themselves to their fate.
+
+But a few optimistic ones decided to put up a fight. Over the years there have been several organised protests and petitions to improve or shift this departmentto Roorkee. Each time, the students were placated by promises and proposals, which we do not deny did improve the campus in general- however it never did manage to address the basic feeling- that we are not a part of IIT Roorkee. Last year, the director, in a meeting,said that it would be a good proposal to shift the undergradaute courses to Roorkee, turning the saharanpur campus into a research institute. As the students got to know of this, they launched an organised and constitutional movement to get what is increasingly being dubbed as “the campus shift”. However the director, at a meeting with student representatives later, insisted that his comment had been off- the-cuff and not serious. After a mass student sit-in at roorkee was fenced off with diplomatic statements and sweet words, the movement petered off.
+This year, a new batch of students arrived, which within one month became deeply dissatisfied.The hunger strike was begun by them to demand a campus shift and was joined by several seniors whose spirits had not been crushed by their repeated failures. 
+                                        
+