IT vs Core Sector = Money vs Ethics

Its very convenient to be in the computer science field today (amongst all engineering fields) since thats where the moolah is. So if I take up a lucrative offer at Microsoft or Oracle or our desi Infy (ya, it offers a good package at IITs), there's no ethical dilemma - I've studied comp. science for all my engineering-life!

The scenario for other branches, sadly, is quite different especially for civil, chemical and mechanical engineering students. Firstly, the number of companies offering a job in their core sector is very less; and secondly the salary they offer is comparable to (if not less than) what Infy pays to a NIIT course holder. So what do they do? - they take up IT sector jobs, get trained in Java/ SAP/ some-niche-IT-stuff and try to live happily ever after. After all, they've studied hi-tech construction/ compounds/ machines for 4 or 6 years, and here they are - showing all their might on a keyboard.

Whether or not it affects the individual conscience, this should be a matter of serious concern to the authorities (MHRD, I guess! or whosoever is the policy maker here). This is an IIT for God's sake - if such things happen here, then don't even go looking for what happens elsewhere. Students of all branches are trained to be the one of the best in their respective fields, and then robbed off the opportunities that'll actually help the government to reap the benefits of the subsidy-beans they sowed.

I can't think of anything to come up with even a single suggestion to prevent this from happening, which makes me feel guilty of crying foul here. But hey, I'm not the brightest mind in the country. I'm sure this is not a completely unsolvable problem.

Thankfully, there is a policy in place at IITG, which forbids financial firms to recruit from engineering streams - otherwise even the comp. science students will join the club :)

What's the procedure to change the room please?

This question by Swami led to his ragging in the hands of his seniors in Munnabhai MBBS. I dared to ask the same question here, and not surprisingly it led to my ragging too, albeit at the hands of the authorities at IITG.

The situation was very simple. I needed to move from hostel A to hostel B since hostel B hoists the antenna I require for my project. Plus, its a well known secret here that there's a policy to keep all m.tech guys in hostel B, so this shouldn't be a problem at all. I met a fellow hostellite who had changed his room recently -

"What to do to change the hostel, mate?"
"Write an application to the chairman of the hub"
"Chairman of the what?"
"Hub"
"Hub?"
"Hub"

Now, in computer science jargon, a hub is a dumb device that receives a signal at one of its ports and forwards it on all other ports, without bothering to process that signal. I was wondering what a hub had to do with hostels (well, later i learned that it was actually HAB - Hostel Affairs Board). I wrote an application, dated 11th July 2007, and gave it to the chairman, who lazily signed it and forwarded it to the Convener of the Allotment Committee. Chuck HAB, hub it is.

I met the Convener of the Allotment Committee (lets call him CAC) the next day (12th), he assured me that this was a trivial matter and asked me to come back in two days. I went back on 16th (no, I wasn't lazy. 14th-15th was weekend), CAC told me to meet the caretaker of hostel B to get a room allotted. My mistake here - didn't notice that CAC had not signed the application.

On the same day I went to the caretaker of hostel B (with all due respect, lets call him egg-head).
"Sir, I need to come to this hostel. I've got the application approved by the chairman and CAC."
Ponders over my half page application for 6.35 atrocious minutes.
"I can't take a decision without consulting the warden"
"But sir, its already approved, the CAC said I could straight away take a room"
"Why has he not signed your application"
Sigh.. sigh..
"Please meet the warden"

17th July (morning) - warden was not in his room/lab.
17th July (afternoon) - warden was not in his room/lab.
18th July (morning) - warden was not in his room/lab.
18th July (afternoon) - warden was not in his room/lab.
19th July (morning) - warden was not in his room/lab.

19th July (afternoon) - went back to the CAC. He signed my application with the note - "this student may be allowed to stay in hostel B. This wont affect the new allotment process".

Took that double-signed application to that egg-head -
"Sir, there - I have the sign"
"The English is ambiguous, 'may be allowed' - hmm.. not clear, isn't it?"
(Mentally - "WHAT THE F**K!!!!") "Yes sir, it is"
"Did you meet the warden"
"mmmmm.. yes. He only asked me to meet the CAC"
Egg-head calls the warden, sigh!
"The warden will come here and handle this. Come on 23rd morning"

23rd morning - went to egg-head, apparently the warden had not come there yet.
"Come in the afternoon!"
23rd afternoon - went to meet the egg-head - egg-head was not in his room.

I was so pissed off, i didn't bother to go there on 24th. 25th was my birthday, and I wanted to spend it peacefully, so I decided to postpone it that day also. For the first time I was thinking whether I can manage this project without changing the hostel, but a ring-tone interrupted my multi-million-dollar thought process -

"hello"
"abbe venky! where are you? the caretaker is looking for you"
Great! I rushed to hostel B.

Egg-head was clearly quite hot, I was afraid he might hatch.
"I've been looking for you since Monday"
"Sorry sir, I was busy with my project"
"Anyways, you have to move in now"

I had plans for my birthday that evening and it took a truck load of unwilling persuasion to postpone it by one day. So, 14 days, 3 signatures, 50000 calories and a zillion mental profanities later - here I was, in my new room.

Dead Without Deadlines

One of Murphy's laws states that work expands to the time allotted to it. But when you're just given the time, and it's you who has to first think of some work to do, and do it too - things just get worse.

One feeling that is ubiquitously experienced is that deadlines enhance productivity. Of course, it comes with a bit of stress but the positive effects outnumber the rest. Your brain is put to a good, continuous productive use; you are aware of a goal, you plan spontaneously, execute with tremendous diligence; you are racing against time but somehow you feel timeless - its that goal you want to achieve; even a minute's break there refreshes more than a whole day spent lazily at home. And the fulfillment that follows - ah! happiness, the wholeness, the sense of well-being, the sense of accomplishing something - is amazing. You end up doing things which you postponed for the leisurely days, on the busiest of your days. That's how it is - when your brain has gathered a momentum, its best to say - make hay while the sun shines.

On the contrary, when there's no deadline kicking your backside, you master the art of procrastinating wonderfully. You come up with innovative unprecedented reasons to convince yourself of why a particular task can be done sometime later, only to be welcoming boredom to enslave you. And that doesn't come alone - time seems to have lost all its pace, yet at the end of the day you feel a whole day sped by without making much of a difference. You feel lack of control (over what! you don't know), you grudge, you loathe things that doesn't even remotely have anything to do with you. Self-confidence goes for a toss, you doubt whether you have done anything useful in your life.


So what happens when deadline-dependent-lesser-mortals like us are put in a situation where enormous amount of self-motivation is required to keep going? We know that by the time when we actually see the deadline at the far-end of our myopic vision, it would be a bit too late to react; we know self-imposed deadlines don't work; and we know the work we're supposed to do will never be more tempting than movies or cricket. So where do we go from here? Is there is a fault with the system that created this situation, or with us?

RAM aur Shame

The scene - a group of 43, a theft, and an accusation that the perpetrator(s) is from the group. I am from that group. Sufferers - 15 persons, again, from the group itself. I am one of them. A perfect setting for intra-group camps, cold shoulders, incriminating glares, and an incurable distrust. One of these two can happen - the traitor getting caught; or preventing that perfect setting from materializing any further. We chose the latter.

I don't know about what was right and what was not; what we could have done or what we should have done. All I know is when I smile at anyone from this jinxed group, I get a smile back. Maybe the person whom I smiled at was the real culprit, and may be he is not smiling back, he is in fact laughing his wits out in his head. But what I know is that I have not pointed my finger at an innocent someone.

And what have we got in return for this stance - a ridicule in every possible direct, indirect and in-indirect way; glances and jibes that suggest a pity one shows towards impotency; and not to mention the monetary and academic losses.

"Your class is all messed up, your network is very weak! I am sure, had this happened to your seniors, they would have caught the thief by now"
Messed up huh? From where I see, I see an example of a bunch of guys standing together in a crisis, fighting an urge to shout back at every contemptuous remark and instead absorbing the outburst of one and all. Network weak - yeah, we don't have back-stabbers. And seniors - please feel lucky that this didn't happen to you.

"You're a fearful lot. One of you should have stood up and said - 'lets check everyone's room. If you're clean, you shouldn't object the checking.' The stained guy would have tried to resist this idea"
Mr. James Bond, I don't think anyone would be foolish enough to keep that monty in his own room. The campus is BIG enough. And to be honest, this idea didn't strike us at all. Know why - we don't believe it's one of us. Now, even if that turns out to be one of us, I would very very happy to get disappointed then. I would be happy that this was not my suspicion. I would be happy that I trusted my group by default.

"Things would never be the same for you now. Your academics are going to suffer, you'll probably never even know about the facilities and resources your seniors benefited from, and what's more - your juniors will suffer too."
Why do you think we don't understand the gravity of the situation? What pleasure do you derive from telling such things time and again, with a half-mocking-half-pitying smile?
No one can deny that at least, there are 40 innocent souls in this class, yet if you want to go ahead executing everyone, then fine, DO IT. And what's more - you have already made up your mind to mess with the next 40-something batch. Great!

If someday it gets proved that the guilty was not from this class, know what we will do??
We will forgive you, with the same half-mocking-half-pitying smile, this time on our faces.

Khul jaa.... book book

Recently, one of my profs Mr. Bean (name changed due to survival reasons) announced in the class that in this term the exams won't be open-book as they were in the last term. We will have conventional closed-book exams this time. I didn't know whether to be happy or sad on hearing this. So here's a little analysis -


Advantages of open-book exams:

• If you manage to identify the chapter correctly, your blind shot will at least hit the zone, if not the target.
  
  
• You only have to exchange the page numbers, instead of the whole answers.
  
  
• It’s easier to pretend that you are thinking when you are groping into a book. This comes in handy when the subject prof is invigilating as well.
  
  
• At least, now you can pass time for three hours, which again, can impress the invigilator.
  
  
• You can start preparing for the re-exam then and there.

Disadvantages:

• The questions asked are either unsolved exercises or the author himself would have proclaimed that to be “out of the scope of this book”.
  
  
• You don’t get questions like “define this” where you can write “the blah blah of the blah blah is called new blah new blah” and secure 2 marks.
  
  
• You feel empowered to do nothing. You can’t even make the excuse “I was not prepared, else I would have..“ to yourself.
  
  
• You have to buy the book.

And the result is - I am still confused. How the heavens does the prof manages to do this every single time!!!