30/01/2010 The Windy Hostel, Indian Institute of Consultancy, Delhi: At 11.05 a.m. today morning a horrifying accident occurred because of gross negligence by engineers at Windy Hostel, IICd. The hostel had been undergoing renovation for over a year and work had recently started on a new block today. Students were still residing in the 4-story hostel on the top 2 floors while the bottom floors had been vacated.
In order to complete his work on time, the contractor had allegedly told the workers to demolish the lower portion of the building and start renovation work on it, without considering whether the already considerably weakened, 40 year old structure could take the weight. The inevitable occurred, with the top two floors crashing down and burying and damaging many laptops.
In the words of one of the surviving students (who has requested to remain unnamed) "They were destroying the doors beneath our room and the balcony start moving wildly, deflecting as much as 1 cm. We ran to stop them, but the [expletive deleted] workers refused to budge."
The maintenance secretary of the hostel was allegedly gallivanting somewhere in East Delhi during the incident, meeting some foreigner. On being contacted he replied that he had an urgent meeting with someone he could not name -- a fact that has been noted by the investigating authorities who have taken him into custody. We managed to get a statement from the Chief Investigator, Mr. M. Adi "We have not ruled out the involvement of the maintenance secretary, and are also considering the foreign angle", obliquely referring to the recent statement by the President of United States of Pakerica, Mr. Obama Bin Bush.
Being a holiday, most of the students were sitting in their rooms during the accident, apparently trying to block their internet access so as to be able to prepare for their upcoming examinations. A quote by one of the IICians from our archives: "Our professors believe that we can obtain everything we need to learn by surfing the internet -- in fact they maintain a check to see that all students download at least 100MB of data every day to ensure they are spending enough time on the internet. We have learnt a lot but it becomes difficult to adhere to this rule during our minor exams so trying to outsmart our professors and blocking our internet access is a favourite pass-time for IICians during the exam season."
Most of the students were taken by surprise as the building came crashing down on them, and more than 50 laptops have been reported missing and are assumed to still be buried under the rubble, while 10 damaged (2 critically) laptops have been recovered. One or 2 lucky laptops survived on their battery life and were discovered as they were playing heavy rock and could be heard through the concrete. Worried students at IIC have kept a candle light vigil outside the laptop repair shop, with the very best technicians of the top laptop manufacturers including Nosy Baio, Sell and Compact working tirelessly to save the laptops. More technicians are expected to arrive from around the world soon. Excavation work to locate the remaining laptops is also underway.
Many IICians are still in shock, with many roaming around in a daze. A particularly sad case is that of a few students, who, being deprived of access to their laptops and the Facebook live feed appear to have devolved to animals -- with one imitating a bull, another squealing in French like a pig and the worst affected keeps trying to fly off the top of the hostel and is constantly restrained by his friends. It is currently not clear whether he has delusions about being a bird or being the Man of Steel (both being able to fly).
What has made this accident even more unique is the fact that there have been various reports of the accident being a complete fabrication and fallacy as people have allegedly communicated with the missing residents of the hostel (using their own laptops). In the public interest, we reiterate that the accident has happened and any such rumours must be disregarded as utter nonsense.
There have been suspicions of paranormal activity at the site of the accident because of these apparent messages and the top investigative news channel in India -- IndiaTV -- has sent its best reporter to find out the truth. The initial findings of the reporter will be presented on tomorrow's primetime show at 8 p.m. -- "IIC ke khooni engineer". Insiders (who wish to remain unnamed) have said that such a tragic parting of nerds with their computers can cause their ghosts to linger on till they manage to complete their last wish: to update their status messages. Only then will they be able to pass on to the afterlife. As always, there are many skeptics who have denounced this theory, claiming that the ghosts need to play one last LAN game of AoE.
In a surprise turn of events, famed teen impersonator and actor Aamir K. and ex-IICian and MBA B. Chetan came together in support of the missing laptops. They said that they has put aside all differences to be able to garner even more publicity for their film/book as people had stopped discussing their recent disagreements.
Looking through the hits on my blog from Search, I noticed a few based on "how to study like an IITian". Frankly speaking -- I'm sure there are a lot of misconceptions floating around out there about how IITians study (further spread by the infamous 5 pointers) -- so in the interests of improving the level of information on the internet and in public interest, allow me to elaborate.
The Golden Rule, The First Commandment and the Code by which every IITian must live by is never do anything before the last minute. If the presentation is due at 13.00, completing it before 12.30 is blasphemy and before 12.00 means that the concerned IITian has been abducted by aliens and replaced by a doppleganger. Lab reports -- even those involving 30 pages of writing, 10 pages of calculations and 20 graphs each with atleast 50 points (all of which must be drawn exclusively by hand) must never be started before the night before it is due. You get my drift, I assume.
Those who actually buy books are an endangered species -- fast dying out. Books are arranged by jugaad, through seniors, not returning books to the insti library, from the hostel library, photocopies, not buying at all. And so on.
Class Notes are an alien concept conceived by the same alien dopplegangers I mentioned earlier. And are photocopied and distributed throughout. Repeatedly.
Reading room is a euphemism for something else involving socializing, ornithology, etc. Ex(hibition) Hall is often mentioned with an extra s appended on the right word. The only way to actually accomplish anything is to sit facing the wall, with a pair of headphones. And maybe blinkers.
Another phenomenon often observed is that group study is extremely popular. I always doubt the efficacy of this method, though people I know are extremely successful in following this method. Including my room-mate and batch-mates. I have failed miserably in earning marks through group study.
And of course -- time devoted to study. If we did devote as much time to studies as the 5(!?) pointers did, we would've been 9 pointers. Without the (excessive) blessings of the Gods and daily devotion periods. Self study is something you fit in between extra-currics, video games, sleep (4 hours or so) and classes. If you do.
Hope that helps. Yours as always.
--Me.
How to study like an IITian
A bit of background first: I joined Yahoo! Bangalore in May for a 10 weeks summer vacation internship. And my first industry experience.
So: what did I work on? Stuff that involved extensive use of a keyboard, monitor (2 in fact) and a touchpad (occasionally even a mouse). Apart from that, I'm not sure what I'm allowed to speak about, so to avoid any unnecessary complications, I'll leave it at that.
Let's start at the beginning, shall we. Day zero: Go and see the Y! building from outside. Getting into the business park was a bit difficult, so didn't try venturing into the building itself. Day one: Arrive at 8.30 in the morning, wondering what I'll be doing. Completely dressed up in formals, of course. I mean, which company doesn't expect shirts, trousers and black shoes? A lot of them, apparently. Including Y!.
9.30: My introduction to Y! . A 2 hour presentation followed by an intro to my team. I am completely amazed by the office -- themes for each floor; Cafe Coffee Day machines on every corner; neat and clean cubicles. Even better than what I'd expected after having seen the Adobe office in Delhi during India's first WordCamp. My computer wasn't quite ready yet, so I was given a quick introduction to search engines, the structure, etc. by my Team Leader and Manager. Which, in itself, was pretty cool. My computer was set up by the end of the day, but getting it to run was a pretty big problem without support.
Finally, near the end of the day -- it was working. I quickly set up/was helped in setting up my email, Cube No., etc etc. And customizing my desktop. So I was set to reading about a lot of stuff maintained by Y!, which I would be working on. And this kind of went on for the first week -- orientation, reading up a lot of stuff, presentations and clarifications by my team leader; and I click my way through to Friday, setting up a dev environment (customizing Vim, etc.) and so on.
Come Friday, and my team's changed. Which was a bit strange -- but there wasn't anything I could have managed to do wrong by then, so I wasn't that worried. And I probably shouldn't have been, from what I've seen of Y!. ( Y! is so much easier to type than any pronouns, or the company name.)
Week 2: I'm introduced to my new Manager and Team Leader -- my computer's still the same till now. And then I start reading up on new stuff that I'll be using/working on. Re-run 1st week, with a different context. Oh, and I also move to a laptop; as the desktop hasn't been removed yet, I start using both the Desktop's huge monitor and my laptop's average one together. The downside to a laptop -- I'm stuck with Windows; the up-side? I can carry it to conferences and all. And finally, near the end of the week, I'm told about what I'll be working on. Something or the other.
Week 3 onwards is kind of a blur -- I walk into office anywhere between 8 and 11, stay till anywhere between 1 and 3 (am), learn a lot -- both related to computers and pool -- annoy my team leader with strange questions related to the environment I'm working in. And have fun. Weekends are spent crawling around malls looking for books (Landmark being my favourite), having iced coffee at Gloria Jeans Coffee -- and wondering about the requirement of weekends in general for certain kinds of jobs. Occasionally I would be bored enough to walk into office, get some work done, play some pool. Also joined the gym during this time, and kept a goatee. And a moustache.
Somewhere around the middle, I gave my first presentation. I even spent half the night photoshopping 2 flickr images to make a nice image for my debugging tool. It was during this time that I started walking into office at around 10 and leaving anywhere between 1 and 3 am.
I distinctly remember the first night I spent at office. I had initially planned to leave at 11, as I needed some help from someone across timezones. By the time I was ready to catch a cab, it was pouring heavily; and the solitary cab that had managed to reach the office was already overcrowded -- I turned, went to the Cafe, bought a Red Bull (my first) and marched back to my cube. And worked till 3 am. Followed by 2 hours of pool with some other insomniacs (and people who had come back from home 'cause of power cuts). And then some more work till 7 am. After which I caught an auto home.
I spent 1 or 2 more nights at office after that day. There always used to be a few people around. The longest I stayed at office was some 30 hours or so -- during the hack day. I brought along a change of clothes, a towel and other toiletries -- stayed up throughout the night, worked on my hack (http://kunal-b.in/Tangent2) and had more concentrated doses of caffeine than I had probably ever had before. I'm sad to say that my hack bombed and didn't even reach the top 40, but it was an interesting experience.
Life went on, office, various malls et al. Landmark, novels and comics being my primary source of entertainment.
Perhaps too soon, I reached the end of my intern. I gave my final presentation -- which was well received (or I hope it was) -- and spent a week adding a bit more stuff to the final part of my project and handing over whatever I had done to a FTE Y!. And then, back.
After such a long, stream of consciousness typish post, a short summary: Went to Y!, set up camp in office, had fun, did some work, made quite a few friends, played pool and came back to college (but didn't want to).
Interning @ Yahoo!
I have managed to survive two years of life at IIT.
I feel I've always been here.
I feel like I joined yesterday.
Now that that's cleared up let me review what all has been done to me and done by me in IIT. Very frankly, I've changed a lot over the past two years. The first, and biggest change that came around was -- from one month into IIT life -- I've been wishing I had not been selected in JEE.
Other stuff includes losing 18 kg of weight and almost 10 in of waist, becoming extremely adept at putting things off till the last possible moment and still completing (most of them) on time, losing all fear of examinations and tests after being subjected to all sorts imaginable, learning more about site designing and Photoshopping than I ever had, playing in concrete, mud and other stuff, carrying out pages full of calculations without forgetting where I started off, running around a hockey field daily for a year, playing Table Tennis in the dead of the night (3.00 am to be precise) ...
... taking part in Rendezvous, Tryst, Literati and a plethora of other competitions, getting an intern, applying for interns, missing treats, attending treats, giving treats ...
... considering night and day as abstract concepts -- good to think about theoretically -- but not practical ...
... attempting to talk to girls during my socials -- and failing/succeeding ('s a long story), filling my resume with a long list of PORs and going mad doing all the work that requires, surviving for months with exceptionally long hair and beard, giving vivas, interviews, getting blasted and praised by professors ...
... learning to play the guitar, keep time, quizzing, occasionally debating, word games and cryptic crosswords, running a library...
... blogging.
Midpoint.
Life at IIT can be directly compared with one long, never ending race composed of many mini-targets to be achieved along the way. The loads of exams merely act as speedbumps -- cover them properly and you just might get ahead; or, you can trip and fall behind.
The UGLY: Life just before exams. Minors / majors are around the corner; preparation levels are generally at an all time low. Professors are doing their level best to complete their syllabus -- while simultaneously threatening us with extra classes. All the extra-curricular activities you tend to be involved in? Well, this is the time to do all that last minute, time-consuming work which just suddenly seems to pop up.
You can clearly tell the mental health and preparation levels of people around by their greetings. People who nod, and perhaps even manage a small smile -- well, they're going to ace the exams (having completed preparations 10 times already) [This breed is almost extinct; whenever you believe that the last one has died [passed] out, another pops up]. Most of us will manage a non-committal grunt -- we've covered some stuff, but still have that assignment to do and that chapter to revise, etc. etc. Those who don't (or rather, can't) notice you -- pity them, for they are doing their best to avoid slaughter.
The BAD: IIT during exams. The only redeeming point during the exams is the night messing where you tend to get decent food from the mess (I agree, that's an oxymoron if there ever was one, but it's true). Secondly, you can finally concentrate on a single subject at a time, without worrying about those before and after.
Student behaviour during this period has already been extensively cataloged by me in an earlier post which also has supporting illustrations.
The GOOD: IIT after exams. The difference between IIT before and after exams can be basically summed up by comparing a graveyard (with a hint of zombies) to a playground. People more or less tend to go crazy during this pleasant purgatory -- after the exams and before the results. Very few institute rules remain unbroken; very few methods of relaxation are not indulged in.
This period lasts for a very short time, as most professors seem to love to ger their hands off papers as fast as possible. They quickly check everything, note the marks in their various lists and hand us our heads on paper platters.
Afterwards, it's almost time for the next set of exams. And, not unlike Stephen King's The Dark Tower, everything starts again.
IITD tGtB&tU 1: Life during, before and after exams
For some reason, people seem to be pretty interested in the inner workings at IIT. Most of them being IITians, of course. So, I've decided to blog a bit about IIT -- just to say thanks for what is great; rant away at what I dislike and always have something to blog about in general.
My father suggested that I try to write a book on IIT once I pass out; that being too difficult a task for me, I'll happily settle for a few (small) blog posts here.
Off hand, I know I'll be blogging about the hostel life, the institute buildings, the internet connection, lan gaming, maybe studies, etc. etc. I hope some of the posts turn out to be mildly interesting.
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