Fauja Singh : 89 :: Dhruv Chandras : ?

Too many vows made... only a few of them kept.

I will run a half marathon in two years and a marathon three years from now. I state so publicly so that I may be held accountable.

BT Acumen 2008

The north-zone round of BT Acumen 08 got over today. IIFT put up a decent show. We won the debate and came third in the quiz.

Praveen and I were representing IIFT in the quiz. We fell short of the first place by a margin of 10 points (at 55, we were just one correct question away). We got off to a slow start and tho' we caught up later on, the initial gap made a difference in the end. I thought all teams were good, and as such, it was a well fought quiz. IIML and FMS were tied at 65, and finally IIML went thru because FMS hit the buzzer and missed.

Sad, considering that we had done quite well for ourselves in the prelims. Sadder still, coz had we won we would have made a clean sweep, and also had the chance to accompany Anchal and Rahul to Bombay for the National Finals. (Anchal had already reached the national finals last year with Arka, who was the winner the year before that. Let's hope he keeps the tradition alive.)

After we lost, my same-name loomie scrapped me this today...

ecclesiastes 9:11
"I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happens to them all."

Incidentally

Popular School Legends

I suppose every school has some teacher who makes absent minded mistakes leading to funny sentences. These funny sentences are quoted around and soon other funny sentences are also attributed to the concerned teacher. This is how school legends are made, and we get a huge list of extremely funny sentences apparently originating from this famous leader, when in fact, only one or two might actually be his/hers.

We had a teacher in school who used to teach us drawing, and sometimes Hindi as well. This is how the legend went.

Once while she was taking attendence, she ordered, "Absent boys raise your hands !". Another time, while teaching geometric shapes, she shouted, "Now draw a straight circle !" On a particularly stuffy day, when we students had forgotten to open the windows, she announced, "Boys, you should not be sitting in such conditions. Open the air and let the windows come in !". Then while telling us about her family, "I have two daughters, and both are girls !". I know for fact that she had only one child, and that too a son. (I had once met them at the railway station, a couple of years after I passed out from school, and we had chatted for some time.)

A little while ago I mentioned a few of these witticisms to my room-mate, and he claimed that his school too had a teacher to whom some of the very same quotes were attributed. He had one priceless gem to the above list. "Children, the scooter is under standing the tree !".

I will end this post with the only quote of this teacher which I have heard first hand. She was a pretty lenient teacher, but she used to loath squabbling children, and used to make such students go and stand outside the class. At least once in every class she used utter her trademark utterance, namely, "If any complaint and both will get punishment !".

I passed my B.Tech

Yeah, that's right. The S8 results have come out, and I am officially an engineer. I am now Dhruv Chandras, B.Tech, CSE. Ha !

CSE stands for Computer Science and Engineering. B.Tech for Bachelor of Technology - a more fundoo sounding version of your regular BE. Instead of being plain engineers, we are now technocrats. A few years later, we will have B.Inno and B.Entre degrees.. (For innovators and entrepreneurs..)

I don't know why so many people today do engineering.

Actually, I do.

You see, it is a very respectable degree to have. From the earliest times, engineers were respected for their logical brains and innovative capabilities. They were the people who actually made things that you and me used. Houses, cars, appliances, etc. In my grand-dad's era, an engineering degree was sufficient to make one's way to the top of the organisation. (Well, it was sufficient for him !)

Also, for someone from a middle class background, it fills some solid bricks in the wall of your resume.

In 4 years, you learn stuff that you would probably never ever use again in your life. I want to do an MBA. Most engineers want to do an MBA. And even those who pursue MS degrees rarely end up applying what they learnt for 6 years. But then, the BE/BTech is the stepping stone to that coveted MS / MBA degree, which in turn is a gateway to lucrative career options, mainly in the upper echelons of management. If you look at all the management schools today, they are clogged with engineers. (Mind you, the directors of all these b-schools have tried to remedy this to diversify the intake, and they have tried hard. Short of setting quotas, they have done everything else. The percentage of engineers in the batch has remained unchanged ! Shows how many desperate engineers are out there trying make their BE/BTech worthwhile by capping it off with an MBA !)

I remember my school days. If you were among the top 10, then medicine or engineering was THE way for you. At least that's what you were told. If you were even decently good at studies, you were pushed into engineering. Most 10th standard board merit rankers used to take PCMB (i.e. Physics, Chemistry, Maths And Biology). Why - I asked a friend who had come in the SSC Top 50. To keep my options open, he said. Meaning, medicine ya engineering. He ended up an engineer, or to be more precise, a technocrat. I remember how shocked everyone was when one of our school toppers, Rahul Daga, choose to do commerce. He was very focussed though, and ended up topping his insti.

So, from the learning and application point of view, it is a totally useless degree to have. And most "engineers" will agree with me. But, as I said before, from the overall perspective, it is a pretty good, and SAFE degree to have. Besides the aforementioned points of a) being respectable b) being a good resume-filler c) being a passport to a good life, the BE/BTech degree has some more good things to offer.

For example, the 4 years of my B.Tech life provided me with innumerable opportunities for personality development, expansion of the mind and exposure to various people, cultures and situations. It gave time to think and to find out what I wanted to do in life. It toughened me up and gave me a chance to be more independent. Without doubt, I learnt a lot of stuff (mostly non-academic!!).

Thus the degree has been a great 'filler'. However, I would like to add that a large chunk of the benefits I mentioned in the previous para were possible only due to living a hostel life in a strange land, with students representing practically every part of India.

If, before you select your under-grad course, you know exactly what you want to do, then pursue that in a very specific way. Don't waste your time doing engineering. If however, you don't know what you want to do, or want to give yourself more time, then pursue an engineering degree by all means. However, do try to do it from an IIT/NIT/any other prestigious univ with a vibrant hostel life. It makes all the difference in the world.

What started out on a satirical note became a little preachy-sermonish in between, and ended on a slightly senti note ! The joyride/ordeal of B.Tech is over. Amen. Anyway, expect a lot more posts revolving around the B.Tech theme in the next few weeks. I have a lot of ideas... !

! Re@!!y |-|@te t|-|0$e !@#$%^&*

I hate it when these people change their names on orkut, either to some silly sentence, or to hacker font. It's impossible to search for such guys when you want to scrap them, and it's very tough to find out who they are if they scrap you.

It certainly Wofs

Every now and then, I come across some really good site.. which I madly go through for a couple of days. The latest is itwofs.com.

I love bollywood music, both old and new. Ever since I heard Mama Mia, and then heard Mil Gaya, Hum Ko Saathi Mil Gaya, and realised that it was a straight rip off, I have always been curious to know how many more of our tunes are copies.

Itwofs.com, pronounced as "I two Ef Es", (Inspirations for Indian Film Songs), is a site dedicated to not only digging up such keede, but also providing the .rm clips of both versions. See for yourselves how haraamkhor our music directors are, is their motto.

Do go through it.

B.Tech NIT Calicut (01) - The Initiation

Most of us still vividly remember our first few days out here. Barring maybe a couple of exceptions, nobody had stayed in a hostel before. So, there was a lot of curiosity, apprehension as well as excitement among the 300 odd new inmates of the hostel. You could sense it in the air. It was tangible.

There was a lot of paperwork to be done before you were allotted your room. You also had to buy some essential items from the in-hostel co-operative store. 1 Kurl-on mattress (the pillow came free), 1bucket with a cover, 1 mug, 1 soap case, 2 ropes, 1 mirror, 1 broom, 1 dust-pan, 1 dust-bin, 5 hangars, 10 clips - these were the items I bought. I had purchased all toiletries beforehand.

I was quite pleased when I saw the room - it was pretty spacious and very airy. 3 parallel beds, 3 study tables with drawers, one beside each bed, and 3 cupboards. And yes, 3 metallic chairs. 3 students per room. When I entered the room, one plump stocky curly haired bespectacled boy was sitting on the middle bed with his father. Over his head, I saw a rope strung, with colourful faded boxers fluttering under the fan. The bed farthest from the door had apparently been booked too - there was a Kurl-on on it. The first bed was mine then.

We exchanged the Hi's and Hello's.... he was Maharashtrian too. We got acquainted. Started talking. His name was Amit - and he was speaking in a monotone. Reeling statistics after statistics. NITs and their rankings... which JEE rank would translate to which branch in which IIT... which AIEEE rank would get you X branch in Y NIT... what were the placements of NIT Calicut.. what were the quotas for each state... and then some more arbitrary statistics. I was speechless.

All the students didn't come at once. It was a trickle that started around a week before the commencement date, which soon become a flood a day before commencement. That day was a Sunday. I kept meeting new people and made a lot of new acquaintances. I had a little problem in the first week - it was hard to penetrate that Malayali accent. I should say those, because there were atleast 3 different accents. Non-mallus weren't the only people who had an issue with the accents. My other roomie, Koshy, confessed that in the first few days he couldn't understand the Malayam spoken by some of the other Mallus. I also had problems with the Hindi spoken by the UPites and the B-boys. The Kolkata hindi was fine, except that they used 'hum' instead of 'main'.

In the days when NIT was REC, especially in the 90s, the scenario as far as ragging was concerned was pretty bad. Apparently the first years used to be subjected to pretty brutal and humiliating stuff, and the occasional police intervention was not uncommon. To ensure safety of the first years, they were all cooped into one hostel, with a guard at the single entrance. The ragging wasn't that bad now, but the system continued. A-hostel was the fortress of the campus, that safe haven were you could roam about without worrying that some senior would come and start threatening you. You could go out only for 3 purposes - attending lectures, getting a haircut and paying your monthly hostel and mess dues.

We settled down. Formed groups. They soon got realigned along state lines as the seniors got in touch with us and started the ragging. But that's another story. Lectures were a let down. I sat on the first bench the first day. Wednesday. By Friday I was on the last bench - a backbencher... and I have remained one for the rest of my B.Tech life.