Hooked Up....!!!!

I was one of the unlucky ones in hostel 3 who got access to the BIT LAN quite some time after the rest had. Almost two months later. All this while i was cursing the administration and the various departments involved for denying me this facility. My joy obviosly knew no bounds when they finally got it working. So what if it was bang in the middle of the mid-sems?...who cares?....i've given 7 mid sems and it wont matter if i screw up the 8th one. I remember i footed it all the way to techno-point from the inners to get a piece of lan wire crimped (hope thats the right spelling) and 'Hook' my comp onto the LAN.

Little did i know what effect this would have on my life....i would be 'Hooked' onto something i cant give up easily. Sleeping hours would shorten from a lazy 9 hours to merely 4 hours. I would be chatting for hours with people i just barely knew. Share some of my deepest emotions with closer ones. I would barely have time to see my best friends who lived in the nearby hostel. I would talk to another who lived in the next room through dc++. I would browse this forum for hours on end until my eyes hurt. I would play games on the LAN and sulk the entire day if i lost one, and paste a smile on my face if i won.

In short, this LAN thingy now determines my interactions with friends, oher people, it uses up all my time, it controls my moods, hell, it controls
my life. Other colleges have had LAN since ages, and we can see our future if we look at these colleges. People don't go home in the holidays to visit their parents coz there's no LAN there...they miss classes... flunk... they don't even know the name of the person who lives two rooms away from them. I mean people calling me by my nick is cool...but after a while it starts to bug me. It's not like there are no good points about having a LAN...we can network....share ideas...get to know new people (virtually ofcourse)...and other stuff. But at the cost of becoming socially defunct?...is this worth it?

I dont like what this LAN is doing to my life...but you know what? I cant
live without it...!! Seriously i am HOOKED !!

I am grateful....

That day is vividly etched in my memory. I remember clearly the ride in the auto that brought us (me and my parents) to BIT. It was a bright sunny afternoon, and after a two day train journey I should have been exhausted but somehow I wasn’t. I was too excited for trifles like that. I watched amazed as we passed the long hostels. The perfect facade of the BIT institute building emerged out of nowhere and offered a sudden breath-taking view. I hadn’t experienced anything so imposing before. Whoever says that he wasn’t awestruck when he first entered BIT is lying. I was astounded too, and though I acted cool about it all, I saw being here as a culmination of my efforts of the last few years.

Somewhere in between the pride in their glances to me, my parents must have harbored a deep concern for me. As such, amid the sense of achievement there was a silent under-current of apprehension. It was then that I decided, I will belittle all the sorrows this place gives me and herald all the joy I am afforded. "That should be easy", I said to myself. I couldn’t have imagined how hard it would be.

The first rude shock was that I was to share a small, nay, tiny room with my roommate. (Looking back it wasn’t that bad). The ordeal of the admission process, complicated further by the gutkha eating, incompetent babus and peons in the offices. One of the first things to strike me about this place was that security guards were all over the place, and were getting things done...they were more helpful then the officials. “There goes meritocracy out of the window”, I thought. I reconciled myself by saying that this is probably the case with most colleges...chalta hain...little did I realize now how often I have to say that in my stay here. It was the same with the food, the way classes were conducted, the labs, the curriculum...hey wait a minute...I couldn’t name one thing that this college offered that was better than the others...everything was either as bad or worse.

I hate to look back and say “If only…”, but sometimes we have to and learn to admit our mistakes. So I think sometimes, was it a mistake to come here? Had my dreams been shattered mercilessly? I got the answer eventually. Education is not only the gain of knowledge and a tool to win a livelihood...no, it is much more than that...this place gave me amazing friends, I came in contact with great seniors and juniors, I learnt from them, I learnt from great men like Mr. B.B. Pant, this was what this college had given me. It has taught me how to live, amid chaos and confusion, how to carve a niche for myself; it showed me who I really was. These things people say, are achievable in other institutions too, but I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. All I know is that I wouldn’t be the same had I been elsewhere. I am what I am today because of these years in college and I am grateful for that.

Bored in Goa?.....at this time of the year?

Yeah you got that right...its official, i am bored at this time of the year in Goa. HOW? you ask?...come to think of it for people who live in Goa this time of the year is the most...umm whats the word....sluggish. You see we are a lot of people who lead a laidback life...just give us our fish-curry rice (and the essential fenny) and we dont care about anything else in the world. So this time of the year when something like a million tourists come traipsing into our serene environments we do get bitten by the partying bug, but actually we are going, "Oh no, not again....". By the time Christmas is over we are through with all the parties and crave for our personal space again. That for me is my computer and my T.V. (actually only espn and star sports on T.V)....so when the computer motherboard gets screwed and the cable operator refuses to transmit espn and star-sports, it is the perfect recipe for boredom. A huge chunk of my friends are rendered useless since they are studying for their exams (MBBS), starting on the 2nd Jan., it is me and my fish-curry rice all alone. Now that my computer has been fixed, things have started looking up again, and since Swetha and her friends (who came to Goa for a few days) rid me of a whole day of boredom, i feel like myself again.

A few mood swings i had in these past few days------

stumped, stupified!! : IIFT entrance exam
dissinterested : while studying for the end semesters
relief : when exams got over
dismay : when drogba and lampard scored two wonder goals to win the match for chelsea
more dismay : Man Utd lose 0-1 to West Ham!
Joy : Man Utd win 3-1 against Reading!
more Joy! : chelsea drew 2-2.
Indifferent : didnt make the IIFT cut-off

but overall i've been bored........
p.s. A special mention for Swetha, Bhavya, Divya and Shilpa...hope you enjoyed your stay in goa

What a "mess"......!!

One of the biggest reasons for the almost hysterical joy of a BITIAN when he enters the final year is the allotment of the 'inner' hostels.Now these are a set of 'elite' hostels meant for final year BE students.Salient features include single occupancy rooms, and the bathrooms actually having a clean tiled floor....believe me these are a quantum leap from the 'outer' hostel where the pigeon hole principal does not aply....since each room is a pigeon hole and there are two pigeons in each...coming back to the point...we were extremely ecstatic when we made our annual nomadic journey from one hostel to another...and apart from the salient features mentioned above, we looked forward to the best part of it all....THE FOOD!!!....oh the food has always been so excellent and for the first few weeks we were actually gaining weight for the first time in our BITIAN days!....

Did ya note the past tense?...yeah thats because its no longer excellent...i wonder wether it is food at all any longer....what transpired within two weeks?...how could there be such a drastic change overnight?....well someone in the administration suddenly realized that "whoa!!...i need to change the system of 'extra's'...the mess has become a restaraunt"....the system of extra's was simple...there will be a basic meal on top of which everyone can order dishes of his choice and each person will be charged individually for that...now the system is like there will only be the basic meals and everyone will have to have that stuff no matter what...no choice...no extra dishes...now you would think that we will be paying less huh?...nope!...dont think so...here are a few points i want to make...(i hope someone out there in the administration reads this...and his heart melts)

1) In the morning we can have either of 2 eggs or an apple or a glass of milk...what is that all about?...how do these things equate?...doesnt make any sense to me....if anyone wants to have 2 apples he doesnt get them even if the apples get wasted in the end...

2) We can have our eggs only boiled not and omelette...huh?...whats that all about?

3) If i dont mind paying extra money for better food then why should someone else have a problem with that?...

4) Why should i pay for a meal that i didn't have?

5) The reason for scrapping the extra system was that the mess workers used to put stuff on the students account and pocket a few bucks on the sly....dude...i would rather have those poor guys enjoy a good meal once in a while than someone else higher up the hierarchy.

There are many more things that annoy me about the changes in our mess...but i realise there is no use....i hope some official on the admonistration reads this and does something...why do pople always change things that were going along smoothly in the first place?...there's some food for thought...(sorry for the cliche)...

p.s. Recent Developments :
The mess workers recently placed an order for 14 kgs of chicken for about 28 people....believe me i ate the chicken and the amount served was no where near to the 1/2 kg per person mark......Now the student mess committee....(which is constituted to bring to light such discrepancies)....reported the matter to the Dean-Students "Welfare" (note the inverted commas)....not suprisingly no action was taken against the mess workers....the entire committee resigned after this humiliation...

Who's war is it....?

The economic boom that started in the '90's was a fairy tale (apart from the dotcom bust of 2000) too good to be true. The forces that were to be, were brewing with something sure for. The unprecedented globalization drive was silently fueling the arms race of upcoming economics like Israel, India apart from also opening up vast oppurtunities for terrorist organizations and the Hizbollah for procuring arms. Now Israel has always been heralded as the champion of combating guerilla warfare of the Hamas and the Hizbollah. They used to carry out stealth attacks of the their own to strike at the very heart of these outfits. But the Big Brother (USA) was restless for some sort of control over the gulf region, and having taken care of it's biggest threat in the region (Saddam)....they continued empowering their ally with arms.
Today Isreal has signed up for so much arsenal that it has no option but to use it!It is but natural for Israel to act like a pampered kid.

Having said all this I firmly believe that the new-age battlefield is different than that of the olden days. Today's wars will be fought not on the actual "ground zero"...but in boardrooms and in international conventions and meetings. The most powerfull countries in the world will be those with the largest corporations, and with the best technologies and resources.

In retrospect i think the world has always been like this has it not? US and Japan are where they are today because of their companies and technological advances....way back in the 17th century British colonization began with the zeal of the British East India Company to expand its markets and have access to more resources....what does this mean for INDIA?

I feel that India should not be bothered over it's neighbour and the Kashmir problem. India is miles ahead economically and Indian corporations will soon become too large and too important for anyone to cross India's path..........



p.s. Update on the campus placements in my college:-
32 days....41 companies....~700 offers...~70 double offers...and more to come!