Ohk, i don’t have anything to write really, nothing new seems to be happening anywhere for me to express myself through the black keys that are straining my fingers. I just realized that i had a blog and i have a duty towards it, which is to continuously keep feeding it my rants. Anyway since i have begun this, i better put something to it.

So this Sunday marked the end of a very long week for me, highlighted by go karts, assignments, reports, online tests and a lots of searching (google obviously). Though it started really well with the 20 laps of high speed go kart racing (which even though i paid for the 20 laps for 7 people, felt thrilling!)..it went pretty much downhill from there. It was like the karts provided the adrenaline to make it to the end of the week in sane condition, as the next couple of days went into googling everything about recession for our TRW report (don’t bother with what TRW is) followed by some serious data editing and manipulations which took up most of the time. though i did learn some new things about recession, but frankly it didn’t really fascinate me.

After some serious two days which involved lots of last minute running and convincing, we made it through the report and to the next level in the week, which was named “ES assignment” (again don’t bother what that is). It was an online assignment which we were given 2 hours to solve and it was really one of the more memorable moments in the week to see people shouting across hostels to see whose question matched with whom. That level was completed at 11:10, 10 minutes later than the time given to us, but really we (that is to say 9 people in 1 room who were doing the assignment simultaneously) had no time to really bother as the final level loomed in the distance, the CP online test (we engineers do pride ourselves in making abbreviations for everything, which only we understand), which was scheduled for sunday.

As some might be knowing, the final level for anything is the toughest and this case wasn’t different as we spent 1 hour pondering over the the greek presented to us and labelled ‘question paper’. The only silver lining in this level was perhaps that the last line stands for the majority of campus, and of course the fact that i felt most relaxed in the week after we were finally asked to switch off our monitors and hide our work behind the black screen reflecting my free face. And thus ended my week long game, testing cunning ,survival skills, hand eye coordination (??) and ya a bit of gray cell concentration in my brain too.

Also I’d like to add that based on some valuable suggestions , i have tried to reduce the length of my posts, though i don’t seem to have done a good job. So anyway i better wind up, its not really a great confidence booster to talk about your disastrous endeavours.

Hope you had a better week!

IIT's IIM's follow BITS

Okay, the topic might be a little biased owing to my bitsian nature, but no one can deny the fact the two premier institutes in the country have gone the BITS way. Kapil Sibal’s new proposal makes it mandatory for students to have a an 80% board percentage, and IIM’s seem to be going online (you can read the article here), something that BITS did long ago (both of them). I wont argue about the online test system because its high time we did that, but is 80% percentage really necessary for any institute??

First of all as an IIT aspirant myself who has given both boards and JEE, i can say that even though syllabus of both boards and JEE is more or less the same, there is a huge difference in the level of the course. While boards keep to the basics of without going much into derivations and details, JEE expects us to know the in depth analysis of each topic we study. Therefore it is safe to say that a person preparing for JEE wont find it difficult to get 80% in boards because basically the concepts are the same. And if a person is good enough to clear IIT, boards should be a cakewalk for him. Moreover, mostly the board question pattern remains same every year and it is easy to predict the questions. So i don’t particularly think that keeping the 80% cut off for JEE will drastically change the quality of students getting into IIT, unless you take boards too lightly and write the exams with too much overconfidence. (which happened to a guy In my college, who scored 350 in BITSAT ,the entrance test for BITS but failed to clear the 80% cut off as he took the boards for granted and therefore had to join in the second semester. Though the fact that he couldn’t score 80% in boards doesnt make him less worthy but does make him lose a semester.)

However i do feel that the cut off criteria will certainly create unnecessary pressure on the students. Even though there was a minimum of 60% required in boards before, but that’s something that you usually get without much bother in boards. But 80% cut off will definitely be playing on the back of the minds of the aspirants. Even though i maintain that isn’t difficult to score 80% in boards, it is enough to make the students uncomfortable. They would definitely take boards more seriously and spend more time on it than they usually would. Till now, people just used to open books a day or so before the exams but now they will definitely be more watchful in boards, considering the fact that boards are now playing an important role in their dreams to crack JEE.

All in all i feel, even though it isn’t difficult for a serious JEE aspirant to score 80%in boards, it definitely does add pointless burden on the students and in the rarest of cases (as the guy in my college) costs a worthy student a seat (or a semester). Without the cut off, people can easily concentrate on their preparations for JEE which is undoubtedly more important to them than boards. Thus i prefer that cut off should be reduced to 70 or 75% as the figure 80 invariably plays with the psychology of the students and adds an additional onus of the board exams (and i speak for every institute which has this criteria, including BITS)

the week that was!!

Right so my first blog from college…after a long and quite eventful vactions at home…i am back at my college..more experienced and more armed..and as seniors this time which meant we’ll be having nervous wierdos (read 'fuchas') hovering around campus with a fear of looking around other people and we could walk around campus with an air of authority..but all that later..
So i finally enter goa…and look forward to entering my campus…i see some familiar faces already…and so finally i enter my hostel and i see my neighbour waving at me..and i respond by calling him to help pick my luggage…and during the usualties of wassup and kaisa hai and all…i finally reach my room…i open it expecting to find a neat and tidy room waiting to be burdened under the heaps of dirt to be developed over the period of time….but as you might have guessed things dont always turn up the way we want them to…what instead greeted me was a very strong smell which my friend attributed to fungus…ohk..thats a shocker…i didn’t expect such a warm welcome…its rainy season here so usually fungus does tend to creep in here…but i didn’t anticipate dealing with it on the 1st day back…but seems i had to.! As two more of my friends joined me to compare their fungus with my own…and i found out almost every person had uninvited guests to attend to…infact turned out i had relatively suffered much less damage…just a couple of shirts and a bed sheet and the pillow…! With the cleaning process over we set out to observe any changes in the campus…!
The first thing that catched our eye was that the campus was definitely greener…lots of grass and trees seem to have growed in our absence…and in the distance we also spotted a couple of windmills…which on digging further we found had been planted by the government..! many solar panels had also been installed so the campus is definitely going the green way!! Moreover our shopping centre had a new contractor…though most of it remained kinda the same still looked better…much the rest remained the same. One thing that coudnt have been ignored were the parents with their ‘wards’ the newly admitted..all nervous,excited and tensed…reminded me of my first day really! Thus ignoring them for now..we made our way to monginis..and enjoyed a little snack before coming back and chatting with new arrivals (at our hostel)..and thus went into the night..which gave us a chance to try out one of the new messes….though disappointment awaited us…much of the food was pretty much the same..but our first 15 days were in the other mess so perhaps that would be better..! and thus the day ended with almost all exhausted and sleeping early!
The next day was pretty much boring with most of it going to the registration process…with not much to do the remaining day or the other two days being paralysed by the rain we had to spent most of it indoor…talking about our vacations….our classes started from Monday and for the 1st time in 3 semesters i had a great timetableto boast about…with a adequate breaks and classes….so the week passed by normally….without much incident….a couple of interactions with beloved juniors bit ya..thats about it…! As the rains became less…it was decided to explore the city…we decided to going to fort aguada..followed by dinner…thus we booked a tavera and went to the fort…it as kinda ok…but still another item checked on the checklist….it was really hot and humid and we went there in the peak afternoon so by the time we came back all our heads were spinning like anything and went to bed early and time passed as usually as it does!!

my 2nd sem...!

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}}our official quark mascot{{

hmm...my post for 2nd sem will be relatuvely shorter than of 1st sem...primary reason being everything we did in 1st sem more or less continued in 2nd sem...even though this time it was a bit more subdued.owing to the prescence of laptop in almost every room and people discovering the wonders of our internal lan p2p software viz direct connect (dc for short) which has all the stuff you require to boast to your friends about any book you have read or movie that you have seen lately because dc has practically everything ranging from ebooks to movies to software tutorials to software

themselves to games...everything you can possibly think of!! we dont have to spend money on theaters etc which going by the look of things is pretty useful in college..(you will hardly ever see a person leaving even a 1 re tip anywhere..a penny saved is a penny earned after all)... still major point of 1st sem remained same...i mean classes,exams and our preparations (or rather lack of it) werent affected...apparently teachers were not amused by the fact that all freshers were experiencing a new virtual college (read dc) and needed time to absorb the fact that everything on dc can be viewed in 4 years (as many of my mates only spend their time on their laptops taking everything dc had to offer..unaware of outside world perhapsthinking that if he has to finish dc he will have to spend his every spare time on it)...so anyway the point to be considered was that teachers werent bothered about out lame excuses about entering classes late (that too in an unclean and just out of bed condition) because we slept late at night lost in the realm of dc.(i am mentioning dc too much aint i???)..anyway the new thing that happened in our 2nd sem were the fests...i know i talked about an inter hostel event in our 1st sem..but this was diffferent..it was national level..more fun,more events, more people (for use of a more appropriate word...girls) and more competition (ya like we cared!). so there were 3 fests in all held at different times of semester..they were (with time of occurence)...

1) a techincal fest QUARK (held 3 days before our 1st test)

2) a cultural fest WAVES ( held 4 days before our 2nd test)

3) sports fest SPREE (held 20 days before final exams..still better huh??)

btw quark is supposed to have a full form which i am dutifully not aware of ..i only know that 'q' stands for quest and 'k' for knowledge (and mind you before you draw conclusions about my attention in college affairs...this info is what less than 10% will be able to tell you)..you can come in with your entries of remaining letters bit noone really cares though i ike to call it "Quest for Upsetting All Remains of Knowledge ..i suppose spree must have a full form too though i am not sure..waves i assure you does not have any meaning behind it..!

right. soour first fest was quark...and our 1st expirience of a national level fest..well atleast my 1st expirience....one senior in my department had given me a small something to do..and make charts about it...and i remember moving about aimlessly in search of a person with better chart writing than me (i refer to it as chart writing coz its different from normal paper writing..those who have made charts would know..) aind eventually i actually had a girl from my dept make those charts in 1 day that too...and in th e process ended up giving my friends sketchpen box to those girls...but i was grateful..they saved some serious trouble...thanks to them! and 1st day of quark i mostly spent registring people for bitsmun (we dont really need to go into details.). and ya Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was apparently coming to innaugrate our event...though he arrived like 2 hours late and well after events started (which meant officially we were conducting events even before quark started..thus we were ahead of time for once). his speech was utterly boring which was hardly a surprise...! there wasnt much use of us in events as most were bagged away by seniors..as their technical knowledge was obviously far greater than ours...but again atleast we gained an insight as to what projects and ideas were our seniors working on...another thing in fests are the food stalls....a nice break from college mess food...specially the 'gola' which was the most sold out food item...but even apart from that were all the burgers and pav bhaji and stuff which was awesome really!!

waves was the next fest to come by....the awesomeness things such as food stalls and other feasts (read girls) kinda improved....and i for one had definitely more fun in waves than in quark....coz i definitely had more part in organinzing which involved me running around daily..which frankly speaking i thoroughly enjoyed...you know all the planning and stuff and then seeing the success of your event..it was brilliant! i am looking forward to it again...! but apart from that there were the special nights to enjoy...namely the dj nites and band nites and all..! and then there was sea rock...a semi professional rock band competition that demanded full stenghth of our neck muscles (headbangs in short) that too in the hot afternoon sun..though it was fun!! and our media coverage was done by mtv wassup team...i dunno maybe you people even watched it...but we had a chance to see Bani j work live! it was awesome and thus went waves!!

third fest was our sports fest spree....all we did during that entire fest was enjoy and rest in the 3 day break...and ate free food...not because of treats or anything...but there are other ways ..if you know what i mean...<>....and ya the highlight was basketball...girls basketball ...and the teams that came to participate...even though they hammered our college team we still cheered for them... for obvious reasons...<<>>...the best part in spree was the fuzz ball competions...which we spent entire days playing...that was about it from spree for us..

and thus with exams some 3 weeks later ended our second sem and 1st year of college...technically it means we are 25% engineers now...but thats no use as we all know...and frankly speaking we dont know anything in the name of engineering yet,...and i am really looking forward to our 2nd year...but letme tell you...everything i wrote for my 1st year and al the fests is very much in brief..(dont give me that look,,,i noe that joke...its way too old now)...there are many things i might have missed out...like our outings and all.. but you see...every day in college is worth writing a blog on...and thats what i intend to do from now on...i wont be typing annual reports...they are far longer than i tought.....so thats all from my 1st year!! i'll be coming back with my next blog soon (as soon as i get a topic!!)...!

my 1st sem...!

my second blog and ive already repeated the word 1st..not that i am much bothered but i couldnt think of a better starting....and ya dont go with the heading and believe that m actually gonna write bout my first year..(which was 1991 btw)... ok lame joke...i know.... but the fact is that ive just completed my maiden year at college....and i thought what could be a better topic than this to write a blog on....! (m writing bout 1st and 2nd sem seperately because it would be too long a blog if i wrote both in one!)

right...after a lot of tension,drama,sleepless nights(mostly on my moms part) last year it was finally decided i would be gracing bits pilani goa campus with my sincere prescence for the next 4 years my life..4 years that are supposed to be the most "awesome time of my life"...4 years that would transform me from a "boy to a man"..4 years in which i m supposed to be ready to "face the world"...and every other 4 year thing people have bored me with ever since they heard of my next "stop" in this journey through time where ive gotta have a lot of such stops (i avoided the use of the word "supposed" here again for the sake of repetion..but my intention remains the same however). i was particularly happy...and my parents can validate that in exagerrated terms....i mean this was one of those colleges which i was studying for the last two years to be in (the study part could make another blog but i wouldnt dwell too much on it right now)...and my family was happy too...so we as in my entire family took off to goa 3 days before my registration..so that we could enjoy a break before i would be dumped in my hostel for the 1st sem... and since this is a blog on my 1st year..lets skip the 3 day holiday and cme to the registration day..

right we were supposed to be in campus by 9 am....but as is the age old custom ..things didnt start until 9:40. the 1st step was to book for hostels...the name of my hostel was ah6...and we wandered around the campus looking out for a billboard saying ah6 which eventually turned out to be the farthest hostel from the main building...the hostel was the most recently made...so the 1st sight which greeted us on entering it was the dirt and stones lying on the part where there was supposed to be a lawn...but it also eamnt that we would be living in rooms never stayed in before..and using toilets never used before (infact we found out later that ours was the only hostel with western toilets) though we had to live farthest off from the insti building.....and after a long day of registering and signing confirming details and giving certificates..a process in which i was required to run to and fro from the hostel about 10 times(remember my hostel being the farthest) and which ended with the most speech by the director in the auditorium...it was finally time to bade goodbye to my parents..it was enotional..specially for my mom..and i was kinda nostalgic too seeing them return to the hotel in the taxi without me...but the prospect of the new life energized me and i rushed back to the hostel...to my new room...i met a couple of guys who were of my hostel..people who i lost track of after a few weeks..but they atleast gave me starting ompany which every fresher might have been wanting at that time...i came back and was about to enter my room when a voice behind me said 'hi'...i turned around to see my neighbour...well actly a coupleof rooms off for a neighbour in exact terms but definitely the guy i chatted till bout nite joined in by my actual neighbour later...well its kind of an irony that i dont have either of my neighbours numbers even after 1 year...but thats the way its is...!

the next couple of days went without event just the normal intro part with friends and checking out the campus...and getting accustomed to college life. the time when i was askedfor my intro by seniors is worth a mention..though it isnt extreme as in iits perhaps but still it was fun giving intro in french,on both knees and to put 'sir' at begining and end of each sentence. we had to arrange for books from seniors and it was required to enter their hostel for that...a place where us juniors had thought of as a lions den till...then it didnt went as bad..we sat in 1 room for nearly 15 mins without incident...! so thats what are "encounter" with seniors went...! infact my first few days in college were quite boring.. except when 22 people gathered in 1 room to watch a movie on the only laptop in hostel till then..and the late night chats...for which our corridor was particularly famous...infact even the warden warned us not to chat to each other after 12pm...ya ohk..we listened!

but the real fun came after the classes started...for the first couple of days everone used to get up on time and dress up and bath (some people didnt even bother with those formalities even in the beginning) and go to class ready to take in everything our teachers said ...after all we are here to learn arent we?? but "first couple of days" lasted shorter than we expected...soon we were bunking classes gettin up late...not bothering to keep up with class...after all tests were still away werent they?? as time progressed we started sleeping late and late doing basically nothing..but still the air in hostel somehow seems to suck out the sleep hormones from body...i mean i slept so much at home..and still do while on vacations..i guess its part of hostel life..even though i slept really on time la=ike a good boy at 11 11:30 for the first few days..but again that didnt last long....another factor was the mess...though we were excited at eating out in mess...we found out pretty early that mess isnt something worth getting excited for...as the rumors of mess food came out to be pretty accurate...we were found hanging more and more at monginis,nescafe insti cafeteria for our breakfast and other snacks....

vasco is another place as dear to us as our hostel rooms...its the nearest town to our college..we get everything we need there...but not everything we want....so we have to venture out to panjim and other places to eat or treats and stuff...infact being on the beach with friends and then out for a dinner is one memory that perhaps i will miss bout being here...and by treat...i found out here as to how unlucky a person is on his birthday...i mean just look at it...that poor guy is beaten by the bullies who could hand the likes of stallone their pink slips...plus he is completely wet, if lucky by water...(usually eggs are the best deal) and he has to attend calls till late night depriving him of sleep...get up and first words he hear is treat...and whats more he doesnt get as much as a toffee for his efforts....he lives on in the hope that everyone present there had to be born on a day that is labelled on the calender...and that gives relief trust me...!!

college fests is something we all look forward to...though we didnt have national fests in our 1st sem....we did have one interhostel event....that was aweome in its own respect...wearing our specific hostel tshirts and and testing the capability of our lungs with all the shouting and staying up entire nights preparing for competions and making slogans to humiliate others was a great expierience!

but its not all milk and roses in hostel too...there are things like exams which act as great stress boosters to combat all the stress busters available....as i said we didnt really pay attention to whats happening in class till the test dates started teasing us about how close they were....and thus began the relentless late night struggles (with maggi and biscuits as our first aid to drowsiness...you know its shocking as to how exams even counter hostel air which is supposed to suck out sleep hormones and actually make you sleepy..exams are indeed powerful tor tools for teachers!) to conquer the mountain of exams...it were our first exposure to relative marking...a remarkable discovery of its own...so all our pride of gaining 90's were smashed when we saw our marks which were like in 60's.and all that was muttered after exams were estimates of averages of grade cutoffs and what were we expectedly getting (which surprisingly are always more than we put..no matter how strict we are to ourselves while estimating) .but the relative marking system turned out to be saviour...with people with bout 20 marks more than me also endin with the same grade and i did manage a descent cgpa as well...soon we were done with everything and it was time to return home...i mean even with all the fun around..you still somehow find time to miss home in between,especially in the last month or so with exams and all, so obviously we were all excited to go home and answer questions awaiting us... about the journey called "1st semester"!

2nd sem post soon!