Four Sundays ago, as I sat in my new single room in the IIT Kanpur Girls Hostel, and as a whole world of possibilities for the next two years - new friends, new food, new teachers, new subjects - stretched out gloriously in front of me, I realised that I still felt alone.. strangely and totally alone..
But then I remembered.. I have you guys!! U guys who are always ready to share my joys n sorrows, u guys for whom no joke is too trivial to be laughed at and no tragedy is too small to be disregarded.. So here comes a spankin' new Salaaam Namaste, all the way from Kanpur....
Salaaaaaaaaam Namaste ppl!!
I have reached IITK, and have more or less settled down to cutting..er..attending classes. My branch, for the benefit of those vapid readers who read my mails thru' one eye and immediately eject them out thru' the other, is Laser Technology. L-A-S-E-R
T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y. If you ever forget that, I will come to wherever you are and beat the stuffing out of you. So there.
T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y. If you ever forget that, I will come to wherever you are and beat the stuffing out of you. So there.
Well, that brings us to the news headlines. I'm the only girl in my department, (L-A-S-E-R T-E-C-H-N-O-L-O-G-Y) and also the only girl in all my classes. (In this sem we have 2 core n 2 elective papers, but our core courses are open electives for the BTech, MTech, PhD ppl of all branches, and so the classes r all mixed.) I notice that the boys very rarely take notes. They seem to be thinking that they can copy down stuff later from my book. Are they in for a surprise or what?? Heh heh!! Gimme five!!
Coming to the faculty, they are fucking amazing - and I mean that. One moment they'll be telling stories from the panchatantra to highlight the flaws of the examination system, the very next moment we'll be sent on a hypothetical trip to a vegetable market on Mars to illustrate the meaning of the S-matrix. They quote shayiris to prove theorems, rub their hands in glee when we answer tough questions correctly, and tell us that good scientific thinking comes from the heart and not the brain. In fact, one prof even said "We won't really mind if you take of your clothes and run through the campus at mid-day. All we ask is that you scream 'Eurekaaaaaaaaa!!' while doing it!!"
But hey, hardcore MES-ians, don't you worry. I religiously wear my tryst '05 t-shirt around here, and if you ever happen to hear an IIT-ian telling you that they've heard of a legendary college in Kerala called MES (where intelligence meets creativity) which routinely holds multi-billion dollar tech extravaganzas called tryst and so on, just don't act surprised. That's all I ask.
Much love,
Sangeetha.
PS: Am absolutely cash-strapped, having bought a guitar in a fit of - well, you know, the kind of fits that people have. Oh no - not those fits - well, I'm sure you know what I mean. Will call up only after I start getting my stipend - next month @ the earliest. Ciao!
2 comments:
"They quote shayiris to prove theorems, rub their hands in glee when we answer tough questions correctly, and tell us that good scientific thinking comes from the heart and not the brain."
Some really brain-fucked, mush bag faculty member you got in one of your classes. A scientist, as he claims himself to be, doesn't talk metaphorically, especially while disseminating scientific information to his/her students; whereas he talks about "thinking comes from heart"! Next time you meet, let him/her know that a science/engineering class is not a cinematic feature shown in a theatre. You can crack jokes, but you can't tell that mushy bullshit to students.
Who is that mushbag by the way? Which department; EE or PHY?
Ok..
A) He wasn't 'disseminating information'.. I'm not studying in a college that is situated on the set of Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, where the essence of possibly the greatest and most influential play in the English language is squeezed into one inane, completely bewildering sentence.
Information, in every course in this college, is disseminated in pretty much the same way as elsewhere - with a chalkpiece, on a blackboard, in a logical sequence of steps, leading from one established fact to another, and so on.
B)I guess the fault is mine, for I have failed to put his words in their proper context. He was merely remarking on the role that a well-developed intuition plays when we are in uncharted territory - an intuition that warns us away from messy approaches and steers us towards elegant solutions. How else will you account for the fact that discoveries are made much before they can be explained? How did Fermat come up with a theorem in 1637 that mathematicians struggled to prove for nearly four centuries?
C) It is 'you have got', as opposed to 'you got'.. Now that came purely from my brain.. :)
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