iMuse-2

An excellent Tabla concert. The audience in raptures of applause and the artist overjoyed at the praise for his performance. His emotions flow out in the form of words which apparently to his surprise and disappointment is met with loud boos. His mistake apparently was not his choice of words but the language he sought to express them in.

The Union of India when it was formed about 60 years back was born with an expiry date. Most external observers were of the opinion that a country with more than 20 different languages and seemingly a million cultures would never stand the test of time. It was Utopian-the idea of integrating so many different people into a single nation. Nevertheless India is today a nation to be reckoned with-having overcome every single threat aimed at its unity and sovereignty. But if there ever was one single reason that could be pointed out for the unexpected success of our nation, it has to be the idea of division of states by linguistic boundaries.

Language is easily the best unifying force among people reasons easily found- Language being the medium for the establishment and growth of civilization and again for cultural and scientific advancement. People who grow up reading the same literature, hearing the same songs and stories will obviously grow up with similar aspirations and outlook on life. This can probably explain why most Chinese, Bengalis and half of Kerala are followers of the Communist ideology. It is also a good explanation for the presence of regional associations in our college. Love 'em or hate 'em they are going to be a part of our college landscape for as long as we have people with Malayalam, Bengali or Punjabi as their mother-tongue. No amount of the "all of us are Indians, we should all be speaking Hindi and shun Asso-s" rhetoric is going to stop people joining Associations either. What can be done is to increase the tolerance level of people to other new cultures. A healthy respect for the language, tradition and culture of others is the need of the hour and these are possible only when you understand and respect the greatness of your own roots.

English and Hindi -for me atleast- are languages of convenience, the ones I use to communicate with people of a different mother-tongue. I take pity to the people who choose these over their mother-tongue in the delusion of imagined coolness. Know yourself before you get on to the merry-go-round of the latest iteration of what's up( wats up, wassup, ssup, wattup).I am quite happy when called a mallu, even if it was in contempt, they chose to identify me with what I speak than how I look or my social standing. They, probably in their ignorance identified me with a language , a literary tradition and intellectual worth probably much greater than his/her own. I cant figure out why some Gujaratis become uncomfortable and insecure with the tag of a gujju. The prejudices of the ignorant are not enough to drown out the richness of your culture.

The tabla concert was part of Mindbend. The maestro's over joyous heart poured out in Gujarati,the language dearest to him only to be met with loud boos and shouts of "Hindi,Hindi no gujju" from a rogue crowd of wannabe punks and first years impatient to try out their newfound freedom and advertise their hum-zyada-harami-hain status to the college. The graceful thing to do would have been to ask for an explanation from him after he had finished off in Gujarati. The artist recovering from the shock went on to speak in Hindi thereafter and the punks clapped in glee at their imagined victory. I hung my head in shame.

Editorial for Renesa

The last few weeks saw one of the best Mindbend that has been held in the college in recent history . There were loads of reasons for it not to turn out good- an extended holiday, the successful attempt at scuttling the rock show by some insecure representatives and general fatigue after a string of technical events. Yet it turned out to be a hit and how! The robotics show drew a great crowd and the workshops and lectures were excellent. The cultural nights were well organized and well received. Sparsh will have a lot to live upto but with big names like Mohit Chauhan and Gaurav Dagaonkar set to perform, it probably will be one Sparsh that'll be remembered for long.

In other news the TEQIP audit conducted recently concluded ( in line with the trend set by our representatives) that our institute deserves a high 9.2 which puts us in the league of the top 3 NITs. The college mail-ids are fully operational which is again good news although one does fervently hope that the Administrators put in a good Spam filter going by the number of “look at my pictures” mailers cluttering up the inbox. The Director has also been busying himself with sending us pictures of all the new hostels coming up but again one wishes every time that one of those pictures is the elevation of the Convocation hall that has been pending for long and is one of the more pressing needs of an institute of our stature. Its farewell season and it is time to yet again bid adieu to a wonderful batch passing through the hallowed portals of our institute. We have dedicated the whole center fold to the passing out batch. It is also time for a change of hands at Renesa and we hope the infusion of new blood will keep the spirit of Renesa burning bright and maybe even lead to a change for the better.

Inspite of all this, the year that went by will certainly not be remembered in any glowing terms. Rather it will be known as the year when the activities of the whole college was held hostage in the name of a petty scuffle, the year when meritocracy in leadership attained dubious distinction. The experiment as it is now being called is underway to find whether a committee of grade curve worshipers can actually run a college for a year without all the so called politics and its fallouts. Autocracy has found the sheepskin it was waiting for all along.

The issue here is not whether the experiment does really turn out to be successful. Maybe it will, most probably not. The issue here is whether all of this is good for the institute. Colleges have traditionally been bastions of free thought and free speech, places where rebellious young men and women cry out hoarse over every injustice,seeding grounds for the basic lessons of civil society and democracy. But when such measures as the setting up of a non representative student council are taken and attempts at censorship are made the question begs to asked? Is the college losing its spirit in its race towards technical excellence? Is there no room for personal freedoms in the pursuit of higher TEQIP ratings? Are kitsch new labs and mega hostels the only criteria for the growth of the institute?

SVNIT is an institute of young adults and one of the basic needs of every such individual is freedom- the freedom to choose what is good for him or her. A petty fight is never a reason enough for the democratic rights of a whole institution to be revoked. The decision not to trust the students to manage themselves was not necessarily the cleverest solution to the problem that was at hand. Nobody likes somebody else to make decisions for them and hence a democratic system. History has proven that autocracy has never been an ideal form of governance. All that it has ever led to is discontentment and violent revolutions.

Now is the time to decide whether we decide to label ourselves as an institute of higher learning or restrict ourselves to the rather narrow definition of a technical institute. Do we graduate as politically naive, submissive technical hands manning the back offices of first world nations or do we graduate as free thinking, creative and liberal minded citizens of the free world? Choose now, Choose wisely.

Adieu !

Kaun Hai Dumb???

Pretension..thy name is Orkut

Have you ever known real pain?-the kind that makes you want to pull all your hair off at one go? Real pain is when some guy calls you up at 2 in the night and asks you to get his net connection fixed because (of all the godforsaken reasons in the world) orkut is not loading (now you know where all the hair went).The blame, though, lies squarely on my short stint as the LAN secretary of my hostel, the travails of which I’ll describe some other time (I wish this will shed some light on the sad plight of the guy in your hostel who takes care of the LAN and you start to pay more respect to him/her)

Orkut (as we all know) is the place where every one is cool and sexy, where everybody looks like a movie star and/or cute animals, where pretentious idiots1 add friends and scrap total bull randomly. Even I am guilty of the oh-so-unforgivable sin2 of trying to woo maidens with (what I thought was) fancy English and sexed up profiles with a list of all the rock bands that a google search on rockbands would come up with and then some more (I genuinely doubt whether there are as many rock bands as people populate their musical taste space with). Again one of the other sections to showoff ones "cooler than thou" credentials is the movie section. One of the big favorites when it comes to the movies section is SAW. I personally cant believe how people can have such a disturbing movie as a favourite...maybe the guys think it exudes machismo to have pervert movies in your favourites...even girls with all their love of barbie and mushy romantic films seems to have SAW as a favourite-beats me...barbie and the SAW puppet are two poles of the doll dimension, maybe they also think pervert movies in their favourites will make them look ubercool ( the likely-an-MCP apologizes for the likely-to-be-perceived sexist comment) There are no limits to the bull people fill up their profiles with. It’s quite surprising how orkut which is a failure3 and a damp squib of a social networking site with no real USP or niche compared to other networks is still going strong. I hope orkut meets with a painful death and the skeletons forever to be lost in the dark depths of the nether where most defunct and long dead sites lie( anyone remember altavista, aol, netscape or askjeeves??)

Social networking is soon going to be dead (and I’m going to be one of the few happy people for it).Its going to go the same way blogs went-they said everyone was going to have one, but if I was too lazy and bored to update and maintain my own then about 98% of the other people on the net were too. If you want proof- Microsoft bought a part of facebook for a sum that could easily have wiped poverty in the world twice over4. There you have it- absolute, undeniable proof that social networking is dying and we all know how smart Microsoft people are; the blue screen of death and the three button tap dance (Ctrl+Alt+Del) being the only cultural phenomena they have ever been credited with.

To my friends (and competitors in the world domination game), Google and Mark Zuckerberg. You hoped to take over the world while we were searching for profiles of cute females. Better luck next time...your experiment in mass mind control looked good for sometime-the bluff has been called and anyways with Microsoft in the picture you better move onto newer things. They have this thing with screwing up good and viable domination plans- they just take the monopoly thing a bit too far and get sued all over the place.

I will never know any pleasure greater (subject to revision...I hope sex is as good as it is made out to be) than writing an eulogy to the great farce of social networking. This is the beginning.


1. Most of them tend to be the classic losers with no real social life-the type you would generally stay away from in high school.

2. Washed myself clean though with a purge of all the random females I’d added in the short and crazy period of my life I call “the Orkut delusions”.


3. Orkut is a dead network in most parts of the world except for India and Brazil-and I’m pretty sure 90% of all Brazilian profiles are spam profiles with bots that sell Viagra and link to porno. Gotta give it to them though- Pretty bots.

4. They reportedly valued each profile at an average of $725.You definitely know they have IQs comparable to jellyfish when they value your 20 or so fake profiles at a $725 a piece.

iMuse-1

I do not belong to any caste or religion-maybe by birth but not by choice. Does it make me an atheist-perhaps but a nihilist-never. Atheism can never be equated with a lack of morals, rather atheism or agnosticism is the the product of logic and reasoning, the product of a questioning mind- a mind free of dogma and fear, free from the man made chains of sin and the deceptive (and at best romantic) ideas of salvation,heaven and hell-a mind which has learned that the world is not so much in black and white as it is in shades of grey. From here on whenever I speak of atheism I also imply agnosticism and its shoot-offs thereof even including Deism. My wish here is not to disprove the existence of God but rather to strip off and lay naked the ugly entity of so called organized religion or revealed religion, that which masquerades itself as the only way to true salvation and the resultant attainment of heaven while serving only to keep the masses in the dark about the true nature and purpose of life. Organised religion and the resultant caste system is the malignant tumour on society that threatens to spread its cancerous growth until ultimately resulting in the death of its host-civilized society, while at the same time serving the interests of a few people who stand to benefit from it.

For long the atheists have been looked down upon as outcasts and misfits in society with their radical ideas and unquestionable logic that threatened the very foundations of religion and society. But then then he would rather not be part of a society that judges him not on merit or his contributions to the world but on his caste,religion or the colour of his skin. In a world where the morality of revealed faith equals the persecution of innocents, the free thinkers choose their morals based on principles of humanity and common good. Most atheists believe in the innate goodness of human beings and have faith and in the next person's innate morality unless they have been brainwashed by religion and instilled with a false sense of moral superiority which justifies the murder of people of other faiths for their apparent blasphemy and rejection of the 'one true religion' and its God(s).In a world which judges your character by the number of times and the number of temples you visit or the amount of time you spend in a mosque or a church, a person devoid of religion and its prejudices would rather measure it by your dedication to the progress of humanity and your devotion to development of your own faculties of logic and reasoning.

One major challenge that hinders the progress of humanity is a society filled with hypocrisy which refuses to or rather is afraid of taking off its blindfold. It is not the fear of God which is the beginning of wisdom but rather the elimination of fear that puts you on the illuminated path. If the world has to progress, society and ultimately all of humanity has to understand that we are here not for the service of any higher being but to be of service to each other and to ultimately ensure the survival of the species and of the environment that supports us.

Religion is the opiate of the masses - the corruption of their minds, the high that they seek in the bliss of ignorance and hallucinations of supernaturalism and magic fuelled by epics and gospels. It is the mad rush to worship god-men and idols that drink milk- the blood spilled in the name of holy land and unfathomable foolishness that justifies Ayodhya and Godhra, Israel and Palestine, 9/11 and Iraq , the "truth” that lies, the undying faith that will be the undoing of the human race.

Isn't it time you stepped out of naïveté and ignorance to that which you know cannot lie to you- your own logic and reasoning? What is it that propels you to debunk cold scientific facts and evidence in favour of Creationism to explain the complexities of nature? Why do you subject yourself to naïve Fideism and willingly fool yourself? Is the high of religion worth it or are you afraid to think?

Perfection

Well lets see...How many people have ever wanted to live in a perfect world,a world where there is no sadness,where there is no poverty and nobody ever even gets a chance to take a sneeze(yeah even a sneeze is a luxury) that is a lot of raised hands.For a start lets take the most perfect of superheroes-Superman really isn't perfect.The Man of Steel doesn't have a single flaw of character or superpower,invincible,indestructible;but of course all of his perfection arises from his weakness-a contradiction??Superman fans might know that his single weakness is kryptonite,the rock from his home planet which robs him of all his extraordinary powers.If it is Superman's origins in a distant planet that is the cause for him being perfect then it is also his weakness.If he has a weakness then he is not perfect is he??Not really.It is his weakness that makes him complete.Nobody wants to see a superhero who can bully any and all of his enemies into submission that would be plain boring .Then his weakness becometh his claim to the post of the most perfect of all superheroes.We see that every superhero of ours have their own weaknesses-Spiderman has weakness of character;Batman has no superpowers.He is perfectly mortal.Then that is his weakness but also his usp-he is a normal guy like u or me just that he found enough time to make billions, gain all and every form of knowledge, make a car with jet engines, find an underground cave, learn acrobatics and fight like a guy rite out of a B- grade Chinese martial arts flick with visual sound effects(all the whams and bams) and still look handsome and worst of all get all the girls to pine for him.Wat more could a guy want??(Im the perfect comic book junkie)If we go down history too we see that nothing is perfect.The Titanic sank;Utopia the perfect piece of real estate isn't worth a dime-well because its too perfect even to exist.So if perfection is such an imperfect thing then why do we even have a word called perfect???Maybe it is because we r all perfect in our own ways,maybe it is a mix of our own strengths and weaknesses that makes us all perfect.Same reason why I'm the perfect me-there can be no perfect-er or perfect-est me because I'm the unique irreplaceable, unreproducible perfect specimen of myself.Perfect should be out of the dictionary.It is at best a useless word.There can be the perfectness of imperfection,the imperfectness of perfection and the imperfectness of imperfection but never the perfectness of perfection.Everybody and everything is perfect.Come to think of it,if it was such a perfect world then nobody would get sick-no sickness-no sick leaves??100% attendance??No wait-i would rather get a cold and sneeze my head off rather than live in a perfectly boring world.I'll choose the perfectly imperfect world any day!!!and I know perfectly well what you are going to choose too.(The chances of u choosing for a perfect world are also included in my perfect guess because a perfect guess is anyway an imperfect thing-circular logic is so cool!!)

The conditions under which any one understands me, and necessarily understands me--I know them only too well. Even to endure my seriousness, my passion, he must carry intellectual integrity to the verge of hardness. He must be accustomed to living on mountain tops--and to looking upon the wretched gabble of politics and nationalism as beneath him. He must have become indifferent; he must never ask of the truth whether it brings profit to him or a fatality to him... He must have an inclination, born of strength, for questions that no one has the courage for; the courage for the forbidden; predestination for the labyrinth. The experience of seven solitudes. New ears for new music. New eyes for what is most distant. A new conscience for truths that have hitherto remained unheard. And the will to economize in the grand manner--to hold together his strength, his enthusiasm...Reverence for self; love of self; absolute freedom of self.....

Fredrick Nietzsche