The Mallu Lampoon

Finally I've gotten down to writing a post about my college.I study in this college which is located in some obscure village near the suburbs of Chennai. The nearest landmark is perhaps Madhya Kailash, which is about 35km away. No seriosly! Most directions to college end with, "From Madhya Kailash just keep going down the road, for like eternity. Eventually you will chance upon the campus(or rather a motley collection of buildings pretending to be one)".

One of the first things that strike you when you enter the campus are the immaculately manicured lawns and gardens. As you approach the admin block, which incidentally is quite some distance from the gate, you come across the 'fountain of eternal filth'. The putrid stench that emanates from the waters gives visitors their first whiff of a dysfunctional educational system. It apparently uses processed sewage water, but it's quite evident that the processing was a complete failure. Rumors abound that it was based on a final year project of some chem department student. Epic Fail.

One of the key features of our college is the generous grant of scholarships to students. Nerds who waste perhaps the best part of their lives cramming for inane university exams are rewarded with academic scholarships to compensate for all the fine things they missed out on. This is to provide some solace to those losers so that they can feel happy about themselves and to encourage a culture of faggotness in general.

Another distinctive feature is the unit tests which we take twice a week. Apparently our management believes that our college is a prestigious institution. According to them since other prestigious institutions like Stanford, Harvard, IIT's etc( I typed this out with a straight face. Honest) have a system of continuous assessment, it is imperative that we too adopt a system of continuous evaluation along similar lines. Evidently none of them have been to any of these institutions, or they would have realized that our ridiculous system is unique in it's absurdity and irrelevance.

The 'IIT analogy' is perhaps taken a bit too seriously . Since IIT's have a negligible population of pretty girls, we too have followed suit and entry into our college's hallowed portals(I typed this out with a straight face too) is forbidden to most pretty faces. Unfortunately the similarity with the IIT's ends there.

Yet another unique distinction is our arbit rule generating algorithm. This was originally developed by some brilliant bloke in our management , using genuine stupidity(and you thought A.I was cool :|) algorithms which create dumber rules by the day. After undergoing extensive testing on the CSE department students, this algorithm is now being put in use for students of the college in general.

The only chaps who seem to have a life are the mechanical engineering students. Afternoon classes are suspended for them almost every other day, and their life is closer to that of an arts college student that an engineering student. Of course the fact that some of them know as much about mechanical engineering as an arts student would is a different matter altogether.

Then again I shouldn't be saying that, for my knowledge of Electronics and Communication is about as extensive as Shilpa Shetty's knowledge about Quantum Electro Dynamics! However, in a university built upon the foundations of rote learning, where stupidity is a virtue, wisdom a vice and randomness a way of life,it's not how much you know but how much you can commit to memory that counts.In fact, nothing else matters.

What do you do when you are well past retirement age, have nothing interesting to do and desperately need some whisky? You spend a few years writing a book on some bloke who passed away half a century ago, add some provocative statements that will get you expelled from your 'fundamentalist' party and before you know it, your exorbitantly priced book,which would have sunk without a trace otherwise, is a bestseller!

Although I am no admirer of Jaswant, I must admit that it was brilliant strategy on the old geezer's part. Of course his party colleagues who helped engineer his 'expulsion' must be commended for their fine acting. However there was one crucial flaw that gave them away; they stated that they had gone through the entire book (and subsequently found that it went against 'core party idealogy'), although the book was released only on the 17th evening and Jaswant was expelled on the 19th morning.And we're talking about a 650 pages long book written in english!

Moving on, the recent protests by IIT profs have created quite a stir, at least on the news channels. Their greivances are genuine, unfortunately, and this is indeed one of the biggest problems afflicting our education system(or lack of it). If the IIT's have difficulties recruiting competent faculty wing to lack of adequate compensation, then spare a thought for all the lesser colleges out there.

Most people who do their engineering from the tier 2 and 3 colleges don't really have too many options. They can either join an IT company, go abroad for further studies(if they can afford it) or try clearing exams like GATE,CAT,GRE or even the UPSC exams, failing which they will be forced to join similar tier 2 or 3 colleges for their ME. A substancial proportion of the students end up pursuing the last option and are faced with a very bleak scenario, for save the IIT's and a few other decent instis, graduate engg programs in our country are pathetic and woefully inadequate.The best amongst these grad students(merely a handful) take up research or join core companies. The opportunistic ones join the film industry, while the lowest common denominator enters into politics. The ones stuck somewhere in between join colleges like IIPM.The rest become teachers.

Which reminds me of an adage that is especailly relevant given the present scenario, "Those who can do, those who can't teach".

PS: Kaminey seems to be the most talked about movie these days. So much so, that everytime someone yells 'Kaminey!', the first thing that comes to my mind is Shahid Kapoor!