When Love and Hate Collide

The third semester marked a new beginning for many. It was the adrenaline rush of entering department after having common classes for first year. Lot of us decided to get our socks pulled up now that we had entered department and a sense of belonging would develop, as we had seen the final year senti. But, being the first proper AIEEE batch meant the department had different things in mind for us. Behold readers! The skeleton outlines of Zero Point Everyone (What not to do at CSE, NIT Trichy). Zooming back to the past, the department lived up to its reputation of being cool. 3 half days in a week!!! This was party time, and over that so many cancelled classes. Dream comes true. Then came the academics, bad acoustics was the reason given for not being able to hear our teachers, we took it in stride. Having done a basic programming in c course in first year with the most complicated program being finding inverse of matrix, we suddenly end up making 3 games using graphics in C for the first week! Our seniors look wonderstruck at the level of our programs; teachers say it’s the same thing she has been giving for the past few years. Seniors say otherwise. After all, these are the people with experience, and we are mere students, we remain mum and continue. How tough is it for someone to forget to switch off their mobile? Not very; and isolated events should be forgotten. Nope, it just turned out to prove we have descended from apes (Heard that before, was it Darwin??) or right from the horse’s mouth: “Your parents sent you here as humans, what has changed you to animals. What will I tell your parents? Even the jungles are more orderly.” {NOTE: During this specific class, there was a crow orchestra outside while a dog snoozed off in the back row of class] He is the experienced revered soul, so we sit mum and continue. Then someone hears a roll number wrong, we are accused of giving proxies! [BTW, The number @ the centre of the controversy was 420] We sit mum and continue. It’s like Murphy was watching us and having his laughs. I guess all those who think Murphy is God are lapping this up. Some blame this on one person’s idiosyncrasies (Onki, am borrowing your description of him). But Murphy was watching us sitting mum and continuing. Then, how would you feel if you go for a class and your sir has a written script from a textbook and even better, he states the fact that “Don’t ask me any doubts, refer the textbook, its clearly mentioned.” Later on, he goes on record to say, “Write all the steps for the sum, but no step marks, and if you don’t write all the steps, no marks.” It sounds like George Bush has competition for the ‘Foot in the mouth’ award. Then again, fuzzy logic is this dude’s specialty. While we have funky programs that have other college compsceez ask us if we are in the same year as them, to binary state marks, it was rock and roll for us. I scored 2.5 in ECD, 1^st ct. I was the 5^th highest in class!! Class average was 0.65. 2^nd ct, class average was 2. Then again, we were beyond his expectations, “we drew Shakeela while he wanted Aishwarya Rai”. He promised 50% supplies, he kept his promise along with pure Tamil expletives that I am better off not uttering.

And so did many more of the faculty to give unprecedented 100 supplies to one class in one Sem, just because we were AIEEE batch, knew too much and were acting as we knew that we knew too much. Sounds one sided. Don’t students get to voice their opinions in this place? Oh yes, our college has a forum for that. It’s called class committee meeting, where faculty and student reps meet up and have a positive discussion on how to improve under the able mediatorship of the chair. We had such a meeting, the mediator was absent. The student representatives were handpicked by the faculty and these 9 sacrificial lambs faced the music while they sat mum and continued. Yes, we had some people who threw tantrums; they apologized but why generalize the punishment on everyone. Why refuse to give us a chance when we had forced ourselves to realize our mistakes that no one was ready to pinpoint. Everyone said we were the worst, but how, why? No one knew the path to redemption. One professor felt 20 names of miscreants were enough to sail everyone else true. But under hardships is unity best upheld, and no compsceez would get their brethren into the deep for no fault of theirs. We kept mum and continued, while different departments lambasted our non-existent egos. The winter of 2005 has ended leaving us out cold with 100 supplies and this summer, while we watch our hostels empty out, we compsceez sit back clearing our backs knowing that the world aint fair but at least through hardships, we seal the bonds of friendship. Here is to the class of 2008, NIT Trichy. Come what evil, I’ll be there for you… (Except becoming class rep for another SEM)

Having entered the dept. outta the blue,

What the future held, we had no clue.

Here we were sitting in the coolest dept of them all

Didn’t know others pride led to our fall.

Text editors, window swappers, games and a lot more

Someone up there wanted us screwed hardcore.

Exam papers with arbid marking schemes

Landed you with binary digits even after writing reams.

Being the first proper AIEEE batch now seemed a taboo

We were this close to expulsion too.

Mass failure, transfer into another institute was on the plate,

Year backs or to companies, about us they would berate.

Only we straightened up, would life go well

But what went wrong, none would tell.

Off the record, we hadn’t misbehaved said each

But we must be rotten coz of the thoughts of others who teach.

What was the reason for the dormant volcanoes to erupt?

Out of the blue, all so abrupt?

Is it the high flying placements students enjoy?

Or the fact students these days are no longer coy?

Answers that will remain unanswered

Coz we know it all, AIEEE inferred.

The answer to what went wrong this BLACK Sem,

All I can say, is no one knows, not even them…