Articles from November 2013

“While it is convenient to make a multitude of claims about how the fee hike is part of an elaborate plot to privatise higher education, and how this hike will prevent bright, but less affluent, students from joining an IIT, it’s critical to see if this story fits the facts … a much more important and pressing issue for India today is the abysmal quality of its primary and secondary school education. This is a disproportionately larger bottleneck in ensuring that everyone gets a fair shot at getting an IIT education (or more broadly, a good higher education). It would be prudent for us, the so-called cream of Indian youth, to spend more time addressing this fundamental issue, instead of arguing over the relative trivialities of a fee-hike for an already heavily subsidised world-class education.”
Vinay ‘Slicer’ Sridhar writes an argument in support of the ongoing fee increase in the IITs.

Bhargavi Suryanarayanan attends TEDx Youth@Chennai and writes, “With talks ranging from the importance of creativity to the interestingly titled “The Tao of Ouchies”, with performed poetry by two of the speakers and a Blues concert, the session shook the audience awake on a lazy Sunday.”

In this opinion piece, the author opines, “Saarang, over the past few years (perhaps since Opeth arrived in our Golden Jubilee year and changed things forever), has begun to overrate its proshows. It’s perhaps time to ruminate over what the exact purpose of some of these proshows are, especially the Rock Show, which makes a loss every year … More ideologically, the overselling of proshows is undermining what really is the heart and soul of Saarang: events.”

Science Diet is a weekly selection of five science/technology stories that are timely and relevant, fascinating and inspiring, and certain to stimulate your mind.
In this week’s edition: peer review is collapsing under its own weight; the story of Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder; and a look at physics as it stands now, post-Higgs boson.

The Thespian Club’s theatre group Stagecoach took their production out this year with ‘Taramandal’. The play was performed at T.N. Rajaratnam Auditorium in R.A. Puram, on the 25th of October.
Taramandal’s author, Neel Chaudhuri, based it on the Satyajit Ray short story Patol Babu, Film Star. The play is a set of similar stories, with Patol Da’s narrative interspersed throughout.