The official student media body of IIT Madras
From IITM Memes to Shaastra to the T5E page itself – there are tons of insti-based Facebook pages of all kinds lying out there waiting to be discovered. If you are an Internet addict, you’ll find yourself familiar with most of them. In this piece, Isha tries to highlight the more interesting pages, the ones you might want to like and share and, of course, stalk.
Pizza Mutiny is a brand that many insti students are familiar with, by virtue of their notebooks that are, apart from being very reasonably priced, also popular for the sets of free coupons and the ‘bunk meters’ that come along with them. “It felt great every time a student thanked us because he just got an extra Papa Johns Pizza because of our coupons,” AP says. The ‘bunk meter’ and timetable, although simple additions, seemed to be “things everyone actually found useful”.
Come December and Chennai gears up for its much-awaited festival – the Madras Music Season or December Season. This cultural extravaganza rates higher on the excitement scale than any conventional festival celebrated here. Hotel and taxi bookings peak to the zenith and crowds from Chennai and outside hop from one sabha to another to witness their favourite artistes perform.
Ranjani tells us about Chennai’s December season.
In this series of articles, T5E goes beyond the gates of insti to explore Chennai, and present our readers with interesting and useful information about our beautiful city. First up, Akshyah tells us about some of the many places in and around the city which sell a wide variety of second-hand books at cheap prices.
Nithyanand Rao speaks to Dr. Prabakar Thyagarajan, consultant psychiatrist at the Institute Hospital, on depression and mental health in the backdrop of the recent suicide on campus.
“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.
“The recent fee hike, especially the near-100% hike in the B.Tech tuition fee, is a misguided decision which has negative implications and raises ethical questions. The present fee hikes and the direction of higher education policy have a definite slant towards the ideology that education is a commercial venture.”
A.M. Ayyappadas writes an argument against the ongoing fee hike 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.”
The following is an open letter that was sent to T5E in response to A Different Take on Saarang. It was written by Ravi Musti (MnM), who was Cul-Sec (Arts), 2012-2013, with inputs from the Core team, Saarang 2013. It has been published as received by T5E, and has not been edited in any way. “This article is an attempt to discuss the practicality of certain suggestions (?) made. It is also an attempt at informing the student community on what goes on the inside so that they can form their own opinions on what the festival has become today and where it is going in future.”
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.”