The official student media body of IIT Madras
“The chandeliers, beautiful white curtains, the litany of wall hangings and the ever-so-comfy chairs all scream elegance. Once we were settled down, we looked through their elaborate menu – which offers a wide range of continental all-day breakfast options, Italian and a melangè of French/Danish pastries – in quest of something we liked.”
“As the terms passed by, I was taken out of the shed less and less often. At first, my owner began to walk to class, then to Gurunath and then, horror of horrors, began to take the bus!”
“Do you see a lot of physics words here? That’s because there is a lot of physics involved, and the study of social physics brings together the two exciting fields of social media study and statistical mechanics. However, as with all theories and models involving human decision-making, this too is a slave to the sometimes arbitrary sensibility of people’s everyday decisions. A human may choose to drink Pepsi today and not Coca-Cola; there is no way this seemingly random and whimsical choice can be modeled by logical rules.”
“While we take food from rooms, shops and from those who flaunt it on the roads, the trees remain my favourite source for food and space for dining. Peaceful, spacious and far from the reach of those bespectacled creatures, joy lies in munching on leaves and washing it down with Kaapi Nirvana.”
“The other transition from male to female is not happy either. One who is assigned male at birth but who wants to be a female faces a harsh life in the institute. Their male friends frown upon their behaviour of having “fallen” to the level of a female from a male. Be it their dressing, way of speech, and gait, the transgender students have to face teasings from other students everyday. “
The one vantage point for all the voracious hoggers is the Campus Cafe. This always abuzz food joint has an aura to it. Not to forget the increase in popularity it received after its recent shift to the new, more spacious location. For a lot of us, Campus Cafe is still a remarkable place to have a break in between the tedious lecture hours (sometimes, during).
The one thing that makes this humble place close to our heart is, we realized, the people and the staff.
“Some might ask why I have gone into so much detail when describing something as drab as a quiz competition. The IITM QC story mirrors every classic sports story arc – from underdogs four years ago to dominant winners for the next two years to grizzly competitors seeing off new challengers. But that is not the point of this post. The real point is to record all the different experiences that I have been fortunate to undergo as a part of this contingent…”
“Mine is not a case you would call “extreme” by today’s standards. There is no body mutilation, no death, no placards and angry crowds. It is perhaps worth looking at precisely because it is a very, very common form of harassment, one that so many of us have learned to ignore. We like to think of perpetrators as evil oddities with eye-patches and scars (and lacking the stellar education that a place like IITM offers), and forget that the problem is widespread, that the perpetrators may be those closest to us, and that we ourselves are guilty of abetment. Well, STOP. And read.”
Author of Palace of Illusions and Mistress of Spices among many other bestselling books, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is one of the most noted storytellers of…
At the outset, both the Dean of Students and the Chief Security Officer (CSO) seemed unaware of the numbers we had put forward to them as detailed in the survey, and expressed concern at the magnitude of victims in this particular case. The Dean promised that the institute as a whole was more diligent towards ensuring proper background checks in the case of each guard who is hired. Our survey however, tells a different tale.