The official student media body of IIT Madras
“With the election season underway in full swing, Wednesday marked the return of the annual soapboxes, albeit with a slight variation in the format. In this new format, candidates facing a contest would battle it out against one another while unanimous candidates would be engaged in a discussion with the anchor. Questions from the Executive Council Members and the GSB would follow.”
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) Jeff: “Is this the Lisa Freemont who never wears the same dress twice?” Lisa: “Only because it’s expected of her.”…
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“The book was gifted to me by my first MTech project advisees, along with a pack of liquor-filled chocolates. Unsure how I treated my students for a year that I received those gifts, but reading Steve Jobs turned out to be an intense experience, worth repeating … I hypothesize that the book tastes better than those chocolates.”
“More than the decision, what I was able to observe in the scholars was the anger towards the authoritarian way of decision making by the administration, as always. Many of the scholars were emotionally moved and there was a cry for having a protest. After repeated meetings with the administration by the RAS and scholars, it was decided that there will not be an immediate implementation of the policy, even though it still stays as a policy.”