Emergency SAC Meeting Review: August 2013
The first open SAC meeting of the semester was held on the 31st of August, 2013. It was an emergency meeting, convened to discuss the concerns of students regarding the messes.
An Evening of Manipuri
Art enthusiasts from all over Chennai flocked to the auditorium at SAC on 31 August for a traditional Manipuri performance, looking forward to the rare opportunity. Expectations were not in vain, and the audience were held in thrall by the Pung Cholam Drum dance, followed by a Manipuri Classical Dance.
A Strike Against Hunger
A large number of students (750 by a conservative estimate) assembled at Himalaya lawns over the course of the protest. The organizers had several grievances including the food’s poor quality and lack of nutrition, and bad hygiene in the messes. They also claimed that the quality of the food offered for amount charged for it at IITM was not on par with what is being offered at other IITs.
The Crooks, The Teams, Their Plugin, and Our Server
If you are a regular reader of ours, you might have noticed that our website was down for about a week, and just came back up last night. While the rest of the editorial team debates over whether our server going down or most people not knowing about it is the better of two evils, take a few minutes to listen to the tale of why our server went down. I promise you, it is probably the most interesting thing to come out of Web Operations teams in the institute in a long, long time.
When Two Opposites Meet
“Today I speak to you as a practitioner of public policy who has had the opportunity to work at the intersection of public policy analysis…
STEW: A Veritable Vichyssoise of Verbiage
Survive, Tackle, Extrapolate, Win – STEW, the first Speaking Event of the year for freshies had three rounds that followed an elimination process. Beginning with an Extempore round where the participants spoke for thirty seconds on typically punny or funny topics and followed by the Block and Tackle session, where contestants had to Block (speak For) or Tackle (speak Against) a given two-way topic as instructed by the judges, the evening ended with a grand Shipwreck Face-off, where the ‘celebrities’ (or the identities conferred upon each contender) argued and pleaded for that elusive spot on a life boat.
Where Curiosity Can Take Us
No planet in the solar system has captured public imagination like the red planet, with more than 100,000 people signing up for a one-way trip to Mars when applications opened this year. Mars was the topic of the evening when Dr. Anita Sengupta delivered her speech at the Media Resource Centre in the Central Library at 5.30 pm on Tuesday, 20th of August.
Passing the Baton: Freshie Quiz ’13
Conducted by Aravindabharathi R and Prateek Vijayavargia, Quiz Club Conveners 2013-14, it witnessed a good turnout. The lecture room was filled with freshies vying for spots in the finals. With 30 questions spanning a wide variety of topics, the preliminary round filtered out all but the best eight teams. The finals were extensive and entertaining, with themed rounds like the ‘House Posters’ and ‘Lego Re-enactments’ giving everyone a chance at quick inference.
Food, Coffee and Hindi Music: Suprabaa
Climbing up the stairs towards what used to be Tifanys, you are greeted with the image of a tub of ice cream, which is ironic, since Suprabaa don’t seem to serve any (not yet, they say).
How Big Data Is Changing The World
Today, there is an availability of data about people and society on an unprecedented scale. “This can only mean,” Dr. Anand says, “that we are now on the cusp of a revolution in the social sciences.”