The Fifth Estate and Shaastra 2014 are proud to present the second edition of IITM’s research magazine. Christened Immerse, which stands for IIT Madras Magazine on Research in Science and Engineering, the magazine features a collection of stories on some of the research accomplishments of IITM’s students, research scholars and professors across diverse disciplines. Immerse was released on January 3rd, 2014 by Dr. Bhaskar Ramamurthi, Director of IITM. It is available for download on T5E.

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”.

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.

“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.”