The official student media body of IIT Madras
The Thespian Club’s theatre group Stagecoach took their production out this year with ‘Taramandal’. The play was performed at T.N. Rajaratnam Auditorium in R.A. Puram, on the 25th of October.
Taramandal’s author, Neel Chaudhuri, based it on the Satyajit Ray short story Patol Babu, Film Star. The play is a set of similar stories, with Patol Da’s narrative interspersed throughout.
The rescheduling of Shaastra and Saarang to the first days of January, and the housing of first-year undergraduates in hitherto exclusively post-graduate hostels have resulted in some noticeable changes to the student culture on campus. With the fests falling back-to-back in the vacation, they are attended by fewer insti students, and, additionally, the enthusiasm of students to be in the organising teams of the festivals has declined perceptibly. For the inter-hostel events, which form the major competitive platform for fostering cultural and technical activities within the Institute, UG hostels have usually relied heavily on freshers, inducting them into the ‘culture’ early, so that they could keep the hostel legacy afloat. This year, however, sees a forced departure from that tradition.
Conceptualised in 2012 to formally and regularly address mess issues, the formation of the Mess Monitoring Committee was spurred on by various factors, the foremost of them being the need for a focussed group to tackle the ever-increasing number of mess-related problems. This function was formerly carried out by the Chairman, Council of Wardens, who would chair a meeting once in a while with the caterers and sort out caterer issues and student complaints. ‘The A-Diet fiasco also, in part, made a case for its inclusion,’ Prof Gopalakrishnan, current MMC Chairman, points out.
‘For people who’re touted as future nationbuilders, we are surprisingly insulated from the social issues in our milieu – IIT For Society is an effort to bridge the gap between IIT and the world outside,’ says Bethanavel Ashwanth, final-year dual degree student, co-founder and head of IIT For Society. An initiative that kicked off in September with a panel discussion on manual scavenging, it has a slew of social-awareness activities lined up for the year.
TFI is wonderful. You will love the time you spend in it. It is also tiring and you don’t get paid much. There are limited prospects after the fellowship, don’t fall for their publicity.
The courts resounded with praise for the host college as Sports Fest drew to a close on the 30th September. With 23 colleges from around the city, the games indeed brought about a festive mood to sports in insti and, of course, much needed exposure and a confidence boost for Inter-IIT. With almost all the teams clinching a medal, there seem to be good bodings for the Inter-IIT General Championship.
For all those who have long fancied a world run completely by computers somewhere in the near future, FIRA might be the closest you get to such a display of humanoid brilliance. In 2012, a group composed of many ex-Robocon members brought together their expertise to open IIT Madras’ FIRA chapter for the first time, taking part in the competition in the United Kingdom that year. Team Sahas, as they call themselves, raised the bar in 2013.
The fact that quantum mechanics is everywhere was the theme of the first lecture of the IISc Alumni Association Distinguished Lecture Series held at IITM, given by Prof. Ganapathy Baskaran, Emeritus Professor and Raja Ramanna Fellow at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai.
An interview with Prof. V. Srinivasa Chakravarthy, who recently developed the Bharati script.
Prof. LS Ganesh, Dean (Students), writes to the students on mess food and services to answer common questions and provide clarifications.