Decline of the Campus

I met Deepak sir yesterday. He has recovered from chicken pox. He told me about his idea to start a Free Software Cell at NITC. For all the success of FOSSMeet, we really don’t have a free software community here. Deepak sir is very passionate about building a community. He feels that there is such a lot of potential in this campus that all it needs is a spark. He has given me the task of getting at least five to ten students for forming the body.

While I was with Deepak sir, Ramkumar sir came in and I got to know him better. Of course, he took Microprocessors and Microcontrollers for us last semester, but it’s difficult to get acquainted with a professor during a course, as the class strength is nearly ninty. Deepak sir asked him about the formalities involved in starting a new student club. Ramkumar sir did his BTech in the erstwhile REC during the eighties. He replied that in those days, all you needed was to get ten people together, find a staff advisor and submit a request letter to the Principal.

He talked about the active student groups and forums which had been flourishing then, and have since become extinct. Those where the days when politics was at its peak in our campus, and yet, he said, there were many active forums for discussing the issues of the day, entirely free from any political flavour. Debates are still held occasionally by the Literary and Debating Club, as competitions during culturals fests, but it is mostly debating for the sake of debating- and “soft skill” development.

I realize that the sort of campus Ramkumar sir talked of, no loger exists. When I look about me, I see mostly students glued to their laptops, engrossed in watching movies, unauthorized copies (the word “pirated” is unfair and inappropriate) of which are freely shared on our hostel networks and playing computer games which degrade your level of existence.

Another sad fact that is that there is practically no interaction between the faculty and the students except for the lectures and the labs. I personally feel that a free mingling of people of all ages is crucial to the health of a society. I know from my experience, that there is a lot to be learnt from elder people. I’ll write more about this later. This is a glaring deficiency in today’s campus.

Back at the Engineer Factory

The fifth semester has started. As usual, registration was Chaos, with a capital C. Anyway, completed it successfully! The first hour was Electronic Circuits-2 by Raghu sir. He didn’t take class, but made us share our experiences during the vacation. I talked to the class for a few minutes, about my experience working on Phoenix in Delhi. Deepak sir is down with chicken pox, so I couldn’t meet him.

This year, MHRD has removed the state quotas, which means that while half of the students are from Kerala itself, the other half are admitted purely on All India merit. There are over a hundred first years from Andhra Pradesh!

Besides, the number of seats has now crossed 700. In our year, it was a little over 450. I don’t know why they are increasing the intake without an improvement in infrastructure. Some of the first year students are now accommodated two in single rooms in the PG hostel. As a result, even the MTech first years are accommodated as pairs in those rooms which may be comfortable for a single person, but too congested for two.

It reminds me of the “mass production” which Deepak sir mentioned in his comment a few days ago. There is a huge demand for engineers in the industry, and my college is nothing but a supplier of “engineers”- commodities- to the “back offices of corporates”. It doesn’t matter that there are not enough hostel rooms… It doesn’t matter that most of the teachers now handle batches of over 100… It doesn’t matter whether anyone cares in the least what is being taught… There is a pay packet at the end of four years!

A factory churning out “engineers” by hundreds…

FOSSMeet Report

No one except Manu Krishnan seems to have written any reports of FOSSMeet@NITC 2008, which concluded yesterday. Well, I’m sure we’ll have more feedback from those who attended the event, in a couple of days. Meanwhile, I thought I’d write.

The event started off (on Friday evening) with a conventional inaugural ceremony. Since we couldn’t get anyone else, we had to make the Director of National Chemical Laboratory, Pune- who had come to take part in a conference on polymers at that time- the chief guest. I wasn’t there for his talk, but heard that he talked well about free software (whew! narrow escape!).

After the inauguration, there were a couple of talks which went on till 10.30. The first one was on Octave and Maxima, by R.Deepak, Lecturer in ECE, NITC, and the other was on Blogging, by Kiruba Shankar.

I don’t know much about what went on in the main conference over the next two days, because I was volunteering at the lab where the workshop for school children, FOSS@School, was going on, led by Pramode. Those who missed any talks, don’t worry! We’ve got all the talks recorded, and will be putting them up on the FOSSMeet website soon!

Now, about FOSS@School. For me, it was the single biggest PLUS about this year’s FOSSMeet. (Especially when you consider the number of talks that had fewer than 10 listeners…) Around 42 motivated and energetic students, of 8th, 9th and 10th standard, took part in the workshop. 35 of them came from various parts of Malappuram, led by Seena teacher of Tharakan High School, Angadippuram, who took a lot of trouble to bring the children to NITC. She was accompanied by a few other motivated teachers as well.

The children truly enjoyed the workshop, in which they were mainly introduced to basic programing in python, through Adventures with Neko. They picked up concepts like defining functions and writing loops very easily through this approach. On Sunday, Joseph and company, from Jyothi Engg, College, Thrissur, came with the line following robot they had made, and demonstrated how it worked, to the kids. They were also given a brief introduction to PHOENIX. You’ll be able to read more about the workshop on Pramode’s blog shortly.

Besides this, on Sunday, there was a session of discussion for school teachers, led by Ani Peter and Praveen of SMC. They should be writing about it soon…

That’s it about this year’s FOSSMeet. I’ll add more if something strikes me…