An extremely juvenile post where I cry about my department

Arbit freshie: Sir, ye UGPC lab 2 kahaan hai?

Me: Take a right from the stairwell on the first floor. Go straight ahead. Now, whenever you feel as if all happiness is being sucked out of your life, you’ll reach the UGPC lab 2.

In a parallel universe where I come up with such comeback lines in real-time and bedtime story books for children feature Cyanide and Happiness Comics, there’s a minute possibility of me making it successfully through a semester without facing the sardonic realities of life. To anyone who’s wondering, the realities include my end-term grades and the inflating belly which grows thicker as I munch upon the newly-opened packet of Yumitos. With a vacant stare at yet another video featuring Yo Yo Honey Singh dancing with naked women in background, I begin to realize that the concept of a semester ending with mention-able grades, a successful delivery of work at the POR and a consistent gym routine is not only a figment of my imagination but an urban legend passed on by some seniors, featuring some-random-guy from some-random-IIT managing to score a dassi, a foreign intern, a bandi, an insti-level post, some 99.999999%ile in CAT, a placement in that-MNC-which-pays-the-highest-on-day-one and saving the earth from an attack by Tamraj Kilvish.

The Electronics and Computer engineering department of IITR is a strange place when it comes to, well, everything. Although this blog entry comes after spending 5 academically painful semesters in the institute, the exasperation of seeing the grades on the display board remains the same as it was 2 years back. This department has been a silent witness to some of the worst memories of my life. There have been instances when I have left this place in a state of complete helplessness, with a suicide probability of more than 11%.

Note: To the readers who are unaware of its concept, suicide probability for any EC subject can be easily calculated by this formula -

%Suicide Probability for an exam = [(No. of sleepless nights spent studying for that exam)/(No. of sleepless nights spent crying about its grade)] * 100.

There are many things which intrigue me even now when I enter the department: cheaply whitewashed walls, dusty classrooms, randomly bolted doors and labs that are basically state-of-the-art torture chambers filled with electronic equipment that’s meant to malfunction exactly a moment before you are about to display your end-term practical. These are a few things that, in my opinion, can help this place serve as a possible premise for an award winning, B-grade Ramsay family blockbuster or the 100th anniversary episode of CID or both.

Along the same lines, if someone was to estimate the amount of crap the pigeons deposited on the central light that hangs in the stairwell of the department, then the person would have a hard time. The smell’s bad. Really bad. Not like I-didn’t-take-a-bath-for-3-days bad. It’s I-didn’t-take-a-bath-for-10-days-and-my-deodorant-finished bad. The pathetic smell is further characterized by an invisible rodent infestation as the myriad creatures leave their poop unceremoniously right in the middle of the corridors, further reducing the department’s objectionable standards of public hygiene. With a rather obscene looking tower, (on that note, I remember being part of a conversation where someone suggested that the EC tower should be covered with a giant plastic bag as a part of AIDS awareness campaign), the tantalizing aura that surrounds this grim building is quite repulsive. I am saying that because I haven’t found one female gypsy-psychic who would dare come around this building with her crystal ball.

It is not as if I suddenly started my rant about the department. The fifth semester has reached its end and as I look apprehensively at my receding hairline and a beard that resembles what Tony Stark would like in a Tamil version of Iron Man, I realize that my days in this institute are running at an all-time low. The last 2 and a half years have passed in a speed worthy of quoting an Interstellar movie-reference with some relativistic, space-time gibberish which would make me sound all intelligent and nerdy. Sadly, each and every hour spent in that unholy place trying to grasp the intricacies of a subject, which happens to be highly interesting and intellectually stimulating (and guaranteeing me a fat pay-check), gets lost behind the cutthroat fight for grades at the end of semester.

I guess I will stop here before my name gets accidentally wiped off from the next year’s enrollment list and I am unpersoned for the greater good of coming generations of CS junta. If you are real and reading this, I promise I would write more on the eternal topic of My Life and things that make it miserable, which in my extremely humble opinion, are the most important things in the world.

Peace Out.