This is not an update

Feels strange to see this page after a real long time and find nothing interesting posted, so I think I'll do a bit of justice for the wider audience.

Alright, since I got here, there have been two major events at DAIICT. Terrible overall, but since you're feeling nostalgic and shit, any news is good news right?

Again, if you're looking for intricate details on both events, I suggest browsing thru orkut scrapbooks and albums, or wait for some kind soul to take the time and pain to post an account of sorts. The 5th convocation on Jan 31st and Synapse last weekend, those were the events.

So, what I'm going to tell you isn't really about how awesome everyone looked or how people got booted out of the hostel at 4 am for "possession" of liquor, or the big row that ensued thereafter between one faculty group and M.V. Joshi (the current something of whatever it is they're calling it nowadays) and an unexpected victory for the "graduates" involved. A real heartbreaking story that, one of how one group of students with the help of one old, fat, but tough professor fought for justice and won, albeit at the cost of 5000 bux, so I'm not going to tell you about it, just wait for the movie.

Nor am I going to talk about Synapse, which was more hyped up than any of the ones you've seen in the past... i mean there was a fucking billboard advertisement for Synapse in some godforsaken area of Ahmedabad, and as usual, everything but the rock show, sucked.

What I'd really like to share with you people is how kaloo (G Hareesh [200401073]) currently employed by Infosys (god save them) bought an amazing bike for 23,475 INR. It's an amazing bike really, and if you're thinking value for money... guess what, it's got 24 gears!! So, that's roughly one gear per 1000 bux. What's even more interesting is that it's a fucking cycle (or mountain bike as they call it) that weighs all of 12kgs and it has rims that wont bend or break (like the one in that Zach Braff movie). I dont have the link right now, but will update as soon as i fish it out of my chat logs.. but then again, mad respect to kaloo for only he can pull something like this off...

There's more interesting news, but its got nothing to do with DAIICT.. Amazon's been selling a virtual rape game, in which well you can virtually rape women, they've removed the page now, but you can still find it in google's cache if you search around a bit and are bored out of your skull.

That's it for now. Wait eagerly for some real updates.

PS: This is not my first attempt at "public writing" (wtf is public writing anyway) , so all your feedback and suggested improvements can be duly stuffed up your own backsides.

Changing air of DA-IICT

August 7^th, 2005 when I first entered in DA-IICT, the calm, green environment of DA-IICT campus, tranquil air, and quiet roads. This was the first impression of DA-IICT on me and my family. But I never thought at that time that this quietness could be a little bit toxic to our life. As we were unable to find any thing in Gandhinagar, for everything we had to cover a large distance to Ahmadabad, either for purchasing or for amusement/recreation activities. There wasn't a single good restaurant in Gandhinagar. But over the years life has changed around this campus. Especially in the last two years. Change ,change and change , that's what life is, around DA-IICT. This article is especially for those who left college two or more years ago. And never came back.

Now if you want to have a good coffee, you don’t have to go a long distance in search for your favorite coffee. Just go out side the DA-IICT gate and have a stroll of 15mins and here you are, in front of CCD . Over the last two years this CCD has become very popular as lots of NIFTians and DAIICTians visit there regularly with the belief that 'A lot can happen over coffee'.

I have been to the Chocolate room twice on CG Road. I can not forget the chocolaty taste of every dish especially chocolate truffle, i had there. But due to long distance it was not possible to visit there frequently. But don’t worry. Now we have Chocolate Room here in Infocity just beside the CCD. Now you can have the same Chocolaty flavor when ever you want.

When I see every senior begging for brijwasi food after getting out of our college, I feel a little strange, because we in college don’t want to have that typical canteen food every day. So for those who want some spice in their food, we have a SUB-WAY here in Infocity. You can have burgers, hot dogs all those stuff any time. But be careful. This SUB-WAY can lead you to pauperism. Pizza lovers can have great meal at Uncle Sam Pizza in Gandhinagar. Your pockets won’t be affected much.

I think there are a lot of changes taking place around DA-IICT. It would be very tiring task to list all those down here in this article. But I am trying to cover as many points as I can. Other than restaurants and food products, a lot of construction is going all around our campus. DLF IT City construction has already started just behind the DA-IICT campus. On left hand side, the construction of a new hostel building for NIFT students has just started a few days ago. We have one more important building near DA-IICT which came into existence just 6-8 months ago, the NID PG campus building near our college. Other than these constructions there are few sites of different buildings also .The government project INFLIBNET is one of them.

With the lots of big construction taking place all around DA-IICT. This place is going to be very 'Advanced' in few years. But I don’t know that whether this 'Advancement' will have positive effect on our college or negative. With such constructions happening around DA-IICT, our College will loose its calm and placid ambience, which is USP of our college. I think only the news of NIFT hostel would definitely have some positive effects on DA-IICT students, especially boys [: P].

I hope these buildings and the changing environment around our college would have some positive effect on our campus. And between these new buildings our DA-IICT will keep on rising with its primordial attributes.

PS: This is my first attempt of public writing. I am not as good as other regular writers on this blog, so there might be some grammatical errors. Suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

If you would like to contribute

Hi,
For past few months I have been inactive on blogosphere, but I plan to do the work which was supposed to be done months back. Being late always has done damage to the plans which were to be executed. Nonetheless, here is an start.

If you want to contribute to the blog, please send an email to both of us. There are few more admins, but I would like not to disturb them at this point of time.
Email's are
TO : chhajer at gmail dot com, avi at jodhpuriguy dot com

Note : We are from B.Tech2003, or say Class of' 07. So if you think that we might not know about you, add a referrer the CC section of e-mail.

Who can be a referrer?
Anyone whom I have known personally, is and can be one. I've mostly known all "good" CS/DotA players till B.Tech2005, add DC++ Operators till B.Tech2005 to the list too. If you are a junior, then just ask from 4th years, they should know me, hopefully!
Just ask them if the name "DarK" or "Abhishek Chhajer" or "Avi Mehta" rings any bells in their head, if it does, there you go. You've just found a referrer!

For new people to the blog, here is what we write about
http://daiictians.blogspot.com/2007/06/welcome.html

Hoping to know much more about you, DA-IICT, and us. This is all for now.

Of Food and Faculty

Hey everyone... my first post here.. just copy-pasting some stuff from my blog that i wrote a few days back...

It's not often that you get to know the blokes who teach you outside the classrooms. More often than not, our interactions are just limited to the classrooms. I have been quite lucky in this respect that I have got to interact with a couple of faculty members outside the classroom environment over the last three and a half years. But what happened a couple of nights ago ws truly amazing. All of us sitting in the cafeteria, it being our last such get-together. A number of us were leaving for home the next day, and more importantly Sobu wasn't returning to college. He had been offered an internship at Qualcomm and would be in Hyderabad for the next semester. Anyways, lets not digress from the topic. So yeah, there we were sitting in the cafetaria talking from anything to everything under the sun when Manu, the guy who runs the cafe at night joined us. And well, he had some insight to offer on the food habits of our faculty members...

prof. shiv

A pretty fixed lunch... generally includes a daal, bhindi and jeera aloo.. just 2 chapatis (surprise surprise!!).. and lots of green salad... and yeah a strong coffee to top it off...

prof. mathuria

A daal a day is the motto for him... 30 days-30 daals... no deviation whatsoever... gets his veggies from home only..

prof. srivastava

Never eats in campus.. always goes home...

prof. banerjee

Well well... yeh to subah ka doodh bhi brajwasi se hi lene aate hain.. so u can guess ki khane ka to kya haal hoga.. no wonder raat ko bhi cafeteria mein hi dikhte hai... apparently, mrs. banerjee, doesn't like to cook..

Next we asked Manu kis sabse zyada kaun khata hai.. and well.. the list wasn't surprising at all...

pk chopra, prof. anil roy, kumbar....

prof. sinha (Daddu) and prof. Jotwani were among the rare eaters... while rest everybody was almost a regular..

I wonder what happens next, now that brajwasi has finally decided to close its shop...

Deserted

Now that we're gone and years have passed, this place is uncharacteristically deserted. Apparently there are not many present students of DAIICT in the contributors list here. Life and other subsets of that keep us alumni either busy or incurious. I hope some more of the 2005,2006,2007 & 2008 batch students join in and convince their mates for the same. I'm unaware of any channel for "updates from college" or any photography enthusiast who puts up our picturesque campus on web. Some more activity and updates here might just trigger multiple responses.

PS - Take a look at the pics of Mumbai attacks and rescue operations. :|

Anthem

’cause this whole world needs an anthem
And I’m trying to put the words where they belong
Yeah this whole world needs an anthem
And I’m hoping everyone will sing along


True, eh? how very true. I'm not going to justify that. You should know better by now. There are enough tv channels tripping over themselves to find the weirdest shit on the planet and then broadcast it to give their hapless viewers a fresh stock of disturbing images.
I was talking to a friend in Sweden today, and she was going on about the oil prices, and greenpeace and the indo-us nuclear deal. Wow, I thought, "Wassup?" just got a whole new definition. Okay, its not a bad thing to stay 'abreast' of current events, but some people have this, how do i put it - well, let me give you an analogy. Old people and infants have this problem controlling their bladder. Its not their fault you know.. it's because the muscles responsible for proper bladder function are too weak. Some people have the same problem with their mouths. They just dont know when to shut up.

Anyhow, when they see something interesting on tv, they feel this incessant urge to pass on their recently earned 'wisdom' to the next person they see or talk to. It doesnt matter if they're interested or not. They just have to get it out. Goddammit, I dont care if oil costs 150$ a barrel. It costs like 30 cents a litre here. Its stayed that way for over 15 years, and it will probably stay like that for another 15. Why do YOU care so much?
Oh, it's nothing, they were showing that on the business channel today. I'm impressed, you know, that you watch the business channel. Watch ESPN ffs, or HBO or even History channel. Why why why watch 24 hour news channels. I mean how much world news do you need daily? At least with the history channel you gain more knowledge. And with sports or movies or series you never get bored talking about that stuff.

News addicts, that's the new fad. Its not general knowledge, its public indifference. I've seen people watch live sessions of parliament. The scary part is that they sometimes laugh to themselves, and nod vigorously from time to time. I mean, what can you possibly gain from watching the german parliament in session. Whatever shit he smoked, I'd get a restraining order against it. 24 hours of news... man, that's insane.... remember the good old days? There was a news bulletin in the morning, one at noon, and one at night. And we used to steer clear of them every single time. BBC Radio, yeah, with their clanging chimes and dear god... what was that awful intro music they had for the news. Maybe that's the reason I began to hate the news bulletins. That awful music.. ugh!!

Now that there's 24/7 coverage, news channels are praying for wars and disasters. Cyclone in Burma... gooooo, wait, what's that? the government isnt allowing foreign aid? omfg, this is the motherload... lets go live.. there's a victim, look he doesnt have an arm, come on! mnve it, we need an interview... exclusive footage this will be.. oh yes, people just lovvee survivor stories. We need to spice it up.. lets say he lost his arm saving this kid over here from a falling tree.. yeah?

Sad, I know, but its just an example of the ground realities. The things that go unnoticed, under the banner of creating awareness among the public. Soon, I'm sure there's going to be a reality show wbere tbe contestants must fight to survive an actual disaster. An instant hit.

There's nothing I can do about it. It could have been worse. There are 24 hour weather channels too...

what im saying is
this is the anthem
throw all your hands up
yall got to feel me,sing if your with me, yeah

An anthem. Yes. WE need a fucking anthem.

DA-IICT Alumni Google Group

hi,
this might be highly unlikely that you haven't heard about it, but just for the sake of information, there is a Google Group for DA-IICT Alumni started by Ashish Kumar (B.Tech. 2002)
Currently there are 323 members.

So spread the word.

Note : There are few meetups (Bangalore, Delhi) in next week/10days. So if you are around, then make sure to check those out. Currently they expect the 2004 and 2005 ppl to join in too, so that all the juniors can take maximum from the community.

I'll be in Mumbai from 12th May to 22nd July. Redeye share your WoW account :X

The Swan Song

I was recently told about the Black Swan Theory and the best way to describe a post on Swans is to use the greatest clichés of all… The Swan Song.

As humans we believe in a few assumptions. We believe that gravity exists and we believe that energy and mass can be converted into each other because Einstein said so. Of course, we also assume that Einstein was a genius and therefore he was right! But then there was also a time when we believed that the world was flat and the Earth was the center of the universe. I am quite sure that some real genius would have come up with that idea.

Reverting back to the original Black Swan Theory, people throughout the world used to believe that Swans were white. The assumption was so prevalent that we associated a sense of whiteness with Swans and a sense of Swanness with white. And then, people discovered Australia and to their utmost surprise, they also discovered Swans that were black.

Now the point that I am trying to make is probably so banal that you would want to kill me by the end of this post, but then somethings have to be done despite the banality of their occurrence. A black swan stands for everything that we haven’t anticipated, for things that we believe don’t exist and of course, for discoveries that we haven’t made. The great question is what if there is an Australia where the laws of gravity don’t apply? What if de Broglie hypothesis on the duality of matter falls flat if we account for more dimensions than the four that we know of?

The composition of our entire environment, religion, culture and technology is based on the inherent belief that we know. It assumes that earth was created to be ruled by homo sapiens. The assumption doesn’t stop here, we also believe that evolutionary cycle has stopped working after it created this species and there will be just minor modification where we will be taller and we will lose the appendix. We believe that that since humans differ so much from other species, that human future development may not be governed by the same principles as other animals. This belief is deeply embedded into our culture, with our own set of Creation Myths and Literature. In fact, we are so self-obsessed that we believe that one day we would either rule the universe and we would be able to terraform planets for our survival.

What if human intelligence is too over-rated and there is a subtle wisdom in the evolutionary cycle which has supported immense diversity of species for millions of years before we decided to be intelligent enough to take over. One of the primary advantage of diversity is an essential understanding the diversity promotes survival in extremities of atmospheric conditions. It is far easier to destroy a thousand species with an atmospheric change than to destroy a million species. We an intensive expansion of our species we are moving towards a world with an eventual set of thousand species!

Someday we will discover the black swan and we would end up realizing that our initial beliefs were wrong. The immensity of faith that we have on our intelligence, wherein we believe that we will eventually solve any problem that comes our way might be rendered ineffective against the larger wisdom of what we face! This is not an apocalypse that I am talking about… it’s just a discovery. A small event in the evolutionary lifecycle could have a large impact on our survival.

So the next time you see a langoor happily sitting on the branch of a tree, chewing away one of its branches, just don’t smile to yourself wondering about the purposelessness of his existence. Atleast, he knows that there is no black swan waiting for him at the end of the day.

Connect DA-IICT

Thought that this initiative should reach a larger audience

http://beingdesh.blogspot.com/2008/02/connect-da-iict.html

DA-IICT Placements and Admission

This week, DA-IICT announced admission to all its programs. Seems like the process for placement fair too has started. This time, apparently, there will be two phases of placement. One for niche companies and the other for the normal ones (visit: http://placement.daiict.ac.in for more details). Something for the class of 2007, we are now part of the homepage of DA-IICT!