Mukti ’09

The Linux Users Group (LUG) which will soon be GNU/LUG of NIT Durgapur has started preparations for the next edition of Mukti, that is Mukti ’09. This year, we are going to make it big, bigger than ever! Its the same feeling that’s going through the minds of every member of LUG. And that too for obvious reasons.

mukti

Last year, due to some unavoidable circumstances, Mukti was held along with Aarohan, which was a shocker to everybody in college. This also drew a lot of criticism from the public and since then we had that fire in us to make Mukti ’09 a grand success. We have been having a lot of meetings and have decided to have a lot of new events this time in Mukti, and it is expected to pull a lot of crowds from across the country. I will be the event coordinator for two events namely: pen[GUI]n and Rush-Hour.

I just submitted the write ups for the events which will be put up in the website of mukti, that is http://mukti09.in

Here are the event details for PenGUIn:

penGUIn is a GUI (Graphical User Interface) designing contest, which will test your skills in various GUI designing tools available on Linux. Some of the tools/Programming Languages that can be used are: Java, wxPython, GTK, QT, PyQT, PyGTK, etc. The participants may have to work on some FOSS and design GUIs for some command-line programs which do not have a graphical user interface. The maximum no of participants allowed in a team is 2. The event will be organized in two rounds:

(1) The Online Round: The problem statements of the online round will be put up on the website by 15th January. The submissions for the online round will end on 22nd. The results will be announced on 26th Jan.

(2) Finals: Around 8 teams will be selected from the online round for the final round which will be held in NIT Durgapur during Muki ’09 (6th to 8th Feb). If the participation is more in the online round, then we can consider more entries for the final round. The final round will be an overnight event and challenging problem statements will be given to the participants.

As a build-up to this event, various workshops will be organized in January in NIT Durgapur by the students and professionals in the Industry.

Fading Traditions

Today, I woke up to the song wo lamhe from zeher movie. Patil, as usual was playing the song in his 4.1 speakers which wakes me up every morning. There was nothing unusual about that. But the song had an unusual effect on me and straight away took me to flashback!

There are always a few songs, which you associate with some period of your life. And you don’t listen to these songs often. This particular song reminded me of the days when I had just joined the college, the ragging period, etc. I had seen the video of this song in one of my senior’s room (Arun G to be precise) and that is how I connect this song with those times. Suddenly I started thinking about how far I have got from there and so on.

Then it flashed to my mind that we don’t have any juniors from Karnataka at all now! The usual tradition that used to be followed by Kannu family in a year was: ragging, freshers party, job treat, a video show in Hall 9, and finally farewell to the final year. We have been very unsuccessful in maintaining the tradition, I realized. But that’s also not our fault completely!

It started from the previous year, the present second years did not or rather could not hold a video show at all! And at that time, we had no idea that state quotas in NITs would be scrapped. Then came the big announcement and we all were quite shocked by the response from our state, 0 from Karnataka in NIT Durgapur. We had for some obvious reasons expected this to happen too! But “0″ was a big disappointment. Now, even if we want to, we cannot continue with our tradition and sadly, nothing can be done about that.

NIT Durgapur vs IIIT Hyderabad

I have completed my project here in IIIT this summer and will leave for Durgapur tomorrow. So I just thought why not write my views about the life in our IIIT and contrast it with that of our college. So here it is:

The first impression about a college that you get is when you enter the gate. The first impression about our college is not good at all because of our hopeless gate. Whereas in IIIT, as soon as you enter the campus, you’ll start feeling like you have come to a very good institution.  IIIT is much newer than our college so its buildings are much better than ours and as expected hostels are better than ours.

Now coming to more important things, the one sure thing missing in our college is RESEARCH which is omnipresent in IIIT. A lot of papers in a lot of conferences get selected from IIIT. Research is completely absent in our college. The research labs are state of the art here and there are no research facilities in our labs or even if there are, nobody makes any use of those. The faculty here stress a lot on research and they themselves get involved in a lot of research projects. The profs here, even though they are very well qualified, are very humble and interact a lot with students. I have seen a prof and a group of students sitting in the canteen at 12 AM and discussing a lot of things several times here in IIIT. But in our college, I doubt if any prof is friendly with students at all!

The student strength is very small in IIIT as compared to NIT D and they are either in ECE or CSE. Also, there is no state quota here in IIIT. Therefore our college has a wide variety of students and you’ll have friends from all across India. And if you are interested in working on something that involves students from multiple disciplines, then our college is better for that. The environment in the hostels of IIIT is completely different than that in our college. Cigarettes, for example is available in most of the stores inside our college campus, whereas a IIIT student would have to go out of the campus to buy a pack of cigarettes!

The placements in IIIT, as expected, are much better than that of our college. But NIT D is catching up slowly as we are putting a lot of effort to promote Linux on our campus and people are getting more serious. The LUG in our college has become very active from the past one year or so and IIIT has quite an active LUG too. A lot of people from IIIT go and study in foreign universities after their engineering, and from our college this trend has only started from a year or two and still, not many people go for higher studies.

The life of an average NIT D student, as I have seen is like this: The first year is a complete waste, thanks to the subjects, which are a repetition of +2 syllabus and ragging. This ensures that the student has completely lost his flow that used to exist till 12th std. The second year is when most of the people start enjoying their freedom from seniors and get involved in gaming, be it CS or AOE or FIFA, and it becomes difficult enough for him to get out of that. The third year is when he starts scratching his head to figure out what he has done in the past two years and gets into a bit of subjects and stuff, as the placements approach. At the end of the third year, most of the students are placed in some mass recruiting companies and a large chunk of the people are happy with that and take to boozing or some other stuff. And in the vacations, they start thinking of a project or a VT and just do it for name’s sake. A few more companies (dream) in the final year and the final year is gone!

But the life of a student in IIIT is quite different from this, as they complete all important subjects in the first four semesters and are ready for projects or research in any subject they find interesting. All the students have to get associated with some lab at the end of the second year itself and that’s when they start off. Then at the end of their third year, they have either completed a good project or have published papers in research topics. Many of them get internships in top companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft for their final year projects and most of the students get busy with their MS applications.

So there is a lot of difference between the life of a student in IIIT and NIT D. After saying all this, I have to mention that the situation in our college is also changing for good and people are getting serious day by day. The abolition of state quota this year has also changed the situation drastically, with very less or no ragging for many juniors. So NIT D is not far behind the “top colleges” of our country.