Short Circuit: A start well made!

(with inputs from Anoosh - my friend and co-coord for Shaastra 2009)

It has been a really long break from blogging, largely due to lack of time, and perhaps, lack of an interesting subject to write about. The 7th sem has begun and is more-than-half over. Acads are going on nicely, Shaastra is just over and I finally have the time and an interesting topic to write on!

It all starts with an idea, they say. This did start with an idea. An idea to prove that academics (read: electrical engineering) can be fun when seen from the right perspective. An idea to start a unique genre of events in Shaastra - tech-unwind, one that has less of tech and more of fun! An idea that later came to be known as Short Circuit!

The motivation

An analysis of the participants' statistics of Shaastra 2008 revealed that out of the 20000-odd students who registered on the Shaastra website, more than 4000 belonged to Electrical engineering and related branches (ECE, EEE, E&I etc.). And how many competitive events did Shaastra 2008 had to offer to them? Just ONE! Something that made us (me and Anoosh) ponder for a few days.

The conception and planning

We wanted to conceive of an event that would entertain the large number of Elec masses who throng Shaastra, an event that would be a crowd-puller! After a lot of discussions and deliberations, during a casual stroll around the Cubbon Park (Bangalore) on one fine summer evening, the idea of Short Circuit struck us.

The plan was concretized. Have an open-to-all prelims with questions that evoke a "Yes, yes! I can crack it" kind of feeling upon first reading and which involve application of nothing more than common sense and basic electrical engineering fundaes. Select eight teams from the prelims, and pit them one-on-one against each other in short, crisp and exciting matches spanning 4 quarters, 2 semis and 1 grand finale!

"Elec can be fun too, mind it", we proclaimed!

The publicity

The Official Short Circuit Teaser Video became an instant hit, recording more than 200 views on Youtube in less than 3 hours of getting uploaded. The Official Short Circuit Mascot, a plug-and-socket combination representing a short circuit, became a cult figure straightaway and won several admirers, including certain profs whose interests in Shaastra 2009 till then were limited only to the laser/fireworks show and the grub stalls.

We brought out a couple of teaser questions just before Shaastra to get insti junta excited about Short Circuit. The response was amazing. The lucky winners of these teaser questions, on the day of the grand finale, walked away with assorted gift-hampers consisting of Shaastra T-shirts, Shaastra key-chains, Open Solaris CDs, NetBeans IDE CDs and copies of Electronics For You, all neatly packaged in bio-degradable paper bags brought from Gurunath.

We were overwhelmed when a lot of our insti friends accepted our request to put flyers on Short Circuit on their GTalk status messages. Our sincere thanks to all of them!

[Click on the pic to enlarge and appreciate!]

The event

The prelims, held in CRC on October 3 (Saturday), saw more than 150 teams (~450 students) turning up, including ~60 teams from outside IITM. The question-paper, prepared after 4 straight night-outs of research, became quite popular among the participants, with many of them coming to us later to convey their kudos. The feedback from the participants was amazing; none of the ratings in any of the feedback forms were below 4/5 (5 = Best).

The post-prelims, conducted on the next day in ICSR Hall 3, witnessed an all-insti clash. A fourth-year undergrad team comprising of Chinmoy, Harish and Kishore breezed through the quarters and semis before surviving a scare from an MS team (Timir, Ankesh, Kunal) in the finale to eventually emerge champions!

The post-prelims rounds would be more fondly remembered by the audience for the unique Elec-dumb-charades that had the entire hall in splits. Raghunandan, trying to enact 'convolution', rotated himself, spun an electron and went to the extent of revolving the planets and the universe, but the convolution never happened. Sathish's love for Theoretical Physics was clearly evident as he resorted to Planck's constant and photons to enact a term as simple as 'frequency'.

The circuit-makers

We would like to thank a few people - Faheem (for making the awesome Teaser Video), Arvind (for designing the immortal mascot), Pavan (for handling all our production requirements), Sagar (our QMS coord), Vignesh-SK-Akhil (the Events Cores, for providing all possible support to our idea of Short Circuit), Gainda-Subbu (the Finance Cores, for being kind to provide T-Shirts and keychains as audience prizes), Raghav (the Spons Core, for arranging copies of EFY as audience prize), Tarun-Vamsi-Kishor-Sunaina-Nitish (our vols, for their amazing enthusiasm towards organizing and conducting the event), Manekha (a photography vol, who captured the dumb-charades moments) and everyone else who helped us conduct the event successfully!

A multitude of plans to take Short Circuit forward is in the pipeline - to organize it on a much grander scale next year, to continue it as part of E2A this year, to organize an all-profs' Short Circuit during the upcoming Elec Nite.

As we take a break and look back, we feel proud of initiating this unique event; it was a start really well made!

Can you please explain?

Bangalore's weather is AWESOME! My internship is progressing nicely. Weekends have been fun as well!

Last Friday, we (the interns and the research team at Bell Labs India) did a bit of trekking, rowing and river-bathing in the Cauvery Wildlife Sanctuary. The trekking was adventurous, the destination (peak of Bheemagiri) was a delight, the banks of river Cauvery presented a serene sight! A psychology game on a tree-hammock on the Cauvery banks surprisingly revealed that Shamik sees 'beauty' in 'beasts' and Adhiraj finds 'thoughts' 'dirty'! :P

What I am more interested in describing articulately in this article are incidents that occurred during the next couple of days. Some of us had been to Puttaparthi to have a darshan of Sri Sathya Sai Baba, considered to be the spiritual guru common to all religions. Frankly speaking, I do not have much belief in the saying that he can perform miracles; what I admire about him though are his teachings, which offer so many good things to learn, his simple messages "Love all, serve all" and "Be good, do good" that have won him followers across the globe and the large number of social initiatives that he has undertaken for the betterment of mankind in general and the people of Puttaparthi in particular.

But a couple of incidents there have left me somewhat disturbed!

1. After a satisfying morning darshan and just before the evening darshan, I realized that my phone’s battery was totally discharged. Since I had not called home since quite a long time and also had a train-trip to make to Bangalore later that night, I thought it was better to charge it at the earliest. I struggled to find a plug-point (it's not very easy to find one!) and placed my phone for charging. When it had charged to 63% in about 20 minutes, I removed it, switched it off, placed it back in my bag (phones are not allowed into the darshan hall) and ran for the darshan, only to reach late and miss the initial part of the session. When I came back and switched the phone on, the charge was just 6%!! Such a thing had never happened before...and has never happened again since then!
   
   
2. Later that night, when I tried playing songs on my phone-walkman, I could hear no audio. I thought there might be a problem with the walkman. I tried setting an alarm to hear the alarm-tone; there was none. I asked one of my friends to give me a call, there was no sound of the ring-tone! I tried re-inserting the battery and resetting the phone, nothing worked! I believed my phone-speakers had somehow got screwed. Back in Bangalore, I tried connecting an earphone to see if I could hear any sound; I couldn't! The problem then definitely didn't lie in the speakers but somewhere else. A service centre was the only option to get it repaired at.
   
   Next day, Monday, I went to a nearby service centre but it was closed by the time I reached there. That night, frustrated, I again tried removing the battery to see if I could be lucky. And surprise, the sound was back! Everything worked PERFECTLY!!
   

I could come up with some sort of an explanation for the first incident. When I removed the charger, it was damn hot! I do not clearly know how a charger or the charging process functions, but perhaps some current limiter somewhere had got screwed up, thereby allowing a large current to flow through and causing the charge-level to be shown high when actually it wasn't! Or probably something similar! Or maybe something entirely different!

But I have absolutely no explanation for the second incident. This, even after having studied cell phones, their hardware and software aspects, for nearly two years!

I’ll be the last person to say that these incidents were miracles or occurred due to divine intervention or anything similar! But they certainly can't happen without an explanation! And I have still not been able to find any. Can you please explain?

Because, we care...

It has been a while since I posted an article here. I have been busy with my summer internship since the last month and half and have hardly had the time to update this blog.

Recently, I happened to meet some amazing people and had been longing to write about them ever since. It was Alcatel-Lucent's International Day of Caring (IDoC) and these people belonged to the Association for the Mentally Challenged (AMC), Bangalore.

Believe me, they are some of the most extra-ordinarily wonderful human-beings I have come across in recent times. They belong to a class of their own, beyond our match.

They personify purity. Their smile, their joy, their excitement, their anxiousness - everything is so pure! Their emotions, unlike ours, are very genuine. Beyond that, they are not very different from us. As one of my friends mentioned, it's on seeing these kind of people that one feels like singing, "Tujh mein rab dikhta hai..."



They value achievements as intensely as we do. During the various running races that were conducted for them, I could see, in their efforts, the desire to succeed. Some would win and start yelling in joy. Some others would come last, give a smile and join the victors in their celebrations. Intensity during race and camaraderie then-after - they showed how healthy competition should be; wish everyone on earth could be like them!


Their desire to explore new gadgets is as strong as ours. They had somehow figured out that a snap captured by a digital camera can be immediately viewed on its opposite side. As soon as I would click a snap, they would entreat me to show them the image; not to mention the joy with which they would pose for the photograph in the first place!


We painted together, we played together, we ate together, we sang together, we danced together, we celebrated together! They enjoyed our presence; we enjoyed their company. Those were some of the most memorable moments I have ever spent anywhere!







My sincerest thanks to all the organizers of IDoc 2009, you gave me an opportunity to interact with my more fortunate brethren. Congratulations to all my co-volunteers, we showed that we care...


P.S.: Here is an official report on IDoC 2009 at Bangalore.

Wingmates of Fire

It was a historic event! Atleast for me. For the very first time in three years, my entire wing went out together for a treat!

Yes, all 26 of the 31 of us who were present then in the institute came along, inspite of some of them having some more important commitments elsewhere in the institute. Three Branch Councillors in my wing had a Placements Meeting going on at the same time. Four others had extra classes during the same hours. Another had already fixed a lunch commitment. But nobody could say 'No' to this idea of a full-wing treat. Every single person ensured his presence. Even people like Kunhi, Sufu and Dhawal, who generally do not wake up before noon on holidays, were up and ready in time. Wonderful wing-spirit!

Just the fact that the entire wing was out together had given me such inexplicable satisfaction that I wasn't thinking too much about the food. But the food turned out to be equally satisfaying! The Gujurati-Rajasthani thali at Rangoli was finger-licking good. The Dhoklas and Kachaudis were so delicious that Arjun made a meal just out of them. The Srikhand truly tasted like a piece of divinity. Rotli, Bateta nu Shaak, Ghooghra, Daal Baati, Chana and Ghevar were simply awesome. There were so many other things as well, not to forget the paan at the end. As someone reminisced, "I did not know the names of more than half the things on the thali, but I sure did know that all of them tasted great! "



I would like to make a special mention of my friend, Mukunda, the only non-Gangaster who was specially invited for the treat (that made it 27 treat-goers altogether). He touched everyone's heart when he declared, "I'm a pseudo-Gangaster da! I'm one among you only!" Yes, you're right. Afterall, Ganga is your "hostel-away-from-hostel", isn't it? Welcome!



Some unforgettable moments of the day:









A big note of thanks to all my wingmates for making themselves available for the treat. We have set a trend; now we'll see many other "full-wing treats" (FuWiTs) happening in future.
My heartfelt thanks to my co-sponsors - Hippo, Baba, Parabola, N2O, Sufu, Gunda and Tile. We played a small part in making history happen!
All of us missed the 5 who couldn't make it to the treat - Harish, Vignesh, Rituraj, Achal and Jay. It would have been great had you people been here on that day; nevertheless, be prepared for the future FuWiTs! :)
And Sriram, all of us miss your presence in the wing!

A couple of original video-clips: | Video 1 | Video 2 | The clips have been intentionally left unedited so that the background prompts and comments are heard clearly. Real fun they are, check them out!

Another account of this treat is here, the debut blog-article of my friend, Shankar. Welcome to blogging!

To all my wingmates, I must bow. What wonderful times we have had together so far ! We have been living together, dancing together (Oh no! :) ), 'mugging' together and enjoying life together. I miss those days in the first semester when all of us would be mugging together for the same courses. I still remember the last year's inter-wing tug-of-war when all of us turned out for the sake of our wing. I cannot forget my last birthday when you contributed together and gifted me a birthday present. What a touching moment that was! You all have inspired me, guided me, encouraged me and stayed by me during my low-points in life. You, truly, are my wingmates of fire!

By the way, I'll remember forever the way the entire wing returned back after the treat. As all of us walked together on the pathway connecting the front and rear wings, shouting "Go 5th wing" at the top of our voices, I felt like a king, like being on top of the world! Goose-bump moment that was, seriously!

I'll leave you with a loving recollection of some of our past times!

Weeks in Pics

A break from the usual routine stuff feels so refreshingly divine!

The last couple of weeks have been quite taxing on me. The first round of quizzes, preparations for a couple of projects, brushing up some previously-learnt stuff, the usual academic classes, assignments and reports - lots of things have congested my routine in the recent days. But fortunately, I have had regular opportunities to break free from these mundane routines and rejoice in life. A fond remembrance of some of those moments...

Fete 2009
Fete is IITM's annual inter-hostel gaming competition, where each hostel has to choose a theme and present some games related to the theme amidst suitable ambience in their respective stalls. Our hostel's theme was "Mayan Adventures". We enjoyed the sevices of Vishnu, an expert at art-works, who, assisted by Arjun (aka IDK), another enthusiastic second-yearite, did some superb ambience work for us. I was supposed to be the Ambience-in-charge of our Fete activities, but with people like Vishnu, Arjun and some over-enthusiastic freshies around, I ended up just pushing everyone to work without doing anything myself!

On the day of Fete, we were the last hostel to be judged. Since we weren't allowing the general public to enter our stall until our judging was over, a lot many people didn't get an opportunity to enjoy the wonderful visual treat that our stall had to offer. For all such people and for all others, here is an image-tour of our stall...

A first prize would have been the perfect reward for the amazing performance by Vishnu (who has a scholarship from the San Francisco Art University). Nevertheless, we came second for our ambience...and we celebrated!

The Shaastra '08 WebOps Team Treat
When the average CGPA of the treat-goers is above 9 (validation required), the experience can't get any geekier! It started with Avinash cribbing about a Jhun's assignment on M8C PSoC and Vimal & Slinky offering him several suggestions. It ended with all the CS people (who formed half the team) running to a xerox shop to get photocopies of someone's notes so as to mug for some quiz.



But in between the start and the end, there were some truly memorable moments! Pido's 'head'-on tryst with colours [:)], Vimal's 'match-the-following' test, Bhargav's frequent PJs (sshh...did someone say 'Pinky Jersey'?), Suvinay's imitation of his DSP Prof. and Immanuel-the bikeman ensured smiles for everyone all the time. The Alai brothers affectionately recollected how I used to 'pain' them with tasks in the run-up to Shaastra. Sharan, Hareesh and others acknowledged that all the fight that they had put for Shaastra was worth the treat (afterall, the starters and desserts were so delicious and everything was available in infinite quantity!). In the end, it was 5 hours of colours (ask Pido), fun, smiles and some wonderful memories to cherish!





Dinner at Tangerine
The result of a promise that TMani was trapped into making some months back [;)], this dinner had one of the most diverse set of insti people on board. There were people from diverse branches (Elec, Mech, Chem, Meta, BT, Civil etc.), from diverse years (second yearites to fifth yearite; though mostly second-yearites), with diverse CGPAs (6 pointers to 9 pointers) and with diverse areas of interests (arts, sports, acads etc.)! Spending time with them all, listening to their views on various issues, hearing their perceptions of campus-life - it was a truly unique experience! Some memorable snaps:





FEx sessions
All my first round quizzes went well upto the F slot. With only the 'light' G slot to go, I believed this would be the very first time in 3 years when I would have fared well in all the subjects. But it was not to happen..and I screwed up my G slot! Murphy's law at work, isn't it?

This time, some of us tried out a new concept, FEx (Fundaes Exchange) sessions. All participants were supposed to read up the entire portion of a course before attending the respective FEx session for the course. Each one could then point out the topics that he's not comfortable with and anyone else, who understood those particular topics well, would put fundaes. It helped us reasonably well. In a bid to prevent last-night mugging, we're planning to have such sessions for Quiz 2 atleast half a week before start, so that we have some incentive to go through the entire syllabi well before the quiz begins and not leave anything till the end. Hope it works out successfully!

Lots of other things have happened in the last couple of weeks. I have been auctioned off for a 'respectable' [:P] amount for GPL (Ganga Premier League), a noble football initiative in our hostel. Voting for hostel and institute elections has just got over. Parliamentary elections are coming. Grander than this, three Indians have won Oscars. I had never seen before a more aggressive on-stage performance by AR Rahman than the one at Kodak Theatre during the Oscar Night.

A lot of activities are lined up on my to-do list for the next few weeks as well; some pleasant ones, some strenuous ones. Way to go!

By the way, "Ella Pugazhum Iraivanukke!"