A new course, a new institute: No big deal?

New institutes, new Universities are coming up in many places across India. Although the need of such new institutes in a country with second largest population in the world can not be ruled out, the question often asked is whether the new institutions are living up to the expectations of the students, their parents or other fellow countrymen. Of course the academic reputation of an institute can not be purchased or built instantaneously and it takes some time, the government should at least make sure some of the minimum requirements before opening new institutes or universities. The same is true when an institute introduces a new course. The government often hurries a lot in the process it seems, may be because of the coming elections or some other sacred reasons which I can't think of. Couple of new IIT's were introduced four years back, and most of them without proper infra-structure. Most of them did not even have their own campus, the respective state governments were yet to allot land for the campus. So the new IIT's were either operating from some state government engineering college campus (like refugees) or in extreme cases operating from a different state within the campus of its mentor IIT. The students who might have got a place in a good NIT with good infra-structure and reputation opted for several such new IIT's thinking that the brand name will work. Is that enough? People don't come to IIT just for the tag. The life in IIT has more than just a tag. After spending five years in a premier institute like IIT Bombay, I know how much valuable the life here is, and at the same time I feel sad to see the new IIT's not yet having their own campus. The first 3-4 batches of these IIT's won't even see their own campus. Apart from that, the government also increased the intake of students in the IIT's introducing reservations. Even the older IIT's have become too much populated now, with many hostels are being under construction, reducing the green coverage as well. I can imagine how crowded the new IIT's will be which are operating from other colleges by occupying a small portion of the campus. It would have been much better if these IIT's were started at least after the land for the campus were allotted and are in a position to operate from their own campus.

Similar is true when an institute introduces a new course. They often overlook the fact that the infrastructure in the institute might not support that new course as well as the new students who will opt for the course. For example, the MSc-PhD dual degree course introduced in IITB in 2005 still sounds like alien to many of the academic office people. They have not yet mentioned this course in various certificates and we need to write our course name by hand there. They do not even know that after finishing MSc coursework we should get as much fellowship as other regular PhD students get. They are also confused whether they should give PhD, MSc or both the degrees after we complete the course. In short they are yet to introduce a proper booklet mentioning the rules and regulations about this new course. They just introduced the course six years back without giving much thought about it. One more problem this course facing is the availability of PhD supervisors. The institute takes regular PhD students twice a year, and every year one batch of Dual Degree with seven students are getting added to the list. So around 15-20 people are getting admitted to a course in the department which will ultimately lead to PhD degree. But do the department has as much infrastructure or faculty for that? Nobody seems to have an answer. Earlier the students had lots of freedom in choosing their topic as well as guide, but that no longer seems to be there since many faculty members have stopped offering projects due to overload. The institute should think about all these issues before taking new students every year. Hope to see some changes soon!

Boring Summer!

This summer seems really boring with no plans to go to some school or conferences. I don't remember when I spent the whole summer in the institute in last five years. Either I used to go home or to some other institutes for summer internships or schools, workshops. Although the summer internship option is no longer available, I did not find any conference suitable for me. There were two three of them but of so much high standards that registration limit had crossed limit much before I came to know about them. Most conferences nowadays ask to pay registration fees(a huge sum of money for a grad student in India) before applying which is a big headache nowadays. Although there are some options to get these money reimbursed from various funding agencies in India, the process takes some time. ICTP school is a very good option to look for, but I already attended previous year's Cosmology school. I would have preferred to attend the Particle Physics school this year, but it's impossible to get the funding for two consecutive years, and our institute provides funding only when we go for oral presentation and not for attending schools abroad. Even if I had not applied for the Cosmology school and applied for the Particle Physics school this year, I am not sure if I would have got selected. This time the selection was a bit strange to me since many people with publications did not get selected, may be the organizers are looking for fresh participants who have just joined PhD. It at least gives me the good feeling that I at least attended the Cosmology school last year which was a real good experience. I am looking for the SUSY conference this year in Batavia, Illinois but not sure if will get selected. This is considered to be largest conference for people working in supersymmetry theory and phenomenology. Keeping fingers crossed right now. Anyway, spending the summer in the institute has at least one advantage it seems: the campus is far less crowded and takes me back to my earlier days in 2006 at IIT except one difference in the sense that there are not as many trees in the campus now.

SYMPHY 2011

The SYMPHY 2011 was a great success. Keeping an eye on the fact that, it was the very first time that the physics department is organizing such an in-house symposium, the responses from the students as well as the faculties were quite good. Couple of undergraduates also turned up (we don't expect them to come to in-house symposium on a weekend as they hardly come to attend their classes on weekdays). The responses from the research scholars were awesome, most of them showed up sooner or later. Among the faculties, we probably had expected a bit more. Prof Yajnik, Prof P.P.Singh and Prof Varma were there with us from the very beginning till the end of the symposium (9 am to 6:30 pm) which was remarkable. Some other faculty members showed up later as well. The invited speakers' talks were also good, Deepak Dhar talked about pattern formation in biological systems and Sandip Trivedi gave a basic summary of CMBR, Dark Energy, Cosmological constant etc at an undergraduate level. My talk went alright although I did not have much audience at 9 30 am, but at least two-three people (including my guide) could follow the talk and asked questions at the end. During the condensed matter talks however, there were lots of discussions, comments from students as well as faculties (since majority of the research scholars as well as faculties in the department work in Cond-mat). It was good to see such active discussions specially among the students for the first time probably for me. I hope this will continue in future with many more active participants as well as speakers.

SYMPHY 2011

Physics Department, IIT Bombay is organizing the first ever in-house symposium SYMPHY 2011 on 15th January 2011. The idea is to have a formal communication among all the research scholars working in various fields in the department. Looking at the fact that there is very little interaction among the students in the department, hopefully this symposium will initiate such a process rather in a formal way. To make the event look more attractive, there will be two invited speakers Deepak Dhar and Sandip Trivedi (both from Tata Institute). The research scholars have the option to present their work either through poster or oral presentation (15+5 mins). Although initially there was a doubt that a one-day symposium won't be enough for a department which has around 50 research scholars or more. But from the submission of abstracts, it seems that one day is just perfect as we are not getting too many students willing to give talk. The list of participants as well as their talk titles have been put up in the website already. The organizers are also planning to prepare a e-booklet containing all the talk titles+abstracts which will be put in the website later. Hope SYMPHY 2011 will take off with a grand success!!

Non-Academic Leave!

I am planning to take Non-Academic Leave for around ten days next month. It has been a long time I have not taken this type of leave ;) Whatever leave I have taken this year are all part of my academic leave which does not have any upper bound. But personal leave can be maximum of thirty days in a year and they are not cumulative :( Thus it is better if I make maximum use of it every year. I am planning to go home next month during the Durga Puja vacation. I was not planning this although. I wanted to go home in December, but that has become unlikely since I might have to go to Jaipur for DAE Symposium (http://heps.lnmiit.ac.in/). So better I should go next month itself to get the Durga Puja festival as a bonus. I do not have much work load also except the two papers which I am trying to finish. The only thing I am worrying is the TA duty in that week. I need to find some guy who can take the responsibility of that for the particular week. I do not know exactly what will happen if I do not find a substitute to do the TA duty for that week and go home. May be the department will cut my stripends, which I won't mind much anyway :)

Things getting worse!

Things in the IITB campus getting worse and worse nowadays. We already had lots of problems running the common mess of Hostel 12 and Hostel 13. The caterer called Aditya Caterers was thrown out last year due to some stupid reasons. After that they hired another caterer which also gave up after six months. Its not an easy task to run a mess for around 1200 people. Now they have built up one brand new hostel and one new wing of Hostel 12. And to add to the woes of old H-13 and H-12 mates, they have included all these new people in the same mess which was already in trouble. Now there are 2000 people eating in the same mess. The food quality, hygiene, maintenance everything went down sharply. I can not understand why they could not start a new mess for the Hostel 14. I doubt how long this new caterer will be able to run this mess. One more disgusting thing which has happened is that IIT is charging 800 rupees per year from all students for the stupid facility of the transport system inside the campus no matter they use it or not. Many students have their own bi-cycles and many prefer to walk from hostels to the department. In such a case why a student will pay money for a facility which he or she is not going to use at all. I do not understand who decides these things, in a democratic country things should happen in a democratic way. But here only the big boss takes decisions and are imposed on thousand poor students forcefully.

The most shameful act an IITian has done ever....

I came to know of a horrible incident today involving two IITians, one from IIT Roorkee and another from IIT Delhi. Although suicide incidents are very common in IIT's, this one is however more shocking and shameful. The IITR guy brutally murdered his girlfriend from IITD in a hotel in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. The guy who has been taken into police custody, has revealed that the reason behind this murder in the past affairs of his girlfriend with someone else. Whatever be the reason, nobody can justify killing someone. And personally I never expected such an act by some BTech student who usually are of very chilled out type. Anyway I never heard of such heinous and shameful act by any IITian before.

The Pain of being a nine point someone

I don't know what Chetan Bhagat has written in his first novel "five point someone"; I just know that the phrase five point someone refers to those IITians who has CPI (cumulative performance index) between 5 and 6. It's quite well-known the kind of depression an IITian suffer from when he or she fails to perform in the academic system as it was expected. This has led to many incidents in different IIT's where students chose the most extreme step to come out of this stress and depression. Recently in IIT Bombay, there was a suicide case by a student of 2nd year BTech programme. His poor performance in class is said to be the probable reason behind it. But why such students get admitted after all? Does not it mean that the IIT entrance system of admitting students to various programs have failed totally? Is there any huge gap between the admission criteria and the academic standards? I am not an expert to answer such questions. But I would like to mention one point that poor performance may not be the only reason behind depression. There are other reasons also which are overlooked most of the time. IIT system has many faults in it which can even make an academic topper feel depressed. I do not need to talk about anyone else. Myself is the best example. I have always been an academic topper till my BSc. During my MSc in IIT B also I was the second topper among the 2 year MSc as well as MSc-PhD dual degree students and could maintain a CPI of 9.15 at the end of two years. Unfortunately CPI is not everything which count in life. After I moved into research part of my MS-PhD dual degree course, my expectations, my motivations and my excitements started disappearing. The first blow came to me when my supervisor was appointed as dean in a different IIT, and he had to shift there temporarily and he is still there. Its one and half year till then he has not come back to his home institute and during this one and half year neither I have any publication with him nor any good progress in work has happened. May be I am not a very smart guy to do research through email discussions. Although I spent few months in that IIT where my supervisor is appointed as dean, I could not do much work since he hardly could give me time. That was quite natural since a dean has to do lots of non-academic things. The second and the most recent blow came when I got the news that my supervisor is going to Canada on sabbatical for one year. So I will be completing almost two and half years without any good research work by the end of 2010. Aren't these more than enough to bring too much depression and stress into life? The IIT system doesn't care what will happen to a PhD student if his/her supervisor is sent to some other place to do some no-academic things, it does not care what will happen to a student when a faculty goes on sabbatical for one year. IIT should give a thought about all these and should not run into a conclusion that only poor academic performance creates stress, depression among students.

Porcupine Tree Live 21st Dec, 2009

I came to know about this awesome news much before, but forgot to give a blog update. Porcupine Tree(PT) is coming to India for the first time on 21st December and the best thing for IITB people is that PT will be performing right in the institute open air theater as a part of institute annual cultural festival Mood Indigo. This will be fourth Mood Indigo during my stay in the campus, but this will be the first time I am going to attend, I simply can't afford to miss PT. Although various Indian bands like Zero, Parikrama keep performing almost every year in Mood Indigo, I never had much interest in them since I am very much familiar to their live concerts. But this year Mood Indigo is certainly special, hope PT will give us a memorable experience. The details about the concert can be found here http://www.moodi.org/porcupinetree/

Hitler and IIT attendence...a must watch video..:D

Yesterday one of my friend suggested me to watch this video. This video is originally taken from the movie 'Downfall(Der Untergang)'. But a few clever IIT ians have changed the subtitles in such way that after watching this video people (who don't understant German of course) won't believe that it's fake. Have a look: