rohitj's domain

So, yesterday I got a mail from bluehost saying that there are some copyrighted material on my site. I bought an account with bluehost in June/July 2007. I share it with some of my friends. One of them is bheekling who hates US copyright laws and the way they use it to exploit people. If you talk in favor of RIAA, he will probably kill you. . And he also prefers to play with these laws. … so anyways, when we bought the hosting space, we decided that we will not put any pirated material on the site. It so seems that initially we were in doubt that japanese animes are not copyrighted. But it so seems they are. Its not copyrighted in US though. So, US law can not make me remove them from my site. Anyways Bluehost guys said that I have the following thing on site, which I must remove. (they use the word “copy written material”. I have no idea what that means )

Now, “Movie” is surely copyrighted. bheekling uploaded that temporarily by mistake. He has removed.
This is my response to bluehost. Let us see what happens. :

In continuation to my last post. I wrote the following on newsgroups inside IITK:

I think its important that’s why I writing it. I am anyways going to post it
on my blog as well.

Note : I haven’t read what all people have been saying on this thread.
(apart from 3-4 posts from some people I know)

I was discussing with it with some friends, and came to some good
conclusions…..

0) So, the first problem is that students here do not know what they want
from this place. They do not know what they want from life. They do not
have right information. Students when come here don’t know nothing about
nothing. So, we should have a questionnaire/review system. A system which
will ask students to answer some questions. People wouldn’t evaluate it,
but this questionnaire will make students think. Student will think want
they want from themselves. Students will think whats right and whats wrong.
We can have this questionnaire thing every semester. This will not only
make them think, they will tend to ask questions about possibilities they
have.
0.1) First supporting point to the fact that student don’t think of their
future and they don’t think logically is that lot of students are going to
financial jobs, without even knowing what finance is. I can surely say 90%
of people are going to finance without even thinking what their future is
gonna be, and without knowing what exactly they shall be doing (If you are
one of those who is going for a finance job, and think I am wrong, please
don’t reply. I don’t time to explain you why you are wrong.)

1) Student interaction : I find that people coming out for different
festivals are more or less same. You will find same guy working in Megabuck
and Techkriti. These big festival are big, but they are not attracting many
students (IITK students) as participants. We need something else so that
people will come out. We need a way so that people from different years
could come and talk at *same* stage, rather than with senior-junior ego.
1.1) I strongly propose that we should have a good place where people could
come and hang out. CC Canteen isn’t an enough place. We need a place where
I could sit for long time, where I could “hang out”. CC canteen isn’t a
place where you sit for long time. And anyways the kind of food we get here
isn’t good enough. CR sucks. I don’t remember even a single visit to CR
when I didn’t shout at the workers. This “good” place will serve in many
ways. A big problem with IITK life is that there is no happening place
around us. We need a happening place in or around IITK. These “happening”
places help you in lot of ways. All your tensions from acads/parents can be
removed. And you stand on a stage where there is no senior and there is no
junior. These places will trigger interaction. Someone suggested dance
place, but I don’t think thats possible. So, a normal food court sort of
place with probably good music would be a good idea. A place where students
will get good food, and also a good place to sit. A place where they will
come to have fun. Do you know of any place where you go to have fun apart
from your room where you sit in front of your computer. And also, remember
the kind of sucky and *unnutritious* food you get in mess. Seriously, why
do we need mess when it can not serve nutritious food. One main reason why
I am not doing a PhD from IITK is that I know my life will be sucky for
next 3-4 years. I will have to spend my time inside a small area with no
place where I could go to enjoy myself.
1.2) Why don’t we have a proper air conditioned SAC Rasoi. Make it a common place to hang out. Let it be a little bit extra expensive, but make it proper. Every now and then we have domino guys coming, why don’t we have a proper Rasoi in SAC instead. We have such a huge place about rasoi as well, we can utilize it to the best.

1.3) Mixed hall system in which 1st, 2nd and 3rd year students live together
is a good option. They get interact with each other. You may say that 1st
year can anyways interact with 2nd year, but its not good enough. 2nd year
students are *stupid*. They know nothing. I remember my first year when I
used to ask my seniors (2nd year mainly) what I should do to go for MS. I
remember their replies, it was all bullcrap. 3rd still knows something. I
wonder if all four year students could stay together. Can we

2) Happy Hours : CSE started a cool thing. We have a regular weekly meeting of faculty and students. Faculty and students interact informally about different issues. We talk about personal stuffs as well. We should have such happy hours thing in every department. This way faculty-student interaction will increase (which right now is very less). Not only that faculty knows a broader and better picture of the IIT world. They can talk better about what students can do. They have the right knowledge. Students can clarify their queries. Also students wouldn’t feel alien.

3) BTech Hons and BTech Minor : I got to know that IITB has this system now. You have a set of options. You can do BTech Hons, which is a bit harder than normal BTech, and you can do BTech which is 4-5 course less than normal BTech. You can decide to switch between them whenever you want. You can also do some courses in other department and get BTech Minor in that field. This way, you don’t have to spend time on wasteful difficult courses, and can spend some quality time on courses that you want to do. And if you find that you don’t want to be in technical field anymore, you can always opt for just BTech, and get a degree and then can join MBA/finance job whatever you want. This way the load can be decreased for those who are not able to /don’t want to take extra pressure.
3.1) Also, stop calling BTech as four year degree. Its a Btech/MTech, thats it. When you get your degree shouldn’t be important.

But for eff’s sake, do/suggest something “constructive”. Rather than just asking for decreasing academic pressure. Yes, stupid courses and stupid instructors are there, but why are we not able to ignore that? Parent?, to hell with them if they are not able to think constructive.

rohitj
PS: Last year, my views were different. I wouldn’t say they were wrong, but weren’t very broad enough I guess. So, if you find my views switched, my apologies.

Yesterday, when I was doing the final preparation for my presentation for CS727 course project, someone was tying rope around the fan in his room, and sometime after that, a good observation was made. The way suicides are shown in Bollywood movies, its pretty much true. Fan can in fact take the burden of a dead body. Oh, by the way, IITK is best at that. It is bearing (why bearing? you will know as this post progresses) burden of God knows how many suicides. At least it is 5th time in my stay here in IITK. Only 2 of my batch mates “could” do this daring task. I “know” some more tried, at least thought about it. Its not only daring but geeky as well to come up with new ideas. See, all 5 had different ways of doing this deed. What actually is more problematic for me is that this guy had to do this just before end semester exam. I remember screwing my 625 end semester exam because of similar incidence. And I have got 648 exam tomorrow. …. oh yeah, my 727 presentation went well. It was my 20th project at IITK.

Yes, I am still able to write this post in some funny way. Some of you know how these incidences effect me. Still want to control my thoughts on the way things are going. As far as this issue is concerned, I have been shifting from one view to another. I still do not know whom to blame. But I think I have come up with some lemmas and theorems which will surely help.

Warning: If you are one of those who think I shouldn’t write about it outside IITK, you can go to hell. I gave you 3 years to come up with a solution or at least clear the situation. You didn’t do that. You hence loose the right to stop me from writing this post. Yes I know people (15 people a day?) will read it, and I guess they should.

Note: I am mainly talking about suicides which are not purely because of personal reasons.

The first thing to notice is that the students who do these things are stupid. Yes, lot of IITians are stupid (It may sound ironical, but its not). Like a friend of mine pointed out, an F or a bad grade doesn’t ruin your life. I get bad grades, and I am going to Purdue University, which is like one of the best universities for CS. I know people who will graduate in 1-2 more years and still have job offers. Who reads your transcript when they offer you job/admission? Sometimes they do, but most of the times they don’t. And do you know that an F doesn’t affect your CPI (GPA)? Its hilarious, isn’t it. People with lot of Fs have CPI similar to mine. Then whats the fuzz about? Oh one more thing, whatever you score here in IITK, people outside IIT will always call you IITian, and will always listen to you like an SRK fan watches SRK movies.

Secondly, lot of parents are stupid as well. I have some friends who are “frustrated” ( not real frustrated, but frustrated in IITK slang) with the way parents pressurize them for academics. Parents have small idea of how things go in IITs and will still comment on students performance. I remember my father once talking to me about job etc. He was like I got to know that a CS grad from IITK gets like 2 million a year or something. Though in general average salary is like 0.8-0.9 million Rs. Thank God my parents are awesome, who never show any expectations from me except from hard work. And thank God they let me do whatever I wanted to do. I never got to listen comment about my results.

Thirdly, the academic system of IITK. The guy who committed suicide (he was in first year) belonged to a batch of around 500 students. In their first semester itself, in one course, 96 out of 500 students got an F. 20% of the class was dumb according to the instructor. Thats what an F means, right. In IITK, in a normal course, getting an F is a tough job. How can 20% students get an F? Just think who was wrong. IITK is the *best* institute of India. It is one of the best institutes in the world for UG studies. Best students clear its entrance exam. In first semester, these students perform the best. My first semester SPI tops my chart as well. A similar thing happened with a guy from my batch, who committed suicide last to last semester. The professor sent a mail naming students who might will get an F. The list had almost 50% students who were doing the course. I wonder what happened in that particular course. I mean, the students are doing good in other courses, but in one particular course students perform so bad? Who is wrong? I was discussing it with a professor in Happy Hours, and he said that it happens only once a semester. But thats not the point. Why does it happen at all? And don’t you think it will affect student morally and mentally? And don’t you know that it does effect his future in some sense. An F given by mistake in final semester can waste a students 1 whole year. Every now and then there is a course which acts like this. Of course it creates pressure. People have expectations from themselves. I myself expect somethings from myself. Thankfully I do not expect to get good grades. But I do expect to learn from a course. Similar, one guy may expect to get into MIT. And if something tries to come in between even when it doesn’t deserve to come in between, and if the person gets to know that he can not do anything about it, it creates problems.

So, yes. The major cause of these suicides is the student. I know its very harsh to say it so clearly, and believe me its hard for me as well to say it this clear, but this is the fact. Its student who couldn’t think reasonably and couldn’t cope with the pressure. Like a friend said, “apne neeche dekho, duniya hai puri. agar upar dekh ke depression hota hai, aur phir bhi neeche nahin dekh pate, inspite of such a counselling service to help, to unka uthna hi bhala hai”. You know your parents have wrong expectations from you. You know the system is wrong not you. And you know that you are better than most of those who couldn’t even get into IIT. Then where is the problem. And yes, academics or parents trigger the process. But again, why do you give a damn to it.