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A Holiday of Errors

2006-06-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

Here's something this particular friend of mine would have written in his blog, if he had had one.

Based on a true story.

Hi, I'm Jayee. I mean Joy. Without the ee. Because with the ee it'd seem I were a girl. Which I am not.

Anyway, I'm having an awesome holiday, and I'm gonna tell you all about it, whether you want to hear it or not. It began with news that a certain Mr. V celebrated the start of his holiday by auspiciously breaking - no, not a coconut, but two bones in his hand. Yes, he was checking if it was raining outside the train.

This single event brought meaning and direction into Mr. V's life; he has now adopted, as his mission in life, the task of revising and improving the Indian Railways field manual for trackside pole placement. Single handedly. (That being his left hand for now.)

I recieved this news with mixed feelings; for, although the misfortune befell an arch rival of mine, the rivalry between us was mostly about who can do the most stupid things. Did this mean that he had pulled ahead of me in the stupid-things-to-do summer championships? I could not let that happen; I steadfastly resolved to outdo Mr. V's two-boned act before the holiday was over.

My first attempt was unsuccessful; I went to the beach without telling anyone but the coastguard wouldn't let me drown. Disheartened, I returned vowing to do better next time. Another attempt at aggravating my chronic ankle pain with spirited (but none-too-skillful) cricket was moderately successful; but nobody took too much notice and I had to do much better to - well - better the likes of Mr. V.

Taking a deviation from mishaps medical, I made plans for a long journey to see more beaches; Eager to exploit every opportunity, I neglected to book tickets for about half the journey. Soon, I found myself getting on the wrong train which took me sixty kilometres past my destination - and I ended up sleeping in the railway station. At last - a decent goof-up!

Little did observers know that I was only getting started. Soon after my trip, another game of cricket saw me equalling, if not exceeding, Mr. V's score. The ball was hit straight towards me - I executed a doggy-catch-ball-with-mouth manouvre to perfection. Near-perfection, actually, but perfect for my purposes; I saved a six with my left eye. Of course, bleeding in the vitreous chamber meant I had also gone blind in that eye. No pain, no gain.

Then, of course, came the coup de grace. I decided to take driving lessons - my tutors insisted on using a parking lot, but I think I could've done better on a real street. After pretending to listen for ten minutes to all that banter about where the brakes were and the need to press the accelerator gently, I set off. I surprised my tutors with great acceleration... of course, I couldn't be bothered with trivial matters like steering or parked cars.

The white ambassador was dragged some five feet from where it stood. It's hood popped open, bumper buckled inward, and the entire car is probably a few inches shorter now. The mob was satisfyingly large. Touche.

Howwzat, Mr. V?

Asexual reproduction

2006-04-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

I had learnt that the most important part of the life cycle is reproduction. The propagation step that keeps the species alive, no matter how short the lifespan of its individual members, no matter how fast they get buried and out of sight. And that in the vast majority of complex beings, reproduction requires the meeting of two individuals. Graphic confirmation of this fact, at least for one species, was obtained - and ever since, I have lived assured of this basic fact of life. That is, until last Sunday.

Last Sunday, fundoome shook my belief system to the core. She did something strange and terrible - something that made me question everything I thought I knew about how reproduction happens.

She posted a tag in her blog, without being tagged herself.

Is there no sanity left in the world? How can a tag reproduce itself without the hallowed interaction between two bloggers... the inocuous mention in the tag post, the unobtusive little comment containing the sacred incantation, "You've been tagged"?

I was sure that this abomination of a tag would mutate into something terrible. I was right. But it is too powerful for me to resist... I must appease it...

5 people who top your shit list, and why.

Those who oppose freedom of speech. Freedom of speech necessarily includes the right to insult; to be blasphemous; to paint goddesses in the nude (hmm... i see what they mean by nirvana!); to draw a prophet with a bomb in his turban (though his suicide bombing followers can probably hide it in the hole in their heads, no turban necessary); to publish a crude mashup of images of some girl in your class and a porn star (however, note to "artist" - get a life).
Socialists. Reds, Pinks, and other similar shades. I'm not responsible for anyone's poverty. I've never kept a slave; I've never stolen, extorted, or looted. I do not owe anyone. My effort, my money, my life. Get out of my way.
Nationalists. Fake nazi/fascist pigs. Those who still live in the dark ages. Those who have no identity but their religion/caste. Those that use force to impose their dress codes, lifestyles, beliefs and rituals on others.
People in government. Lazy, unproductive parasites who demand that the hardworking, in order to produce, take their permission first. They, who aren't capable of producing anything.
Fanatics. Those who are rabidly anti-something, without a good reason to be so. Anti-american, anti-globalization, anti-big business, all go here.

I'm gonna skip ahead now... and just answer one more interesting thing. Short of time.

Strangest Dream

I'm in this gift shop (or something like that) and suddenly there are gunshots. I don't see who is shooting but I feel a sharp pain in my side, then all energy drains out of me and I fall on my back. I can feel the burning hot bullet inside me. There are still gunshots but they are getting softer and softer. I'm lying there, looking at the fan going round and round, and things go silent... then things turn darker and grayer like someone turned down the contrast. I realize I can't feel the bullet or the wound anymore... and then everything goes totally dark. And then I wake up.

This was so far removed from my everyday range of experiences that I had no idea what to make of it. Perhaps there had been some news story about terrorism that day...

I'm not gonna tag anyone. Since this tag started off by voluntary tag-ee-ism, so let it continue that way. You are welcome to consider yourself tagged, if you are so inclined. For more details, see fundoome's blog.

A Tribute

2006-04-13T03:23:00.000-07:00

It was an awkward moment - the techquiz meeting in Godbole's room during the closing weeks of OP, when he addressed me by my name as if we had known each other for years. Me, a timid second year who had stayed away from DFM throughout OP because he was too scared of Osama. This was how I got my first taste of the Tech GC. Seems like it had happened yesterday, not nearly two years ago.

Snapshots of last year's GC effort, from my memory - Shastry guiding us through brainstorming for product design, in the midst of the noise and clutter of Illu; the butterflies before the presentation; the disappointment of coming second by just four points; the meticulous planning for opensoft; the unflappable Sahni shrugging off a segfault to impress the judges for a gold; and my decision to stand for GSec Tech. It seems like yesterday - the funda collection, the sopboxes, the groundwork on proposals; the results, the worst GPL of my life, and the belief that this year would be the one in which RP's talent gets converted into the General Championship.

And here I am, one year later, the dream of bringing home the Tech GC fulfilled. But other than the fact of our victory, little else about this moment is like what I had expected. The feeling is more relief than triumph. Although I feel that this victory is sweet justice - for all the poor or biased judgements that had hurt RP - a stronger emotion is a desire to let bygones be bygones. But most of all, there is gratitude - for all my friends and hallmates who have made this moment possible. This post is for them.

For Shamik and Manav, of opposite shades of character but one purpose, the cause of the Tech GC;

For Panda, Pilania, Akhilesh, Padhy and Ahmed, whose unassuming ways hide many talents;

For Sahni and Niket, for their tempo and their leadership, and for Harish, Arpit, Kapil, Lokesh, Nishant and Sunny, for an incredible job done in O(1) time;

For Shanks, Himangshu, Bora, Hrishikesh, Swarnavo and Rushin, for there is no greater sacrifice than mugging for the hall;

For Rajeev, Vinay, Anupam and Mridul, for being so far above the crowd;

For Abhishek Ghosh for giving his best against insurmountable odds;

For Adi, Nikhil, Guha, Lunia and Abhineet, for the long hours of brainstorming and work;

For Karwa, for being my sounding board;

For Jyoti, for being there. All the time.

And for Seth.
For everything.

Tag: Ei8ht

2006-03-14T22:46:00.000-08:00

Tagged by fundoome and Sonik X-( Let's get this over with.

My ideal lover should:
be strong and independent. never ask for, or expect, being looked after all the time.
be intelligent. should be able to understand the work i do.
be ambitious. i'm ambitious, and i dont want to be held back.
love me for who i am. not who she wants to turn me into.
have strong principles, and ones not too different from my own.
be clear-headed and logical. know what she wants, have well-defined goals.
be able to communicate with me in words; not in hints, strange looks, or tones-of-voice.
be honest. with me, everyone else, and most importantly with herself.

I want to tag:

Karwa
Sarfarosh
Shanks
Chaavi
Sunny
Dewdrop
Mangu
Dayal

Template

2006-03-14T16:13:00.000-08:00

Inspired by sonik, who was inspired by psycho, who in turn was inspired by by the bourgeois buffoon, I've made myself a watermarked background template. I don't know if it looks better, but it definitely looks new. More importantly, it's original, and not just because i spent a few hours thoroughly modifying Blogger's Minimal theme.

The background picture was taken on our wing trip to Chandipur. That road is part of the golden quadrilateral highways, just outside Kharagpur. An awesome maze of flyovers in what would otherwise be the middle of nowhere - even J, our wing's resident artist, craftsman, all-round nature-freak and photographer for the trip, had to choose between the road and the sunrise to frame his pictures.

Until he got this one. Road plus sunrise. Wallpaper material. And, of course, blog-background material.

Too bad only a fraction of our trip were on such roads. We were soon jolted out of our fantasies of hitting 100 kmph on an overloaded sumo, by the dirt tracks that pass for highways in Orissa.

Pesticide

2006-03-14T02:15:00.000-08:00

Although there were many comments for my last post, none put forward any arguments as to why pacts are better for Gymkhana the fests and GC's. (The alternative to pacts being candis having to campaign for votes, even in other senior halls) Also absent was any mention of when, or whether, the culture of pacts is going to go away. Let me try and start a discussion on that.

secret ballot n. A type of voting in which each person's vote is kept secret, but the amassed votes of various groups are revealed publicly.

secret ballot n. something that would seal the fate of the pact culture.

Don't get me wrong, I know that people will continue to vote as they are told by their seniors. But without the ability to openly snoop on voters, halls can never enforce the pacts they make. "Observers" can never be sure what exactly the seniors are telling people outside the poll booth.

Of course, these seniors can keep "allied agents" around while they give voters their marching orders. Even so, there is no guarantee that voters weren't told something else behind the last corner, or maybe at lunch that day. In short, pacts become unenforceable. No sudden getting on the phone, telling your hall to stop voting for X hall's candi.

In this scenario, I expect that pact-makers will try multiple pacts - one "open" one putting the hall in one "alliance", and another one under-the-table, a high risk pact with the other side. Insurance, just in case. Who's ever gonna know. In the end nobody wll know who voted for whom - the way it is actually meant to be.

So tell me, who is against the secret ballot?

Democracy, Kgp ishtyle.

2006-02-27T21:50:00.000-08:00

My name is Aithin Kaimeaystud. I am a student of the Department of Polytikal Engineering. I am from Poltupur, and I am contesting for the post of General Secretary Studpanti, Technology Students Gymkhana.

In a few weeks, the Gymkhana elections circus will get under way. Happas' chamchas will take a break from licking ass, and start building major castles in the air. Amateur non-events called hall days are organized, a few idiots doing the hard work and a few other assholes taking the credit. Soapboxes, intended to be the centrepiece of the clean elections image, degenerate into pointless mudslinging before mobs that made up their minds long ago. First years, the only ones without ulterior motives or fake loyalties, will be pestered with brotherly love and free funda to no end.

This is also the time for the most popular game in the Gymkhana calendar. Yes, it's an inter-hall. The game of inter-hall pacts.

Pacts is modelled on sumo wrestling, with one major twist. There are six contestants and seven prizes. Don't let this doesn't dampen your spirits however - some ringside action does take place, for greeds sake. Usually, however, action stops after one or two suckers get thrown out, and the rest of the contestants sit down on their fat asses and divide the prizes among themselves.

Borrowing from another form of wrestling, WWE, Pacts allows all the action to be carefully planned beforehand so that the spectators get an engaging show - but only a show.

An important manouver in inter-hall Pacts is the Snoop. The snoop is performed on your allies, not on opponents. Although illegal, the snoop is usually performed in full view of the referees (a.k.a. monitors), who either turn a blind eye or applaud the mastery of the snooper, rules be damned.

Welcome to Democracy, IIT Kgp style.

The voices...

2005-11-24T08:54:00.000-08:00

The cries have reached a cresendo. Every waking moment these voices would drive me crazy with their incessant repetition of that senseless phrase. And the nights... the sleepless nights i spent huddled up in a corner trying to shut out the haunting voices that kept chanting...

"You've been tagged"

The only way to shut up these wicked black magicians (fundoome, sonik, vagabond, psycho...), here is a half-attempt.

Seven things I want to do in my life:
Put on weight
Train in the army (or navy or air force)
Start a company
Get rich
Get richer
Create a new nation (no kidding)
Conquer the world
Seven things I can do:
Daydream
Code
Fix Computers
Give funda I don't have
Sleep days on end
Stay up (fewer) days on end
(And one thing i absolutely can't do is count.)

Seven things I say the most:
Hmm...
Billoos?
Sahara?
Actually.
Do I even say anything else?

Seven things I can't do:
Stop daydreaming
Stop giving funda i don't have
Keep regular hours
Any physical activity for > 2 mins
Lie. When I need to, I give impressions without lying literally.
Live offline
Get someplace on time
Seven things that attract me to the opposite sex:
Non-ugliness (:D)
Ability to keep up with the made-up funda i give
Being low-maintenence (See When Harry met Sally)
Who needs seven things anyway!

Seven celebrity crushes:
James King (female model. Ask me for pix)
Jeon Ji Hyun (from My Sassy Girl)
Alizee
The unnamed animated bandi on my desktop now
This is starting to be boring.

Seven people I tag:

Every blogger i know has been tagged already... Maybe i am the last guy ever to endure this harrowing experience!

The Death of Student-Run Websites

2005-11-06T02:49:00.001-08:00

This recent Scholars' Avenue chaos has resulted in a new rule that students are not allowed to run websites on institute servers. The Kshitij, Springfest and Gymkhana sites (as well as hall and dep websites) have either been taken down or has been passed into the control of faculty members. To make any changes, for example in the Kshitij site, we have to go through a lengthy process involving writing stuff to a CD which the rector nominee (technology) or the SCom chairman (Kshitij), as well as the president gymkhana, will approve, put in a sealed envelope, and then forward to the faculty in charge of the institute website (now also in control of gymkhana webserver). He will then upload those new files if he gets time in between lectures, and the entire process would take 2 weeks by which time a new sponsor would be crying "contract violation", for not putting their logo on the site.

Although this has come in the wake of the Sholars' Avenue deal, I think it was coming for a long time now. The institute seems to believe, perhaps correctly, that Indian "cyber laws" hold the administrator of a server is responsible for all the content on it. Even if he is hosting a public, unmoderated, forum under a disclaimer saying these aren't necessarily his views. Even, it seems, if a cracker defaced the website and put some rhetoric on it - Indian laws seems to require that admins will have to take responsibility for the cracker's rants. Which, by the way, would probably fall foul of laws against sedition which I never new existed in "liberal democratic" India.

In the context of IIT Kharagpur, it seems the gist of the new "IT policy" is this: the diro will be responsible for whatever is hosted on an insti server; they can't take the risk of allowing students, or even faculty, to set up any publicly accessible pages. All content will be vetted by institute bigshots. In one stroke it kills any chance of introducing the so-called "Web 2.0" technologies - collaborative content creation, open discussion boards, the like.

Needless to say, none of the ancient professors that drafted the "IT policy" can tell you what a web browser does, if their lives depended on it.

What takes the cake is this: the institute wants us to believe that this decision was taken because of a couple of defacements of student run sites. They cannot be convinced that security and censorship are different things - every time i meet a professor about this, the conversation alternates randomly between "hackers writing anti-national things" and "what if u people also start abusing the institute, like that newspaper of yours?" Even if they think that CIC can secure webservers better than students (which is a laughable idea), why not get the CIC to administer the servers, and perform security audits on the sites we host on it? Geocities allows millions of people to host sites on their servers, and their server never gets hacked! Neither does David Filo or Jerry Yang get arrested for any of the hundreds of geocities sites openly supportive of Al-Qaeda.

For every student-run site that gets defaced (happened twice as far as i know, both low-profile for-kgp-only sites) ten CIC-run servers get defaced. The much touted

More on those defacements: apparently the intelligence bureau (the world's oldest independent intelligence agency, i hear) is done catching all the militants in kashmir so they are now spending taxpayers' money on sending letters to IIT's diro, every time a website hosted in the institute is defaced. a couple of those letters concerned student-run sites: the alankar website was defaced by a pakistani group in april, although the alankar team got it restored within a day; the V.S. hall website was defaced later. They (profs) did not tell us how many websites run by the "trained professionals" in CIC were also defaced. Having had the opportunity to work on several of the servers they have set up, each running archaic software and terribly misconfigured security settings, I can make a guess that the number would be quite a lot higher. In fact, for a week last month, coinciding almost exactly with the mid sems, the video lectures website was one page of bold chinese text (which i am sure read something like "fuck you, indian imbeciles who don't know what SQL injections are!"). And they took over 7 days to find and fix it!

Quite possibly, when the institute got all those letters from IB, it was left to CIC engineers to assign blame for all the misconfigured servers lying around - and they found a quick way out by blaming voiceless students.

There is one thing that continued to puzzle us - both the instances of defacement happened several months ago. Why the sudden burst of activity after all those moths of foot-dragging on this "IT policy"? We had assumed that it was the Scholars' Avenue chaos - however there seems to be something else as well, although i got only hints. Some site admin somewhere complained that IIT kgp proxy servers were being used to attack his site/server; Law enforcement people and/or institute authorities assumed it was a student here who was responsible. I don't deny that this is a possibility; but it is not the only one and this is why: a friend of mine found out, while he was home, that the new proxy servers - apparently configured by MORONS - accept anonymous connections from the internet! Their ip's are apparently on every hackers' list of such servers; it was waiting to be taken advantage of by malicious hackers, from anywhere in the world, out to cover their tracks. Since there are more hackers in the rest of the world than in IIT Kharagpur, whoever was responsible for the attack is more likely to be from St. Petersburg than from Kharagpur.

The CIC is meticulous in blocking proxy servers from the hostels during daytime... but apparently they forgot about the rest of the whole wide world!

And guess what takes the cake? This friend of mine, the guy who found this out, went and told an engineer in CIC about it - and guess what? He was told very rudely to stop trying to hack the institute proxies, or he will get into a lot of trouble!

BTW... I won't be listing those ip's here.

The Story That Shut Down Scholars' Avenue

2005-10-25T05:09:00.000-07:00

The Scholars' Avenue team got more than what they bargained for, with their October 5 issue. Their cover story was about the pathetic state of IIT Kharagpur's hospital for students - remarkably fair and objective, it had the views of all the stakeholders - the institute administration, hospital administration, doctors, and students.

The institute responded to this like you'd expect the North Korean secret police would - it ordered gymkhana to shut down Scholars' Avenue immediately, and take down the Scholars' Avenue blog (used to be at http://scholarsavenue.blogspot.com); The entire Scholars' Avenue team was theratened with disciplinary action - and the irony is, senior members of the institute administration who are now involved in this crackdown actually gave some of the honest and candid views that were published in the article.

Issue no. 6 also had a small feature on the disruption of classes in the recent All-India strike - it had couple of photos of the mob squatting outside the institute gates, under the cliche of a heading "Painting the campus Red". No-one gave it a second thought; when the administrators alleged that Scholars' Avenue was publishing "political statements", nobody could get what they meant.

The fiasco actually started because Scholars' Avenue newspaper was stuck on the institute noticeboards (something they have been doing for every issue). The argument was that visitors to the institute would get a bad impression about it - fair enough. If this was communicated to the Scholars' Avenue team they would have taken it down immediately - instead the administration decided to kill the concept of a student newspaper completely.

Incidentally, one wonders what happens to this image-building when one of the various employees' associations takes out a strike, putting up banners and posters in front of the institute. At least the Scholars' Avenue was in small print, and used pretty mild language.

Is it that life-endangering apathy in the only hospital for students is less important than 50th anniversary gold coins for mess workers (and for lining pockets across HMC)? Or is it that IIT students, wary of turning their institute into another government "strike-engineering" college, avoid voicing their demands?

There can be no two opinions about this.

The consequences of the Scholars' Avenue chaos has been widespread - thanks to the "pointy-haired men" having a field day of it. This assortment of professors, who happen to be the most rabidly suspicious of students, used this incident to reopen one of their pet issues - with devastating results for the student community. More on this in my next post.

Bad decisions have become a way of life for the IIT administration.

FDMT

2005-09-26T03:35:00.000-07:00

You see, I don't waste ALL my time doing non-technical things. A friend and I have invented an important new process that could be useful in a wide variety of industries. It is an important scientific breakthrough as well, because it enables us to quantify a property previously thought to be unquantifiable.

Application for patent in the Indian Union, under the Patent Act, 1970.

Title: The F'umi Dirty Mind Test

Field of Invention: This invention relates to measurement of the saturation, in a person's mind, of what are conventionally referred to as "Dirty Thoughts".

Background of the Problem and Statement of Prior Art: In many organizations and especially those in the media and creative industries, individuals have to be evaluated on their ability to grasp, and to appreciate, risque humour and other similar content.

Psychoanalysts have devised various tests, involving inkblots or other abstract imagery, or other auditory or written material of an ambiguous nature, and noting the responses of their subjects to these materials, to qualitatively assess the subject. These tests share a common disadvantage in that the results are of a highly subjective nature and cannot be compared across several test subjects.

Summary of the Invention: This problem has been overcome in the current test, which involves telling the test subject a Standard Dirty Joke (S.D.J.), and measuring the time interval between the punchline and the response of the subject.

Detailed Description: The time interval is compared with that taken by a standard test subject, to derive the F'umi Dirty Mind Coefficient, given by

F.D.M.C. = (T_standard/T_subject)^k

The constant k serves to leniarize the response so that if the F.D.M.C's of two individuals differ by a factor of k, one can be said to have k times as dirty a mind as the other.

The success of the F.D.M.T. relies on achieving a appropriate standard subject. A good standard should have a faster response time than all other members of the population. For this purpose, after a careful selection process, we have chosen an individual, whom we shall refer to as "F'umi", as our standard test subject. Her response time to the S.D.J. is 0.3177 seconds, and this value corresponds to a coefficient of 1 on the F.D.M.C. scale.

Due to the large response time ratio's between F'umi and normal human beings, the liniarization coefficient k has been chosen as 0.2862, based on the statistical analysis of the response times of a large and representative population.

Therefore, tehe F'umi Dirty Mind Formula can now be defined as

F.D.M.C. = (T_F'umi/T_subject)^k
= (0.3177 s/T_subject)^0.2862

Several precautions have to be taken while administering the F.D.M.T. to ensure accuracy. The subject shoulod be in a relaxed state of mind and should be free from the effects of stimulants. For accurate results, the standard FDMT joke must be new to the subject; therefore, the joke itself is not being included in this application.

We claim:
A Dirty Mind Test involving comparison of coefficients obtained using the above formula, using response time subsequent to the telling of the S.D.J. and utilizing the coefficients derived for F'umi as standard test subject
A Dirty Mind Test as in claim 1, utilizing coefficients for a standard test subject other than F'umi
A Dirty Mind Test as in claims 1 or 2, utilizing standardized testing material other than the S.D.J.
A Test, as in claims 1, 2 or 3, used for the measurement of properties other than F.D.M.C.
A Test substantially as herein described.
Date: 26 September 2005.

Applicants: Arvin Deep and Sarfarosh

Abstract: A system for assessing the dirtyness of a person's mind has been disclosed. The test subject is told a dirty joke and the time interval between the punchline and the response of the subject is measured. A coefficient indicating the dirtyness of mind is determined using an empirical relation.

Wondering what CB's F.D.M.C. is? We told her the joke three weeks ago, and she still hasn't figured it out yet.

Blogger Burnout

2005-09-24T13:11:00.000-07:00

I will not make any excuses for disappearing. This blogger was, for no particular reason, burnt out. Burnout has been my permanent state of blogging activity since I started; I registered on blogger over two and a half years ago - before you could post pictures, before RSS and ATOM feeds, before, if i remember correctly, blogger profiles and multiple blogs per user. And still, only a handful of posts to show for it.

This week several of my friends started blogs in quick succession - check out the links on the right; it is no coincidence, of course, that they chose this week - i don't believe in coincidence unless some pesky know-it-all is trying to sell me his pet conspiracy theory and i want to get rid of him fast. There was something really very special about last week.

No, IIT did not declare attendence breaks for bloggers; neither was it an extended holiday due to incessant rains. And no, there was no rare and divine alignment of the moon, jupiter and bloggitarius. The moon, and other evil heavenly bodies, had instead conspired to be in that dreaded quarterly configuration; the one that turns otherwise mostly harmless professors into cunning bloodthirsty beasts;

Last week was mid-sems week.

When faced with such a brutal disruption of his (i'll write just this once, assume it from now on - or her) normal schedule, the average KGPian is left confused and disoriented. All of a sudden there is no more practice (whatever it is they used to practice), no more events, no more kshitij/sf/robotix/gsecs/captains/alankar/scholarsavenue meetings. No more life.

Is it a wonder then, that we are forced to turn to utterly unproductive activities, to survive this epidemic of boredom? Is it a wonder that our overworked proxy servers and the overworked webservers at orkut.com trade abuses all day? (URL-encoded and disguised as HTTP Request/Response headers; Who doubts that "Keep-Alive: None" is not a veiled threat?)

Is it a wonder that dozens of new bloggers are brushing up their (often nonexistent) language skills in tiny little Kharagpur?

Thank you for taking the time to read this. Yes, i did know a couple of answers today. CB is well, though still losing things, and no i will not add a link to her blog.

TAO CB - Dinner Story 0

2005-07-11T13:16:00.000-07:00

Note from the author:

I'd written the first CB post as part of a bet, without any plans to follow it up; but the CB story seems to be the ticket to get someone to actually read my blog, so i've been thinking about how to keep it going. CB is a really unique person, and the strange stuff that's happened to her is enough to fill many more chapters. However, these things don't happen on a daily basis, even to her; So i'm finding it really hard to continue the storyline, unless something interesting actually happens.

Moreover, i don't think her folks would appreciate it if i called every other day to ask if she'd run into MV yet.

So from today i'll post short self-contained stories from long long ago, rather than trying to stich everything together. Hopefully this will also result in shorter waits between posts.

When CB was a kid her parents taught her not to talk to strangers. She probably realizes she can forget that rule when she grows up; but that hasn't happened yet. So when she's traveling in a train she gathers her bags around her and pretends to be a piece of luggage herself. Which she's getting rather good at, given the frequent trips she's made since joining IIT.

One of the most important things IIT teaches you is that your biological clock doesn't really have to follow the local time zone. You would think we slept and woke to some pacific ocean timezone. Or perhaps to mars time, given the way schedules slip as the week progresses. Most people won't feel too uncomfortable skipping sleep completely for a couple of days.

Hunger, however, cannot be tamed so easily. Perhaps it has to do with biology, but we prefer to think that it's because, in sleepy socialist kharagpur, food is available only to strict schedules - even in the dhabas and restaurants.

Therefore when CB goes on her afternoon-to-early-morning train journey, she never sleeps. As passengers around her doze, she sits holding her bags and staring out of the window. But when the attendant comes around with dinner, even CB has to tear herself away from the fascinating pitch-darkness outside the window, and eat.

As anyone unfortunate enough to have had dinner with my friend knows, CB's aura of disasters manifests itself strongest when she is eating. The utensils take on a life of their own, determined to spill their contents everywhere. Stray cats and dogs from miles around gather around begging for food, as if drawn by a mystical force. There are only three things more gross than dinner with CB - the toilets in my hall, the food in my mess, and - dinner with CB in a moving train.

With deepest sympathies for the poor souls who shared a compartment with CB this last time she went home, let me share with you CB's most memorable dining experiences.

The Adventures of CB - Chapter 2.

2005-06-20T13:46:00.000-07:00

Two weeks have passed since the events described in Chapter 1.

Kharagpur Railway Station, (date1), 2:25 p.m.

God, or Evolution, gave us two arms and not three; The wise and experienced traveler is reconciled to this fact, and packs all his stuff into two pieces of luggage. Although numerous adjectives apply to my friend CB, "wise" isn't one of them.

One part of CB's brain worked furiously to maintain her balance, with two bags on one shoulder and a third behind her. Another was busy scanning faces in the distance before those faces scanned her. CB could not afford to bump into MV that day.

(MV's department), (date1), 2:25 p.m.

God, or Evolution, gave us one handwriting and not three; The wise and experienced proxy-marker is reconciled to this fact, and brings several pens to mark attendance for his friends. However, MV had only brought one pen. So the three signatures that he made - for himself and for two of his depmates, ended up looking very similar indeed.

As he stepped out, MV cursed the heat; he should be going home soon. He had considered going home that day, but decided to stay and spend another day watching movies. He didn't feel like running into that [-censored-] girl and her overprotective dad, either.

Kharagpur Railway Station, (date1), 2:25 p.m.

CB found the spot her coach would stop, and sat down to think about the little lie she had told MV - that her father would be coming to pick her up. At the time it had seemed a smart move. The guy was less capable of engrossing conversation than a doorknob, and she had to get rid of him and go for dinner soon. But other seemingly smart moves in the past week had turned into disasters - the invisible cloud at work - and CB was not so sure about this one any more.

It wasn't a total lie, though. Since her disastrous first train journey alone, her parents have always offered to come pick her up; Her disastrous first train journey... CB pulled out her ticket and checked it again for the hundredth time.

Kharagpur Railway Station, last summer, 2:25 p.m.

CB was thrilled to be traveling alone. All her life people had been telling her that she was too naive, too absent-minded, and that she couldn't take care of herself. This was her opportunity to redeem herself.

However, her worried parents kept calling her up, and they made her go to the station a full hour before the train was scheduled to leave. They called again just after she had reached the station.

CB's dad: do you have all the bags?
CB: yes, dad
dad: you have locked all of them?
CB: yes, dad. you asked me that before.
dad: check again.
CB (rolling eyes): they're still locked.
dad: did you take your phone?
CB (more rolling): no, my water bottle just rang.

(pause)

dad: okay, stay alert. we'll be at the station waiting for you ok? which coach are you in?
CB: dad, I told you already... S2
dad: you check again and tell me.
(fumbling noises)
(more fumbling noises)
(stop)
(long silence)
dad: do you have the ticket?
CB (wiping off sweat): yeeeeah. here it is. S2, as I said.
dad: ok, did you...
CB: dad I got to go!
(click)

CB's friend, lets call her DD, is permanently attached to two things. One is her rectangular black cellphone, which makes her look like she's talking into a TV remote; the other is her boyfriend - lets call him BB. As dictated by the laws of probability, she was with the latter when the former started ringing.

The first thing DD checked was that the call wasn't from bari. It was from CB. Although BB seldom said anything, she gestured to him to keep quiet as she answered the phone.

CB: I forgot my ticket!!! and I don't have enough money for the fine!
DD: whoa!
CB: what will I do?
DD: your train is at 3:20 right? There's still time... I could come over.
CB: haan that would be great... but do you know how much money you have to bring?

(pause)

DD: or I can also bring the ticket...
CB: yeah that will also do. actually that will be better. it should be in the (secret location) in my room.
DD: you keep your ticket in the (secret location)???

(pause)

DD: okay, never mind. I’m on my way. don't panic!

Twenty minutes later DD, with BB in tow, found CB sitting with her bags on platform 5. After a round of obligatory apologies, gratitude and "it's okay"s, CB mentioned that it was her first time traveling alone. Like any self respecting best friend's boyfriend, BB began to give her funda.

BB: Are you sure this is the right platform?
CB: yeah, I checked.
BB: And is this where your coach stops?
CB: I don't know... how do I find that out?
BB: let me see your ticket again... hmm... S9 huh... should be further that way...
CB (grabbing at the ticket): S9??? hey it's S2... see here?
BB: what? no, that says seat number 52! your coach number is up here... S9, see?

Amd they all moved up the platform to where S9 would stop. A twenty five minute wait later, CB's train pulled into the station.

On the train, last summer, around 3:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m.

The most unpredictable part of travel, even with Indian Railways, is not the schedule. Neither is it how dirty the coaches are, or whether the taps and lights actually work. The most unpredictable part of travel is the stranger you have to sit next to.

CB's neighbour was a fat man incapable of noticing the difference between a sauna and an express train. He sat, cooling off, with his ample belly showing through his unbuttoned shirt. Matched with a large moustache and a chain around his neck, he could have been just off the sets of Munnabhai MBBS.

CB stared out of the window, avoiding bhai's gaze. That didn't put bhai off - "madam, yeh aapka seat hai kya?", "madam, aap kahaan jaa rahi hai?", "madam, aapko koi takleef to nahi?", he chirped at regular intervals. To which CB answered in monosyllables, and kept staring out of the window until her neck hurt.

Around 7 in the evening another passenger entered the compartment and squeezed in next to CB. Almost immediately bhai growled, "Woh madam ka seat hai, hat jao wahaan se", and the thoroughly intimidated newcomer made a beeline for the next compartment. CB, petrified, pretended not to notice and continued to stare into the darkening countryside.

Another hour passed before the coach attendant came with dinner. Strung-up CB hadn't ordered anything, but peered carefully, just in case bhai laced the food with something. She wasn't planning to accept anything, but you never know...

Her heart missed a beat when she found him returning her stare. Bhai then turned to the attendant and beckoned him closer, whispering something in his ear, while CB grew tenser than a guitar string. The attendant smiled, glanced at CB and nodded. As he moved away, bhai shouted after him... "(CB's destination) ke pehle laana!"

Heart pounding, CB decided she couldn't stay there any longer. She pulled her bags out from under the seat and got up. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw bhai looking disappointed and hurt.

bhai: madam, aapka jagah to nahi aaya
CB: nahi... mein... (incoherent whimper)
bhai (for the N'th time): madam, aapko koi takleef to nahi?
CB (shaking her head): (inaudible mumble)
bhai: madam, aapko kahin aur seat nahi milne waala
CB: nahi... meri ek friend hai... (trailing off)

She did not wait to hear how bhai responded to this obvious lie. Dragging her bags into the next compartment, CB was faced with the daunting task of finding a place to sit. She scanned the row of passengers and approached a kind-looking gentleman engrossed in a magazine. CB, barely audibly, asked if he would switch seats with her.

Kind-Looking Gentleman did not stir.

CB repeated herself, louder this time, and a few of the other passengers turned to look at her. KLG continued to pretend to read. CB was tempted to check his pulse, but decided against it and asked him again. He continued to ignore her, and CB grew red with frustration.

A girl in the next seat squeezed herself to a side to make space, and CB took it gratefully. She could only get half of herself onto the seat, but it was still better than a stiff neck from looking out of the window, or sharing a compartment with a boozing bhai. CB wondered why she didn't do this earlier, and tried to make herself comfortable.

Ten minutes later CB began to feel that something was very wrong, but she couldn't tell what. First, she noticed this guy two seats ahead repeatedly glancing in her direction. That wasn't too strange, CB isn't bad looking. But then CB noticed others doing it too... another guy opposite her; then a middle aged man from the seat across the aisle. This WAS strange - CB isn't THAT pretty either.

CB does not respond well to attention. When someone is watching her, or if a camera has her in its view, CB develops a blind spot in that general direction. She looks left, right, up, or down; anywhere but at the person or camera. All her photos bear testament to this peculiarity - in every one, without exception, CB looks absent-minded, disoriented, or asleep. On this occasion too, CB decided to look everywhere except straight ahead; if she had, she'd have noticed that those people weren't looking at her, but at her neighbour.

So CB looked down at her hands; left, at the shoes of the man on the other side of the aisle; then right, at the girl who offered her the seat. And she received the shock of a lifetime - grabbing a full view of what the guys had been fighting to catch a glimpse of.

It was soon apparent, even to CB, that her companion was quite comfortable with the attention. And that the "views" that diligent co-passengers got were far from accidental. CB looked down at her hands, and didn't look anywhere else for the rest of the journey.

(place1 railway station), last summer, 3:30 a.m.

CB looked up and down the platform, but there was no sign of her parents. An already-upset CB was enraged that they were late. She thought up nasty things to say as she pulled out her cellphone and started to dial. Divine intervention - her sin of forgetfulness had finally caught up with her - and her cellphone gave a low battery beep before turning itself off. CB, now furious, kicked her bags into a pile and sat down on them to wait.

After two minutes the train started to pull away. With nothing else to do, she counted the coaches go by. As S2 passed her, a familiar figure jumped out of it, looking even more distraught than herself. Two other familiar figures joined him, and the three made their way menacingly towards CB.

Her parents and her brother.

"You are never traveling alone again."

Back in (date1), the train pulled into Platform 5 and CB awoke from her reverie.

The Adventures of CB - Chapter 1.

2005-06-14T23:54:00.000-07:00

It's not every day that one gets a mystery visitor (pronounced bhijitaar). Even if one happens to be female, and in a predominantly male college thousands of miles from civilization. Moreover, my friend CB is no ordinary female - an invisible cloud of disasters-waiting-to-happen surrounds her, and follows her everywhere she goes.

The last time she had dinner without spilling anything was before she started feeding herself. The last trip she took without forgetting anything was for her vaccination at six months. All her poor friends have juice-stained clothes and squished-between-doors fingers. Her mobile phone holds the world record for kind-stranger encounters. And the Reserve Bank has launched an investigation into why all that currency is disappearing from circulation.

Of course, she doesn't "really do these things, they just happen." Then again, they only happen to her.

Anyway, back to our story. The mystery visitor called on CB at 20:15 one friday evening. Based on eyewitness accounts, SN foyer security cameras, crime scene photos, fingerprints, bloodstains and other forensic evidence, we can now piece together details of the torture that followed.

Mystery Visitor (MV): (CB)
Security Didi: (CB), bhijitaar; (CB), bhijitaar; (CB), bhijitaar;

(long pause)

CB (breathless from her struggle with the door): hi
MV (breathless from his throat drying up in terror): hello

(long pause)

CB: so... umm... who are you?
MV: yeah, hi.

(pause as MV recollects his thoughts)

MV: i'm (MV). the other day i saw you at the other place, and this other guy who was with me mentioned that you were from (place1), and i'm from (place2), so i thought i would say hi.

(long pause)

MV (sweating): No No i don't go around collecting details on all the girls i see. Of course not.

(long pause)

MV: hey do you know (X)? she's in (CB's hometown).
CB: no
MV: what about (Y)?
CB: no
MV: you must know (Z), surely?
CB: nope, sorry

(long pause)

CB: so...
MV (thinking hard): hmm...

(long pause)

MV: so... what do you think of (Ancient Literary Work)? I think the storyline is great.
CB (a little freaked out, glances at exit): dunno... i'm not into that stuff.

(long pause)

CB: so...
MV (thinking hard): hmm...

(long pause)

CB: which hall are you in?
MV (relieved): (Hall)
CB: cool... so do you know (U)? he's in your hall.
MV: uh-uh
CB: okay... (V)?
MV: nope
CB: you must know (W)
MV (/relieved): (W)... hmm... i think so...
CB: he's in your batch!
MV (lying): (W), oh yeah, (W)... he's in my batch! of course i know him.
CB: hmm...

(long pause)

MV (fake grin): wanna go for dinner with me?
CB (eyes rolled up, mouth open, classic CB): huh?
MV (more fake, less grin): errr... are you hungry?
CB: no

(longest pause)

MV: so... when are you going home?
CB: (date). what about you?
MV: me too! how're you going?
CB: my dad's coming to pick me up. wanna come with us?

(medium pause, punctuated by MV's heartbeats)

MV: no... i might be going a couple of days later...

(very short pause)

MV (hurrying to the door): got to go now. nice meeting you.
CB (yelling after him): you too... hey my yahoo id is (YID)... cya online!

But MV's long gone.

The story continues in the next post.

orkut discussion about the darfur situation

2005-06-07T12:45:00.000-07:00

I stumbled across a discussion, in one of the orkut communities i'm in. It's about the genocide in darfur and how the united states isn't doing anything to stop it. it was followed up with a general round or US-bashing, and the mandatory condemnation of the US war in iraq (consistency is apparently not something bleeding-hearts value), oil, etc etc. here's a sample (forgive the guy's english):

A poor soul like me is still struggling to find one unhippocratic foreign policy that US is having!!!! May be there are one or two that I missed!!

Did US’ intervention brought down the misery in iraq? How many people died in war? Did sadam kill that many? Did he cause that much damage as the war did? What about the daily explosions occurring in Iraq even now? What could US do?

Well, why I call US policy Hippocratic on Iraq is because of the way they manipulated media and made the Americans (a large majority of them) believe that saddam was really posing a threat to the US security and we need to attack them when he really didn’t have any WMD with him (remember bush administration later came up with a sorry after the inevitable damage was done). And you would understand the folly of US if only you realize that it was US who created this Saddam.

here's what i posted.

if you look in a dictionary (you need one) you'll find that "purpose" and "justification" have entirely different meanings. if there is justification for an action, the purpose of the actor doesn't change that; conversely, no amount of justification can create a purpose if it doesn't exist.

for the us in iraq, there was a purpose and a justification; the purpose was control over oil, and the justification, that saddam was a tyrant.

in darfur, there is clearly justification; but the us has very little purpose in intervening. the cost is too great and it cannot be justified.

i dont know why you are calling for just the us to intervene there. the sudanese militia are lightly armed and travel on camels; an indian army division could clean them up too. but as an indian first, i dont want my country's soldiers to die there, and i dont want my money to be used that way. there is nothing to gain for india.

and lastly, it is interesting to note that you posted a link about arab militia abuses in sudan and followed it with a condemnation of the us. you condemn the united states, but you haven't said anything against the arab dominated genocide sponsoring government of sudan yet.

on the other hand, i think you would have been all bleeding-heart and supportive of sudan's tyrannical government... back in august '98 when the us bombed bin laden's ex-hideout there. in the absence of any other statement from all you bleeding-hearts, i shall assume that your emotional endorsement of the sudanese regime stands.

i'm sure that people who think with their guts and not their brains won't follow me on this - but you dont have any concern for the victims human rights abuses or anger at the perpetrators, just envy for the successful. face it, you hate america for being the most successful nation on earth, and there's nothing america can do, sort of self destruction, that'll change your mind. or gut.

State of the LAN

2005-06-06T04:02:00.000-07:00

This is the article i wrote for the inaugural issue of "The Scholars' Avenue", IIT Kharagpur's student newspaper.

We love the LAN; we hate the LAN.

KGP’s love affair with the hostel network has now hit a rough patch. The semester began on a bad foot, with the network being held responsible for events that meant bad press for the institute. Curbs on the LAN were expected. Many measures were rumored imminent, and some steps the CIC took reinforced these rumors. In this report on the state of the LAN, ScholsAv tries to make sense of the institute’s unwritten network policy.

Connecting…

The speed of the net connection has fallen perceptibly this semester. Here’s our assessment of the events that led to this decline.

The total bandwidth of IIT’s external links has not decreased. Earlier there were four proxy servers, 10.3.100.211/212 for the Singtel link and 213/214 for the VSNL link. Most people used direct connection, so these proxy servers did not carry much traffic.

This semester the institute decided to install URL blocking – direct connection was discontinued in order to force all traffic through the filtering proxy servers. Moreover, the VSNL link was made unavailable from the hostels. To handle the expected increase in the Singtel traffic, three new proxy servers were set up – 144.16.192.217/218/148. The CIC did not buy new servers, so these are reportedly not the best hardware. The CIC denies this, but admits that the setup of proxies may not be “optimal”, and they’re working on it.

The bandwidth of the proxy servers are further choked by the filtering system. It searches within the URL for each request, comparing with a list of nearly 3000 blocked words and URL’s. The bandwidth capacity of the proxy servers must have been reduced considerably due to this.

The main task of the administrators now is to filter and block, not to optimize and improve. As long as this remains the case, the net is only likely to get slower.

any working pr0xy?

We used to laugh when newspaper articles said IIT Kharagpur had a “24 hour” LAN facility. “It’s not like someone has to sit there and push buttons all day…” Guess who had the last laugh.

In 2003, CIC blocked net access during the day (8 am to 5:30 pm), after some professors complained that internet access was luring students away from classes. This may have seemed such an obvious solution, that the actual effects of this measure were never seriously noted. However, it is not as straightforward as it seems.

For most of us, local student-run "servers" provide most of the entertainment – movies and songs from DC++, Mutter, Tourneys, Radios, etc. Other than keeping in touch with friends outside, the internet is only used for real learning purposes. This may not have been so when the ban was installed, as there were fewer student servers then, but this is the case now. If someone wants to spend time at his computer instead of attending class, blocking net access alone is not gonna change his mind.

On the other hand, forcing people to research at night stretches the KGPian’s already long day. According to the CIC website, bandwidth usage peaks around midnight and stays there till 4-5 am. If at 4 am KGP is downloading at 5 Mbps, it’s quite likely that people don’t turn up for that 7:30 class.

Instead of increasing attendance, the daytime block may actually be decreasing attendance in morning classes and delaying assignment submissions.

Welcome To .:: Hit Hi Fit Hai ::.

Filesharing is a big grey area. There were rumors at the beginning of the semester that there were going to be regulations on filesharing – an “official” hub, and a ban on other hubs. Those weren’t true – most of the CIC administrators are unaware of the DC network, and are definitely not responsible for the hub regulations.

To the question about whether filesharing was allowed at all, we were told, “Even if the institute decided that Shareaza should not be used, we cannot enforce such a rule.” We can assume that means filesharing is safe for now.

On the other hand there is a very good reason for the institute to encourage filesharing – economy. The bandwidth of the external links is only a few Mbps, while bandwidth within the LAN is several Gbps. If someone has already downloaded a particular file from the slower internet connection, others can get it over filesharing. This means that the file had to be downloaded from the internet only once – and not once for each user. This translates into huge savings of the external link’s bandwidth.
For similar performance gains by using a caching proxy, the proxy server has to have a 10,000 Gb hard disk!

The connection was refused…

The web (as in web pages) is not the only service on the internet. The normal proxies we have are only for web access, and allow connections only to port 80 and 81. The CIC provides another proxy server for accessing FTP and telnet (see box). We were told that other ports could be unblocked on request, if some academically useful software required this; such exemptions are usually granted on a per-ip basis.

So right now there is no official way to connect to internet services like email (POP, IMAP and SMTP), newsgroups (NNTP), etc. This had stopped Richard Stallman from checking his email while he was here… you’ll remember what he had to say about this, if you’d attended his lecture. It is difficult to see what this accomplishes, other than preventing P2P software from connecting. It does block a lot of useful communication tools, as well as a good number of software installers that check for updates.

Here’s a bizarre side story about this. The springfest web site was hosted on a server outside, and had to be updated through FTP. Back then the FTP proxy server wasn’t working. Guess how the web team made those changes – each time they’d write the website to a CD, take it to Goyal, and pay to use their internet connection. You’d think it were Goyal that had 10MBps international connectivity!

Access control configuration prevents…
Content filtering would be, if implemented properly, an acceptable policy for the institute to follow. It should not slow down the net significantly, and it should not block content that isn’t objectionable.

However, there is no such thing as a perfect filtering system – they would let some objectionable sites through, or block permissible sites too, or both. Moreover, filtering systems drastically reduce speed, and for this reason IIT officially follows a no-filtering policy. CIC denies they have had a filtering system installed on any proxy this semester. The truth, as we all know, is very different.

First some history – IIT used to have a filtering system initially, when the total external bandwidth was in kb’s and considered too precious. Now this has grown to 10 Mbps – any filtering system will only decrease speed, not conserve bandwidth.
The current* filtering system, hastily implemented after all the negative media attention, seems to be lifted from someone’s high school project. Much of the filtering is done by matching substrings – for example, if three x’s occur next to each other anywhere in the site’s address, it will be blocked. This causes a large number of perfectly permissible sites to be blocked.

What’s even more pathetic is that the system isn’t effective. It does not block several very well known pornographic sites because the URL’s are more subtle. Moreover it is not yet installed in all the official proxies, so if some site is getting blocked you could just try changing the proxy. On top of that, matching is case sensitive – if you do a google search for “teen” it will be blocked, but not if you typed “TEEN” or “Teen”…

And here’s what takes the cake. In their frenzy to filter sites that have “shit” in the URL, the admins have blocked the official Kshitij 2005 website. The Kshitij team sent countless emails to the “cache administrator” mentioned in the error page, but there were no replies and no action.

Stop, Refresh

The LAN and net access constitute one of the most important facilities the institute has for its students. Yet, no definite policy exists for its administration, and the regulations that exist today are mere knee-jerk reactions to events in the LAN’s short history. Many of these rules have no benefits, and yet seriously impede legitimate use of the network.

Things may be looking up, though. The institute has created a committee on IT policy, which is tasked with creating a comprehensive set of network policies. However nobody, not even members of the committee, expects this undertaking to be completed in the near future – the recommendations of the committee have a long journey up the IIT hierarchy before they can be implemented. The best course for IIT Kharagpur to take is to immediately adopt an established network policy of some other university. This policy can later be evolved by the IT policy committee.

The campus network is one of the biggest investments our institute has ever made. However, its benefits are being eroded away by the absence of focused policy-making. The system requires considerable improvements before it can justify being called “internet access in hostels” – today, these improvements can be made with no investment at all.

Except some time, and thought, from the authorities.

The information we have about the filtering block lists is as of January 31st. Things seem to have changed since then, but it’s not clear what the overall direction of those changes is.
We would like to acknowledge the information we received from the CIC, as well as “Tikli” and “Cyanide_Angel” without which this article wouldn’t have been possible.
Let’s take this occasion to thank the CIC, IIT Foundation, and everyone else who has made the LAN happen. Despite the gaalis we give it, we love the LAN.
Comments: scholarsavenue@yahoogroups.com
Corrections, Arguments, Abuse, Threats: aravindet@gmail.com