Satutory Warning: Very long post with lots of rambles and rants. No offence whatsoever intended here!!! These are strictly my Opinions!!!
Well yeah, with the satutory warning done, lets continue with the IIT-K story…
On saturday (7th Apr, 07), the day started with us (Himanshu and I) trying to figure out where “Hall 5” was. We needed breakfast!!! So, after about 15 minutes of walking, we figured out the place, had decent breakfast and then headed out for the sessions.
1st Session: Business Case Study
Some interesting judges. Pathetic talk from the students side.
This was a whole hour of tormenting before I pulled myself out of that room. I’m extremely sorry to be writing in the negative about an IIT but then, IMHO, IIT-Kanpur doesnt measure up anywhere near the other IIT’s that I’ve heard of. Doesnt match a mosquito’s chance against IIT-B from where I’ve got loads of friends and IIT-M which happens to be in my hometown.
Reasons: These people dint do presentations. They read out reports of the case studies from Powerpoint slides. If we are to accept this, the concepts they gave regarding the case study were proper verbatim “Bullshit“. A guy with a peanuts brain should be able to reason out things. I’m not going into complete details here… but then!!! Nope!!! I’m tight lipped here!! 
Where is the IIT standard here??? What is happening??? Are we actually cracking the JEE’s or is there also the way of the “Ratta maaro aur andar chalo” funda???
After this isession that make me forget my grammar of Engliis, I moved on to another session which was definitely interesting. It was a talk on Woman Entrepreneurship. The board of speakers being Vineeta Singh, the IIT-M, IIM-A graduate who turned down a Rs 1 Crore offer from Deutsche Bank to startup on her own, Sunita Bose who designs some of the hottest designer wear for models and actors in the country and Grishma Udani who co-founded a company called WhirlyBird Electronics which works with Indian Defence systems!!!
This session was very interesting. And Himanshu and I were also able to talk to Vineeta Singh and get her perspective on Why she rejected an offer for One Crore Rupees!!!! I’ll upload that audio file once I figure out a player that can handle the streaming…
Well, after that started we happened to run into Aditya Mishra from TCS, the sponsor / paisawala guy… of Barcamp and MoMo fame… Caught up with him… And after we realised that we werent being given a session slot, we decided to do the session with his session on unconferences and Mobile-space business possibilities…
And during this session did the reality hit us. It was an absolute one way talk except for two people in the entire audience of about 10 people that actually opened their mouths to even say that they could hear us talk. Is there something wrong??? I thought that this was an IIT. People’s ideas fly haywire here. That’s why they have Incubators!!! They’re the meccas of innovation!!! And here were students who were sitting as though they were in any other college in tamil nadu where professors ramble away to glory!!!
After our sessions, we had an amazing enlightenment, the students had forgotten to book our tickets… Coz some guy out there felt that “using our credit card on the internet would be risky”. So, what do we do??? Pay a cab driver 200 bucks, run down to the Kanpur bus stand at 10 in the night, look up at bus timings, be given strange looks by the guys at the counter AND be informed that the booking counter guy is not available…
The next morning, we left early for the bus-stand at 11 o clock for our 3 o clock bus. The temperature outside: A smoldering 43 degrees celsius. 2 Pepsi’s and 3 water bottles later we are informed that the bus would infact leave at 3 in the afternoon, and reach New Delhi at 3 in the morning!!! Thats an astonishingly long 12 hours for 440 kms of travel. Reason: Traffic, bad roads.
And yeah, were the roads bad??? What roads??? Were there any??? The NH-91 from Kanpur to Delhi is narrower than the galli outside my house here in B’lore!!! And the drivers are absolute maniacs. 2 lanes to drive on, choose whichever you like. Witnessed 4 accidents along the way. Got to see a couple of screwed up mangled remains of what used to be vehicles and their freight!!! Shit, that’s scary! Unfortunately, my camera was packed, soo, no photos!
Delhi at 3.30 in the morning, caught an auto, got down at the airport, checked in, got onto the flight at 0600, flight taxied down to the tarmac… And then, Emergency landing by an Air-India flight due to failed hyrdaulics. Our flight delayed initially by 45 minutes and then by an additional 20 more before we finally took off. Witnessed the live incident of an air-hostess dropping the coffee jug onto a guy and burning up his pants!!! Credits turbulence!!!
One thing however that I strongly support Indian Airlines for… The Food they provide onboard… It was simply awesome… But yeah, 5 grannies handling 200 passengers… IA has to change this aspect seriously.
Landed finally in B’lore at 10 in the morning!!!
Now that my trip diary is done, a couple of things that Himanshu and I would like to point out:
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Not all IITians, With all due respect I repeat, NOT ALL IIT-IANS belong to the top-notch category. There are definitely guys that would fail the engineering education standards in TamilNadu colleges. I still dont know how they got in, but then yeah, they have successfully degraded the stamp that IIT brands them with!!!
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When you’re organizing an event, and a couple of dodo’s have actually sponsored you!, Small or Big, they have sponsored you and as human beings, they deserve the basic level of respect. People are visiting your campus. You stay there, the visitors dont. And that’s why they’re called visitors. Dont deprive them of their basic necessities like directions to locations where you find food and mosquito mats / coils if Kanpur is the city.
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People from other cities may not know your city. Some may be adventurous to run around and find things. But, yeah, adventurous or not, if they’re on a packed schedule, dont ask them to Google around. Get them help.
And with those three points of heavy duty accusations, I end this sordid post. Himanshu’s experiences here… I guess he hasnt ranted a lot. But yeah, I dint want to control this post looking at the 3 days that we spent in IIT-K. Nevertheless, my respect and admiration for IIT’s still stays…
Tags: business, IIT-K, Kanpur, Life, Megabucks, Travel, Indian Airlines, Rambles
[...] I had blogged about my sad experience at the Kanpur IIT event Megabucks here. [...]
Hey man!!! “From what you write it seems that you had given JEE in your time and then after FAILING you studied from Tamil Nadu Local Chhap Engg. College….”
Im not bein arrogant but Im trying to tell u that I can be arrogant!
And I could have written more than this but I prefer not.
Hope you get me!
There are definitely guys that would fail the engineering education standards in TamilNadu colleges.
For your information most of PG guys here are from South Indian colleges and they dont know how to work on equipments kept in UG first year lab.Dont doubt JEE.Moreover, this event was managed by MBA guys who dont give JEE.
I know u r angry with organisers and participants but dont blame their IQ for the goof-up.
Ashwin! Macha – you’re rocking eh? Been long since we spoke/mailed. Ping me sometime dude.
Regards
sRi
@Rajiv…. Duuuuude… I’d never forget you guys… Not to forget mentioning Gautam and his kinky T-Shirt!!! Nevertheless, I did want to mention you guys… But i kinda had this negative air all along… so dint mention you guys… But the yeah, Sorry for leaving you out!!!
A post dedicated to the WATBlog team comin up soon… B-)
oye you forgot us!!! i thought we were the only entertainment you got at the trip! remember gautams pic in the tight tshirt?
Hey @Chinmay,
The Cruisemaniac is actually just an identity… A pen name if I could put it that way… But then yeah, I do have my real name “Ashwin Murali” around at a lot of places… Nevertheless, The Cruisemaniac is a title that I kinda like and it’s really nice to have people recognize you!!!
Thanx anyways…
@Rachit: Was that some kind of trick to find the real name of the Cruise Maniac?
Ha, Cruise Maniac! Your cat’s out of the bag! (Still wonder why it ain’t mentioned anywhere except on the technorati page!)
@Rachit:
Thanks for your comment. BTW, I’m Ashwin. Himanshu blogs here.
Hey Himanshu!
It’s really nice on your part to blog honestly about an event. As an organizer of a business plan competition myself (we, at the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani recently had Conquest 2007 with teams from Singapore and all parts of India coming over) it is really helpful.
For our postmortem sessions, we usually try to get feedback from people outside the Center and it really helps. Probably, as organizers we need to start thinking more from an outsider’s perspective. Good read though.
@Nag:
Yes, I do accept the point that the students had exams and all that. But professionalism is a standard expectation from any IIT. I’m a frequent visitor to IIT Madras and I go there with the blind expectation of what I can demand with those guys. I’ve also worked with those students in the past and believe me, they are a class apart. IIT-K dint have that class.
@Piyush:
Bad Roads??? I think I said “What roads!!!”
@Amit Pande Sirji:
Lucky you that you had a sweet time with IIT. This was an unexpected hiccup. Nevertheless…
@Vinu:
Our discussion on this can go offline…
@Former IITKian:
It’s ok. Things did go wrong but then it wasnt pathetic… My main aim of the 2 posts is that I wanted the students to realize the visibility that an IIT hosted event has in-front of the world. The kind of view people have of an IIT and the importance of maintaining the perspective people have of IIT.
Hi,
I am extremely sorry for what you underwent at IITK. I hope you conveyed your opinions to the organisers – it is high time that they realised their responsibilities. They should realise that they cannot get away with anything just because they are IITians – the sooner the better.
I had asked you about the mosquito coils in a previous thread. I can guess the answer from this post. And that answer does not make me very happy about where my dear alma-mater is headed….
I think I strongly agree with your views on IIT-K. I too had similar experiance, when I was working with guys from IIT-K in one of our BU’s. I don’t know how they got in to the so called IIT_k… But, one thing is for sure, IIT-k is not up to the threshold, where it should have been.
Cudos to your efforts of bringing the ground reality to terms…
hey – sorry about the gaffe – have corrected your URL
I had a better time last winter at IITK with the Masters in design students – and some of the faculty. But yes, its true that on the one hand, perhaps while successive generations are ‘savvy’ because of access to information/technology/networking, they are also ‘dumbified’ in terms of fundamentals. As the old saying goes…if a million monkeys clatter away on a million typewriters, you still don’t get too close to a Shakespeare…
Definitely, Thanks for making it up there. Although feels bad to find out so many hiccups.
But am definitely surprised to hear this, now my colleague is gonna have tough time today in office, He is from IITK
.
Bad/No roads, scorching heat, Maniac driving.
Thats all the experience of True Northern part of India. But things still run!
And I don’ think age is any factor to excuse them of this irresponsible hospitality. Even school kids today will surprise you with such small things and here we are talking about IITK!
Well..what can I say. This post surprised me but let’s move on and learn from the experiences. But one thing to note — they are just 20 or 21 yr students and it might not be too uncommon for some one in that age group to miss some expectations. Moreover, with the exams and the event all around the same time, I guess they were worn out.
BTW..I chuckled @ “Witnessed the live incident of an air-hostess dropping the coffee jug onto a guy and burning up his pants!!!”
Ouch! that would hurt the poor fella.
But hey, thanks guyz for making the trip.