Welcome to the Jungle - IITM survival guide

This post is intended for freshers at IITM. If you are not a fresher, please do read it and also encourage freshers you know, to read this post so that it can help as many people as possible. This post is a survival guide for freshers at IIT Madras. The following are the various issues where freshers need orientation.

Rooms:
The rooms at IITM are just awesome, they are neatly tiled and well furnished. A cot, a chair, a spacious wardrobe, a computer table, book shelves completely fill up the 3.5'x5' room you get. 3.5 and 5.5 feet may seem small but the rooms are spacious as they are 14' high. The room can accommodate up to 4 people on chairs.
Watch-out:- There have been incidents where snakes have been seen at the windows of rooms. Only 68% of snake bites are fatal and hence this need not be a major concern.

Food:
The food in IITM is so awesome that it requires an entire post to describe it and hence here is the post that will answer all your queries. For people who don't like mess food, there are alternatives. The author doesn't know much about the quality of mess food these days because his lunch has mainly been in the fruit-shop consisting of water-melons.

Night-life:
The LAN gets cut at 12:00, that being the only source of your entertainment for freshers, the seniors of IITM considering their needs have arranged for an alternate way of entertainment. Every night seniors delightedly invite them to their rooms for the first few days when they miss normal life the most. Other seniors are also invited for the party. The seniors usually dance in a group or sing funny songs to entertain you. Sometimes they sing and dance at the same time for the song that freshers suggest. There are question answer rounds where seniors answer your questions. That is when you find out important things like their AIR, their room-wife and so on. Some times, educational videos involving biology, chemistry, physics etc are shown. At the end, you get to give a cute name to your senior for example instinct, duck, C-Pro, lighter, Juga, KP, monkey etc.
watch out:
Sleeping for less than 6 hours a day turns you into a zombie. Make sure you use your class-timings [refer paragraph below] wisely.

Classes:
IITM is known for its huge classrooms and some classrooms can accommodate over 1000 people at a time. Such classrooms were built because the number of students coming in are rising every year. Currently the class strength is around 200 and the freshers end up making a lot of friends in their first year.
A few courses have remote learning programs where a professor teaches 3 huge classes at the same time. The prof stays and teaches in the centre room and a video of the prof is played in two neighbouring classes. Teachers assistants however are present everywhere looking out for students who talk to each other in class. They are then dealt with seriously.
watch-out:
Catch a seat early, you may have to with a girl otherwise. How is that bad? You will know soon.
Do not talk in the class, the professors give punishments and you will be made to kneel down before everyone.
95% attendance is compulsory. This means you can skip at most one class.
Workshop:

Usually IITians end up being in big companies and they sit in their cubicles in front of a computer with a cool chair. They don't realise the value of hard-work, hence there is a workshop that students can use to realise what hard work is all about. Most of the 'professors' at the workshop take it too seriously and insist the students on writing notes, reports and manuals. By the end of the course, the student will be a qualified construction worker, painter, miner, carpenter, electrician, moulder, musician, beautician, lift-boy and of course badly injured. All the things that you will ever need in your life are taught in the workshops.
Watch-out:
Before hitting the nail, take your finger off it.
Do not make fun of the electrician in English, he does manage to understand.

Sports:
Most of the evenings are spent playing sports. Wall climbing, bungee jumping are the most famous ones at IITM. Skating (pipe and rails), wave surfing, mountain climbing are less preferred. Sports are compulsory for freshers as 2 years of IIT preparation would have made them unfit. The sports are quite safe in IITM. Very few fatalities are reported every year.


Here are something you will have to really watch out for.
Inter-hostel violence:
Some IITians are really aggressive, they go to the extent of scolding a hostel's mother even if that didn't make sense to a sane guy. Usually fights break out in the hostel zone over who gets to win Shroeter although the winner of the fight doesn't really get anything except a victim or two. Many innocent people from Ganga were slaughtered by people from Tapti after they cheated in a wall-climbing match.
Watch-out:
Carry a weapon with you always. You can convert to Sikhism, that helps. You can defend yourself with a Kripan.
Always attack first, do not defend!

Forests:
As you may know now, IITM was established illegally on forest land. There are a wide range of creatures like monkeys, black-buck, mongoose, spotted deer and of course their predators. There are just 12 tigers left in the forest now and the numbers are fast declining but since the number of students have gone up in recent years, their chances of survival have improved.
Watch-out:
Wear anti tiger masks, always travel in groups and always take an adult with you.

Girls:
The girls in IITM the most beautiful ones I have ever seen. You will enjoy your stay at IITM. In fact you will have so many options that you will start singing "Kisko pyaar karoon, kaise pyaar karoon, woh bhi hai, yeh bhi hai, tu bhi hai, haye!". Although endangered, the numbers are rising each year. Writing any further about them will probably result in an unprovoked attack and hence the author stops at this stage.
Watch-out:
The author has to watch out now, the wrath of the goddesses are about to follow him, enjoy! you are safe.

Apart from the above topics, there are a few more that are worth discussing like festivals (Shaastra, Saarang and some unknow management festival), the labs at IIT Madras, the library, Schroeter, Tech-soc, Lit-soc, Centre for Innovation, Sustainability network but the author just ran out of ink and hence won't be writing about any of the above insignificant topics.


No matter what happens, always be proud of yourself and remember, you have cleared the JEE and you now are an IITian, just like every one else there.

The great Indian Wedding

"Female girl wanted. Non-smoker, non-ugly." - Joey tribbiani

"Posting one of my quotes before every article is such a cliché." - Oscar Wilde

All characters in the following article are fictitious and any resemblance to any character dead/alive/zombie are accidental and should be ignored.

Marriages are usually made in heaven, but in some places like India, they are man-made.  There are many types of marriages: love marriages, forced marriages, child marriages, bought marriages, accidental marriages (like in Indian movies), same-gender marriages, inter-species marriage, multiple marriages.  The following article will explore an age old paradigm of an arranged marriage, its advantages, its disadvantages and its effects on Indian heritage, Indian mentality and probably climate change.

There was once a time in India where the father of a newly born child used to buy some cotton from the merchant across and the road and pay by making a marriage deal with him. The deal would enable the babies of the two parties to get married. Being just toddlers, unable to walk, the babies had to crawl around the sacred fire thrice to complete the marriage ritual to become a couple.


[ Two babies, getting ready for the ritual ]

In the time of kings, a king would summon a random set of people found on the road and organise a competition (wrestling, archery, wall climbing, rhyme recitation, lemon and spoon to name a few) and the princess of the land would be forcibly married off to the winner of the competition, a guy she just met. The kings in those days found high correlations between successful genes and victory in say, an air guitaring competition. In fact Sita was made to marry Rama after he won an archery competition. (source Tinkle)


[ Lemon and spoon competition for a person who probably swings both ways ]

In the author's father time, the author's father realised he was engaged only when a few of his friends called him up to congratulate him on getting engaged. His father then wrote a letter the following week informing him that his engagement had been conducted.

That was all in the past, things have changed a lot in the 21st century. The face of an arranged marriage has totally changed. The selection process now starts off when the parents of a girl and those of a boy go on a date. If there is a successful conversation between the two pairs, the selection goes to its next phase. In the next phase the parents go to a priest and seek his consent for the marriage. The priest then uses the birthdays of the two and analyses the positions of the sun, the moon and the stars at the time of birth and uses a few rules to decide whether the marriage can happen or not.

Here are some of the rules that are used

• If a person is born in prime numbered months, he is a demon. If a person is born in a month number which is a fibonocci number, he is a human. In other cases, the person is a god.
• A human boy can't marry a god girl, a demon boy can't marry a human girl, a human boy cannot marry a tiger and finally a god boy can't marry any girl.
• If the couple can still marry, they go on to the next round.
• The group of stars that are brightest, directly opposite to the sun on the date of birth of the boy and the girl are selected and the pattern is analysed.
• There are 12 such patterns: goat, bull, crab, lion, fish, scorpion, chair, computer, nuclear reactor, merry-go-round, university campus, face with acne.
• Common rules are now applied like lion eats goat, scorpion stings crab, bull eats table, bull gores goat, computer sits on a chair, fish doesn't know how to use a computer, nuclear reactor is not in the university campus and a face with acne beats everything.
• If the guy's pattern beats the girl's pattern, they are into the next round.
• Every digit in the girls birthday is now added up, same goes for the boy. They are fed as inputs to a random number generator as a seed. The random number modulo 36 is calculated. if the value is more than 18, they are made for each other. In the olden days, the random number generation was done manually, these days there are numerous softwares available in the market for the job.
• Some times there is an extra round conducted in case of certain girls. If the girl did not get a sufficient score in the previous rounds, she is given extra tasks before being eligible to marry. Say for example marrying a tree. This is very common and happens even in royal families.

Now that the major obstacle to a marriage has been dealt with, the parents of the guy and the girl can go on and get engaged and become a couple-couple. After the engagement, its finalised that the boy and the girl will get married. This is when the boy and the girl get to know about each other and get the licence to chat.

Even in an arranged marriage, the symptoms of love start appearing within a fortnight of the arrangement of marriage. The boy and the girl start calling each other names like 'cutie', 'sweetie', 'meetie', 'jaanu' and so on to show affection. They spend hours video chatting, stealing away considerable amount of bandwidth which could be effectively utilised by another connection in the house probably by a sibling to download ebooks, ACM-papers and other educational content. They keep contacting each other every few hours at work and at home. When they don't get a reply and a time out is detected, they get angry/tense and sometimes even end up beating up their sibling, who by the way is very likely a nice guy who doesn't make fun of the situation. They make each other smile all the time and sometimes actually laugh. These according to experts are symptoms of love.

Arranged marriages are better than love marriages because

• one doesn't have to fall in love with some one and realise that the person is a married mother of two and even has a pet dog by the name Tommie. The unnecessary depression that is undergone, the amount of time that is wasted in recovery from the madness all alone, the additions of arbitrary girls to the friends list in one's facebook/twitter accounts to console oneself, can all be easily avoided in case of an arranged marriage because statistics show that in 96% of the cases, the bride is unmarried and in 99.97% of the cases the bride is not yet a mother.
  
  
• One doesn't have to pack his luggage in a hurry, run away from home with the girl he loves, get married and start living in a hotel room where he unpacks his luggage to realise that he hasn't brought any of his underwear. The girl may probably get furious if she realises that her husband has been wearing the same underwear for over a week. Any attempts in explaining the similar system people follow in college campuses where clothes are changed once a fortnight will probably end the marriage in just 7 days.
  
  
•  One doesn't have to fall in love with a girl whose face is as white as snow to only realise on the night after the marriage that its just the face that's as white as snow. Speaking of which, there is not much an arranged marriage can do about it but the author felt that bringing it up was important.

The author interviewed a cricket players who has been through both arranged and love marriages and asked him about his views on marriage in India for which he had the following to say.

"Bismillah ir-Rahman ir-Rahim, Alla ko shukr hai mera doosri Shaadhi huvi. My first marriage was love. I chat with the girl online, she show me pictures, I love her pictures. I ask her photo real? she said yes. 2 saal baad, Internet relay chat pe hamaari Shaadi huvi. Maine ek SMS bhi bejha tha 'Nikah Nikah Nikah' bolke. Shaadhi ke baad I find girl is not look good, I not love her any more. Love marriage is like cricket, one team is play well and win and other team is loose. Arrange marriage is not like that, is me toh dono family ek hota hai. In this case two nations becomes one. All of the people in my land love Sanya a lot and creates a website called sanyaBhabhi.com in love for her."



THIS POST IS MEANT FOR FUN ONLY, MOST PARTS OF IT ARE NOT SERIOUS. PLEASE COMMENT IF YOU LIKED THE POST.