A Mad Tree Party

FYI- My article for the Pune Tree Fest 2012, the original can be found here: A Mad Tree Party

I haven’t read the newspaper, not in a long time. I haven’t written, not in a long time. But yesterday, when after so many days, I picked up the Times of India lying on my couch, I had no idea why this tree festival article caught my eye, and made me read that page longer than any other, ultimately ending up in this tangled representation of a multitude of experiences. I was actually surprised, I mean, I have never been much of a strong idealist for plant-life, I love greenery and blossoming nature just like the next person, then why the pause?

And then suddenly, out of nowhere, a small scene flashed out. A little girl, sneaking chili seeds out from the potato sabzi in her lunch, just like every other day, only this time, not throwing them into the bin, but secretly putting them into a small white plastic Shikakai pot hastily filled up with damp mud, in the few minutes that her mother dozed off. Who watered it every day from her water bottle, fearing someone would discover if the water in the jug seemed lesser. Who looked at the tiny pot every day, and prayed that it grew enough chilies so her mother wouldn’t have to buy from the grumpy old vegetable lady. Who was terrified when her parents finally discovered it, fearing the worst, and jumped in ecstatic joy when they allowed her to keep it and gave it a nice, cozy place of its own in the window! Who looked in wonder at her pot after a few weeks, that contained a miraculous transformation from few seedlings to a handsome, swaying chili plant, and decorated it with stickers and glitter and chart paper and wrote in proud letters – My Tree. Who took it to her school and showed it to everyone and celebrated the plant. Who still has the white pot, although the plant, too big to grow in it now, had to be shifted to the park.

My relationship with plants has just been so natural that I don’t at all remember making a conscious effort to do anything in that regard. For no reason, I just choose them. More moments started flashing out in random order - I remembered caressing the jasmine plant when I plucked a flower, giving a long speech in front of the neem tree that always greeted me every morning when I looked out the window, reading tree chapters in my textbook with extra interest. I remember listening awestruck to stories of my grandfather tending to his neat vegetable garden in our village house backyard, I remember climbing onto the slanted rooftop to wave huge bumble bees off the bean-vines (even though I felt dead scared of them), I remember pleading excitedly to my mother to take me to the huge farm of her aunt where they used to grow everything that could be grown and who didn’t buy a single food item from outside except salt, I remember my great-uncle teaching me the names and the origins of different varieties of spices that he’d planted in his kitchen garden.

And the most splendid experience of all - spending the last four years of my life in companion with a tree that had become an inseparable part of me – The Banyan Tree of the CoEP campus. It was my spot for contemplation, its thick stem a hiding place for dodging professors who would walk by it to the next lecture classroom, dozing off beneath its cool aura as we waited for the next practical, to go so far as to conduct an entire club meeting underneath the natural canopy it provided! Every day included at least one trip to the tree, even if it had to be the only reason to walk to that side of the campus (well, not so much considering how lethargic I can be, but yeah, lots of trips :P). 

The countless moments spent beneath its benevolent branches, blink smilingly up at me now, as I can’t help thinking, trees are companionship. Trees understand. Trees soothe. But trees also rebel. Because trees, are life. And that is why, trees are memories. :)

The Dark 'Knights'

This is what is called the 'never say die' spirit. Or something like that.

KKR v/s CSK at Centurion, 18/05/09
It wasn't a match that turned heads. Wasn't one that would make even the tail-lines of the TOI. It's just what you can do even if it doesn't greatly matter whether you do it or not. Yes, even with a lazily-filled stadium booing at you.

The Kolkata Knight Riders threw the match into fire and then snatched it out of the lapping flames. They needed just one dark horse, and they got it in the form of Bradley Hodge. I'm not particularly fond of the team (though it's being owned by SRK), but yesterday's match sure made me eat half the cushions in the hall! I just happened to read a match preview two days ago that declared, Is Kolkata lucky enough to win against Chennai? FTI, if KKR could've broken out of their notorious reputation of throwing away comfortably winnable matches in the last over just a bit earlier, they actually would have made the semis. The guys were a lot clumsy (a trait that cost Hussey yesterday), but what made this chase near-perfect was that it wasn't just some madness coming off. McCullum and Hodge selected the bowlers they were going to target, took it easy against Murali, and later found a Saha to prop up the main act.

They played a little for their pride, and a bit more for coming back into the next season positively, and although it rarely looked like they played to win, they did that handsomely against the second best team in the running!

Cheers, as usual!

Quick Tales - the Results

Here they are!

Congratulations to all the winners! And a good job, organisers.

A cheer for the time taken to comment on almost every story and pointing out where each one worked (or as the case might be, bombed).

And now that I know I use more type-styling than type (which is a shocking achievement in itself), I'm gonna be the next one vying! :D

The Scores.

Quick Tales - the ShortList

* tone of surprise, eyebrows raised *

Why! Hello Blog!

* /tone of surprise, eyebrows raised *

That's more than two months out of the offing.

And this is a blog-saving post. :|

Well, the saying goes,

The prospect of unpaid publicity arouses even the laziest.

Or maybe, I coined it right now. Never mind.

One of my major motivations (probably the only one) to take part in QUiCK TALES, a Flash Fiction writing contest jointly organised by Caferati and LiveJournal, was, the beginning of my engineering mid-semester exams coincided with the fateful last date of the contest; and I just had to do anything, anything other than studies :|

Theme: Journal (in any which way that you can interpret it)

Word limit: Not more than 500 words. 

Mine motive was pure time-pass, but I learnt a few days ago, to shock, and speechlessness, that both the entries that I had submitted somehow found their way into the final 100 shortlisted ones! And one of the prizes, The People's Choice Prize depends on junta ka vote; bole toh, you people need to go and read those stories and rate them on a scale of 1 to 10, and they'll calculate an average score on Doomsday.

The poll is open only to LJ members, so you need to register on LiveJournal to rate. Sign up over here, it's just a 30 seconds ka jhamela, and you can forget all about the account after you've rated the stories 

Here go mine, to hum and blackcurrant rum (:D)

#683 and #738

Just go and read the stuff!

Feedback would be greatly appreciated. (Mail, blog, or journal :D)

Don't worry! You won't be inflicted with more than 5 minutes of my writing. The word limit left no chance for the scrollbar!

And of course, goes without ado, the rest of the shortlisted stories.

Poll closes in a few weeks!

• Mood: Shock, wearing off 

* SighGone *

I should've looked around; rather, messed and pottered and monkeyed around with a fine-toothed comb before I talked below.

Now, I'm speechless. :|

ZERO-Equivalent

* Sigh *

Today's Headline:

IITs lower cut-offs to fill seats

Second Round of Admissions For The First Time In History Of IITs

Some bits of accidental revelation:

"quotas cannot be filled because there aren't enough suitable candidates..."

'Nearly 50% of reserved seats lying vacant' *432 to be precise*

'..criminal waste of infrastructure'

"...ministry is not interested in de-reserving vacant seats..."

"...ministry wants the premiere engineering schools to dilute merit.... "

"...further bring down cutoffs to admit reserved category students..."

'HRD orders faculty quota with "immediate effect" in IITs'

And before you check the idea out, a point in concern:

The present IIT cut-off is around 180 for a general category student and 104 for a reserved category one. Which gets lowered to its 55% for the preparatory course i.e. to 57. Which'll get further lowered to dispel the empty-seat syndrome.

What's the bet the final cut-off [if it is, indeed, intended to cut off] won't come down to a zero equivalent?

Oh and by the bye, as like everywhere, why not reserve plush velvet-swathed seats for these people in heaven too?

Eye.ing the IITs

Amid the hot and happening headline news about the contentious Indo-US nuke deal which has replaced the food crisis as the latest means of heated arguments amongst roadside beggars over their subah ki cutting(begged, of course) and how home lavatories are a must for politicians to contest the forthcoming elections; I was shocked by the small paragraph that the TOI had devoted 2 days ago to the margins of the front page. I mean, it was a really long time since I had seen the word education on page 1. But as I said, it was just about a 3.5 cm article. They'd tried to compensate for their unknowing lack of discretion, I suppose. :l Anyhow, here goes: As many as eight new IITs would be set up in the country during the current academic session to impart high quality technical education. And of course, no elaborations.

Being a believer myself, I ventured to do a bit of a probity probe, [the Internet, being much more considerate, yielded cause and execution] and to my astonishment, found out that the system had gone in for 7 IIMs in addition!

Understandably, the first emotion I experienced was regret, that I wasn't in a position to attempt JEE a year later. [Not in the least because I would've got into one of the prestigious schools, but because I could've boasted that I lost the rat-race by 360 seats less. Matters, see. :) ] But then, my mind registered amazement. Three of these proposed institutes, apparently, planned to initiate functioning in castaway laboratories and rented premises! The media, and consequently the public have sparked up hot debates on the most obvious point that this proposal gives rise to: the dilution of quality due to quantity. Won’t having more IITs and IIMs simply fritter the premium on quality that these institutes have? Can a mere increase in numbers guarantee a consistency in the quality of education imparted? Rather than unfocussedly increasing the IIT count, why not pump that money to improve infrastructure and faculty in the existing IITs?? And so on and so forth in all possible strings of words, citing hundreds of instances. All worth its salt. A demure interposition though. More than the quality of the education imparted to the students who get into IIT, doesn’t the quality of the students who get into IIT in the first place matter more? As a maiden venture, what was IIT designed to be? An institute, whose main objective is to pick up the crème-de-la-crème of the student herd in the world and aid them in the process of being more so. Mark it! Not any Tom, Dick and Harry. So just as the best students existing rightfully claim that they deserve to be in IIT, doesn’t IIT rightfully deserve to select only the best among the best available?

At this point in time, some people might argue that all humans are born equal and hence reserve equal rights to education in the elite group of schools. That the reason IIT should increase its intake is to provide education par excellence to the maximum possible students. I perfectly agree with the first part of the first statement. Born parity. I assure you, I was born as piercingly naked as Chetan Bhagat. Born equals. Both attended high-school and studied, more or less, the same syllabus.[I’m assuming he did.] But then, why the hell am I graduating from COEP when Bhagat graduated from IIT? : ( I suppose you get the idea. Somewhere down the line, the difference in our academic abilities, and more than that, the difference in our pedantic personalities showed up. We cease to be equals from the moment we’re born. Henceforth, our actions, abilities and choices inevitably decide our level for us. We remain equals only in the sense that we are humans.

Simply for the sake of a means of classification, let us assume that the amount of marks(obtained by a person) is a measure of one’s intelligence, since that is, by far, the only unbiased criterion of candidate-selection. [Of course, there are several notable cases in point of people being far more intelligent than what their marks show, the most remarkable case being mine :) ] Directly, and very simply, implying that a particular level of intelligence gets appreciated, and accepted, and levels below it are not. Simply because they do not deserve to be. Or because there are enough people more deserving than them. I admit, I do not deserve to be in IIT. (I deserve more. :D) There should be enough seats in IIT only for those who are QUALIFIABLE, and not for all who are there. Citing the continual increase of population as a rationale to increase the number of IITs is inexplicably hollow. IITs and IIMs are niche institutes and not shop floors. However, they are not exceptional only because they provide top-notch tutelage but because the pool of talent that they gather is top-notch in itself. They are shaping and honing it, they are manoeuvring it, not creating it. But more IITs will mean more seats to fill. Which will put students having significantly lesser capabilities on par with the ingenious ones. Which will have some very direct negative implications:

1. Where is the competition? Why would anyone study to get 99 per cent if he could get into the institute even for a paltry 80 percent? It hampers the analytical and intellectual growth of the pupil, quite the opposite of what the IIT intends isn’t it? Curbing the need to excel is probably the most cruel treatment a student can be subjected to.

2. Pushing relatively low IQ people into coping alongside the flawlessly brilliant ones is the worst that you could do to them. Smothering mediocre students with stellar education won’t do much; it will only result in grossly inefficient utilization. Of both resources, and manpower. Inferiority complexes galore; is it a surprise that the number of suicide cases registered by the nationwide IITs only increases with each passing year?

3. And with the tight compromisations on coaching faculty, the net outcome 4 years hence would be [provided they manage to survive] engineers who’ll probably earn their bread and butter but who wouldn't outlast two hoots in a competitive environment like, say, the international market. The premises of the IIT would be transformed into commonplace manufacturing facilities churning out an x number of average, unremarkable professionals.

Or in short, we return to the same point in question, but with a substantial variation.

Dilution of quality, not because of absolute quantity, but because of inept, raw, undeserving quantity. And the only way we can pull ourselves out of this mess is by starting right down at the beginning. Right from KG, inculcate within you the will to learn and grow yourself. Keep a guard on your own quality as a student; sterling institutions are bound to follow. Do not whine that a student who got 90 per cent last year got into IIT but you couldn’t get into it this year with the same per cent. That’s because the value of 90 per cent was appreciable enough till last year, but not NOW. “Survival of the fittest” alludes a tad too well to today’s world.

I believe the number of IITs should be increased, or for that matter, any other institute should be upgraded ONLY if there is an increase of intelligent population. The system should focus on elevating the masses to the IITs, and not depreciating the IITs to the masses. More than 40 per cent of the Indian population is still illiterate. Provide them with basic primary education so that they are able to fend for themselves. Enhance and innovate. Dissolve the reservation system that eats into people's acumen and misguides them into quiescence, thereby establishing equality in the real sense. So that the average maturity level increases. So that people become aware of how powerful education and cognizance and intellect are.

So that there might come one day in the world, when “getting into IIT” isn’t such a big deal anymore; not because there are enough seats to accommodate everyone(indeed, that is practically inviable), but because everyone has scored 99+. Because then, you won’t need the stamp of IIT, or for that matter, even Stanford or Oxford or any other institution to project YOUR quality; You yourself are the stamp, and the logo.

And the philatelist, is God.