Looking Back

My life As An Open Wiki

It's April 3rd, 2024 and I've entered the last month of my undergraduate life at NITC. I first step foot to the NITC Campus at around mid-2019. I'll be honest I had no clue about the rich history and culture of campus that day. Just like every other fresher, the first thing I searched on YouTube was about Tathva and Ragam. I loved the trailers and aftermovies of all those events so much that I considered everyone who got featured in any of them as a celebrity. I had a chance to meet quite a few of them and had the privilege to be friends with them. This Blog entry is an effort to document our lives here as NITCians so that those who come after us also have insight into how we lived, how we endured and tackled engineering and other problems with what we have. I'll break this into different years and try to link everything to their pages so that there is more info have fun reading and maybe write your own by creating an account.

First Year

For most of my peers and myself, it was the first time staying away from family. Sure there were a lot of students who were staying in institutes like Brilliant Pala, Chaithanya Narayana, and Kota for a year or more to crack JEE that had already gone through this. But arguably we had more freedom. Or so we thought. I see many of the senior batch kids even from my batch that used to envy b21s and batches below for the freedom they got to enjoy. Pre-covid campus and hostels were highly restrictive when it came to first year and females. Hostel committee meetings were a nightmare for many and the number of students who got mouthfuls for "Breaking rules" was not few. The rules especially for first years were set for their safety. To tackle ragging first years were strongly discouraged and even punished for having interaction with seniors or going to places where the seniors don't want you to go. I used to think that the logic the hostel administration was following was such that, "Senior students won't rag you if we rag you first". Still, with all the shackles in place, the first sem was more eventful including SAC onam, carpe diem, and ofc Tathva. Darshan Raval and Infra were the 2 extreme peaks of pleasure and pain we had in the sem. I also joined the Students' Commune which was started by some of our seniors. The commune was an unofficial student organisation that believed in need of student unity and political awareness for having a healthier campus.

Soon after tathva the campus started getting Ready for Ragam. The Home Team Inductions had started and like everyone else I showed up to NLHC to test my luck. After multiple rounds of screening and war between seniors for juniors I got into the NITC Mime Team.

NITC Mime Team 

The journey with the Mime team members to Ragam was physically and mentally draining but instead of weakening us, the journey had made us stronger. We were at our physical peak during Ragam after the drills we went through and our minds were sharp. From day 0 to day of Ragam we underwent moments of joy and sorrow and were taken into the Mimehood. The night before Ragam after going through everything according to creed we played the final dress rehearsal before all the Mime seniors and super seniors. with them applauding as a mark of approval we were ready to play Ragam Mime the next day. We all broke our hearts when the result came and we had lost the 10-year streak of the first price and that was the emotional all-time low we had. The wound didn't heal for a long time until we went to Christ University and secured first place from 6 colleges that participated. The journey to Christ was a broken, confusing, and depressing one, but the result made sure we came back to campus with our heads high.

Now we had very few days on campus post-Ragam as COVID-19 had started spreading all over the globe. As cases started to get reported in Kerala the institute had declared 1 week holiday and we all went home thinking we'll be back after a week.

WE DIDN'T!

Stuck at home disconnected what was left of semester 2 was completed online. And b16s had to leave campus in one of the saddest ways imaginable.

Second Year

Online had become the "New Normal" when we started the second year classes. It was at around this point when one of my senior had asked me in a random whatsapp "Aren't you a communist ? Which Linux OS are you using ?" even tho I wasn't one at that time I was slanting towards socialist side of the political map. The question he asked was hurt me in ways I don't understand even now and I wiped my laptop and thus began my journey using GNU/Linux. It has to be noted that this random chat is fr a cannon event and chances are I'd have not reached my current career path nor hosted this mediawiki instance. I was never good at making partitions and that's mostly the reason I wanted to single boot Ubuntu at that time instead of dualbooting. And at around this time I had lost my android phone (Nexus 6P) RIP and unlike the current whatsapp web we take for granted the feature to keep the web working without phone connected to internet was not possible. This was the same case when I was using windows too. I had relied on bluestacks and leapdroid later to use whatsapp and other social media apps.

So finding an alternative to this at the time was a hard process. I went through a lot of options like anbox but later settled with genemotion player. the classes were mostly in webex and it's variants. everything else worked pretty fine except for webex training. I never got it to get working on my ubuntu machine and I used to run a Windows 7 VM just for using Webex Training.

It was simply by trying to use my computer normally like a windows user but in linux and to get some power user tools I learned it's beauty and how you can utilize it for much more. The "Senior" who had asked the communist linux question returns this time asking if I was running KDE to customise my setup. I had heard of the term KDE but was unaware what a desktop environment was at that time. And I decided to install plasma desktop along with the default gnome setup that comes out of the box. this did result in my pc getting somewhat bloated and eventually resulted in me installing manjaro instead for the 4th semester. In between somewhere here I