Looking Back

My life In NITC 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 organization that believed in the need for student unity and political awareness to have 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 seniors asked me in a random WhatsApp chat " Aren't you a communist ? Which Linux OS are you using ?" even tho I wasn't one at that time (I was slanting towards the 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 dual-booting. 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 a phone connected to the internet was not possible. This was the same case when I was using Windows too. I 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 its 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 its beauty and how you can utilize it for much more. The "Senior" who had asked the communist Linux question returned this time asking if I was running KDE to customize my setup. I had heard of the term KDE but was unaware of 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

The Club induction went on online and it was fun. I was a huge fan of the Crow Talks By LnD. The seniors Who knew me had already sensed I was gonna be a typical LnD kid. But during the inductions, I had a change of mind. I had this feeling that LnD would only increase my impulses and also since they had subgroups on a linguistic basis I was confused If I should choose Malayalam or English. I wasn't that comfortable using English then and felt that choosing Malayalam would restrict me from improving my English but also was scared to jump straight into English with the vocabulary I had.

ICA Came out of nowhere and I loved their Interview and I realized it's like one of the chillest clubs. So I decided to stick with them and chill out. I wasn't very active in the club but and missed every single carpe diem due to one reason or another. But overall I had fun throughout the years when the campus returned to offline. I also got inducted to Team Unwired

Nothing that can be normally categorized as exciting happened during the 2nd year since it was online. Except maybe us starting an internet radio for campus. I'll write a side story of how we started Rajpath RECalls later sometime. The students' commune had started conducting online sessions on various topics and I organized a session with Abraham Reji on the topic "Free Software, its impact, and sustainability". I scheduled the event on the day of the CSE farewell and missed one of the major group of audience for the session.

The B18s tried to conduct Tathva 20 online. They had done everything possible by themselves with the constraints and had conducted workshops and lectures online focusing on the motto Tathva for a Social Cause. Ragam also followed a similar model in 2021 by B17s and at around this time some of the Seniors had returned to the deserted campus. I along with some of my friends did a road trip to Calicut after the 4th semester to recover what was left of the luggage that was left in our rooms. After multiple days of sitting and growing roots inside our homes coming to campus even if it was just for a day and meeting all the batchmates was a fresh air to all of us.

Third year

Within 2 months of vacation, we were "3rd Year Students" but also at the state of being first year. The long-awaited B20s have joined and we started creating WhatsApp groups to meet and get to know them. The online interaction which maintains records helped decrease the cases of ragging as juniors can easily report any kind of rude behavior to the authorities. This had shifted the junior-senior interaction and its dynamic for better or for worse. I got chance to come back and live in campus because of team unwired. we were preparing for the SAE formula Supra Race that was supposed to be held during July 2022. And it was at the same time the 60th Jubilee celebrations got announced. The home teams were requested to come back to campus and perform for the event that was scheduled to be held on 31st December. And with that I got to train the Mime juniors along with other Mime seniors. All the Home teams made their comeback and performed for the Jubilee.After the Jubilee event the celebrations took a new twist as NAVARAGAM started at the basket ball court. Seeing the "FUN TIMES" the student's in campus were having from watching social media posts many of the students decided to enter the campus to have a chance to have the fun they were dued to. This however was faced by a huge hurdle of quarantine. to put things in perspective the existing criteria for students to enter the bio bubble was to stay in quarantine at the old mega hostel for 7-14 days and then get tested and only then they could enter the main campus. along with this no one was allowed to go outside campus (at least on paper). A large inflow of students was expected for the much awaited Navaragam to bid farewell to 2021 and embrace 2022.As expected the crowd had a blast and together we welcomed the beginning of 2022. The teaser video for Ragam 2022 was also streamed to the students and hope of Ragam reigniting once again post COVID put warmth in all our hearts. This was however run into more issues as large number of covid positive cases started to be reported from inside the campus. TheB18's were already being called back to return back to campus and continue rest of their semester in offline mode. As the number of infections went above the administration decided to send all the kids back home and also cancelled the rejoining of B18's too. Most of us thought this was their final bid to campus and like the B17s and B16s before them they'd also have to spend their last days in campus from their home itself. much of the planned programmes including the Anuragam 2022 were in crisis. Yet under the leadership of the Cultural Affairs Secretery, It was decided to conduct anuragam in an online mode. With exciting events including an online blind date the anuragam 2022 put up a good fight to spread love at the trying times of covid. Soon after the MHRD issued an order demanding all the institutes under them to begin the offline classes immediately and with that the B18's who were called, send back just few weeks prior were called back again. And this time it was in a full swing. Everyone started coming back to the campus and the campus started breathing again and was full of students all over. The third year then came to a peaceful end with Ragam 2022.