A MISSIVE TO THE V.C. OF ANNA UNIVERSITY FROM A STUDENT SEVERELY CRITICAL OF HIS VIEWS

Your decisions of late reflect very little understanding of the student community and seem to have ulterior motives. You have not come out with a logical explanation of your decisions. We all believe that our tolerance so far has encouraged you to come out with such autocratic measures to control us.

The previous decision to bar vehicles was taken even without knowing whether the two gates had enough capacity to accommodate all the student vehicles. Still it did not receive much flak. May be because it seems to have a shred of sanity. It controlled pollution and also made students to take a compulsory walk which gave them some physical exercise. I am even thankful to you for that. However all the staff being allowed to drive around not only deprives them of the physical exercise (much required) but also gives us a sense of being discriminated.

The ban on camera phones in the campus prior to the total ban due to some isolated incident in Delhi public school is also laughable considering the fact that even that school did not take this drastic step. Also they are all school children and we all are grown ups barely teenagers anymore. Instead of banning the camera phones for unstated reasons pretty obvious, you could have introduced sex education which would have been a revolutionary change and would have shown you in good light.

Your comments on dress sense and the decision to introduce dress code has disgraced us. In what way can a dress one is wearing influence one’s studies unless the dress covers their eyes. Do you want everyone to wear misfit safaris like you resembling a scare crow?

If the current ban on cell phones is implemented, then how the hell are hostellers supposed to communicate with their parents? Through the only telephone booth at the canteen! Can anyone imagine the length of the serpentine queues then? Or are you going to shut it down too so as to separate us from all external influences in this pursuit of a B.E. degree? Isn’t it a little too soon for us to renounce worldly pleasures?

The staff members still are enjoying the luxury of using mobiles legally within the campus. But when a staff member receives a phone call during the lecture and drones away on his phone, the time wasted is equivalent to that of the class strength. Can’t you do the arithmetic here? Which is more destructive? Students with mobiles or teachers with them?

Also if cell phones are banned, it is going to get difficult and expensive to tell one another about the test schedules, time table changes, often being cancelled classes due to irregular staff etc.

Instead of banning phones, being a technical university, you can encourage students to research cheaper methods of signal jamming within the campus. Students can also design a few bio fuel or electric vehicles that can be used within the campus. Also you can do hell of a lot to improve faculty standards. I am not trying to pinpoint one or two failures among the faculty but the whole lot for being so uncompetitive and dispirited.

Quit being such a taskmaster and look at the status-quo from our shoes. Surrounded by servile bootlickers, it is difficult to get new innovative ideas, but please avoid rash decisions like these. Instead of appearing on all T.V. channels suggesting stupid rules making a fool out of yourself, why not take part in a debate with your students, hearing their ideas and give your reasons.

I have written all this not to humiliate or demean you but to drive this into your thick head that you can’t force your opinions on others.

CHENNAI DELUGE
Oxymorons like ‘Chennai rains’ have recently become meaningful in their true sense. Rains have marauded Chennai and left it with a war torn look. There has been extensive damage. Infrastructure has been crippled, industry turnover shattered and many working days lost. But this is quite a rare event, the only one for more than a decade.
Have the rains been really that destructive or have they been hyped to their current stature by the media. Only a small fraction of Chennai was flooded. But why did the news channels flash marquees like ‘Chennai reeling under cyclone’ and ‘Chennai submerged’? Probably they wanted to make hay while the sun shines or should I say get drenched when it rains,
The main reason for these rain spells to have snowballed into a near catastrophe is improper urban planning. The city has lakes with miniscule capacities insufficient to cater to the city’s needs. Haphazard construction has encroached many small lakes and ponds. The government instead of emphasizing on micro level changes like the rain water harvesting systems can dig up new lakes and broaden existing ones.
The meteorological department has made some awful predictions this season. During the second cyclone ‘fanoos’, the met officials have made a public disclosure that the areas to be affected by a cyclone can be definitvely said only when the depression is within 200 km from the coast. However for the first cyclone, the met officials were n air in all channels issuing warnings when the storm was 1000km away. Maybe they were all rusty and got excited by the possibility of a storm.
Exam schedules were revised by the hour. As soon as the Anna university officials announced a new schedule, the weather department countered it with a cyclone warning. Exam planners were on tenterhooks the whole season. The exams now seem to take an eternity to get completed.
Bridges in Chennai have become hotspots, teeming with crowds eager to catch a glimpse of flooded rivers below. Have pity for those souls which had wade through the Cooum which overflowed in their streets after breaching its banks.
The only beneficiary of these rains seem to be underperforming cricketers like Ganguly. He was allowed to be in the warmth of the dressing room for four days. Finally his luck ran out and he was forced to the pitch on the last day. As usual his batting glory continued to wane. Also his clout in the BCCI is gradually fading due to power shift or Pawar shift, to be precise.
The doomsday conspirators blame all this nature’s fury on global warming caused by excessive usage of fossil fuels. But to the sci-fi group here is a tidbit. There is one another phenomenon called global dimming which cools down the earth. The pollutants from burning of fuels cause clouds to be formed with greater number of water droplets which increases their reflectivity. So heat is reflected back to space. Contrails(exhausts from planes) also contribute to global dimming. Climatologists noted that in the three days after 9/11 when all air traffic was suspended, the average temperature rose by 1 degree Celsius. So u all can stop feeling the guilty pinch next time you take out your vehicle.
Next year around if anyone’s is missing the rains, then try scheduling a match at Chepauk or get out the Anna university exam schedule.