2nd sem begins( World war 2?).

Maintaining a personal diary was always an enthusiastically started new year resolution which I loved giving up within the first month itself. The idea of writing memoirs for the year and read them later would always excite me. This will serve as a digital replacement I guess, for the same. (thought putting this on world wide web makes it a public affair).

2ND SEMESTER JAN 2020

20th jan, 2020. A mundane monday. 

So 2020 started with memes swarming over the social media of sarcastically proclaiming India as the new super power, as was planned and dreamt by political leaders, some years back. Without getting deep into the chaotic political scenario of the country: my 2020 started with me coming out from the washroom after a much needed late night bath to relieve myself from the tiredness of the journey. The water was harshly cold, (the geyser wasn't working) but my enthusiasm was unmatched. I took a piece of barfi in my mouth and wished myself a happy new year. Like every other UG student of IIT Guwahati who had gone home in winter hols of december, I had reached back the campus on 31st december and was busy cleaning and setting things up in my room. I nursed my room back to life and order like my own kid. I guess single room for boys (discriminatory? but so is supernumerary ), is one of the best thing about the campus life. My room was set well before India barged into a new year, a new decade, a symbolically new time which hopefully will bring prosperity, peace and pleasant experiences. 

It has been some 20 days and I guess the new semester has turned out to be very boring academically. ME101 has turned out to be a mundane affair of balancing forces and reactions and applying moments mechanically and solving for unknown forces, which is mostly the class 11th stuff in disguise. CS101 and CS110 contains no new stuffs, sadly because of  my familiarity with programming since a small age. Maybe others are enjoying writing their first hello world programmes. These small experiences can later turn out to be a life changing and life long love with computer science for some of them. MA102 is mostly matrices, vector spaces, ranks, eigen values for now. People whine about the inclusion of lot of proof based problems, tirelessly. It is a human nature to complain I guess( I was doing the same in previous lines, oops.). But I wish if only people could understand the beauty of proofs, and excitement of pure mathematics. But they won't, they would incorrigibly waste a lot of time of day in fruitless things and satisfy their ego by calling, anyone who talks good of mathematics course, ghissu, nerd etc. Sad. But then this post is not about my misunderstood friend (college mathematics), so , never mind. 

They are teaching us Bio too.

Well in the 1st sem ( whose story will be told in some other post), I found it difficult to keep up in boring classes, and missed a lot many of them (had 75%+ attendance though). In this semester I discovered a better trick to escape boredom (excluding giving the bio metric and running away through the back doors) . I read electronic newspapers, e-magazines on current affairs, polity etc. I subscribed some channels on IAS preparation (no, I am not planning to give it a shot) , simply to unwind myself, on telegram app, and also some e paper groups too. Thus, every morning I have enough material to read through, and this has helped me to win back my old habit of reading newspapers, articles etc in pre - JEE and JEE day and also saves me from dozing off in the class.

The month was also occupied by two famous inter hostel competitions : Manthan (cultural ) and Spardha(sports). I  have somewhat low hostel spirit and thus i played almost no role in any of them, even though I was genuinely interested in literary events. The semester started with seniors recounting how difficult the 2nd semester can be, especially the grade part of the semester is a legendary CPI breaker, thwarting the wishes of so many hopeful branch changers. Well let's see what happens. It is too early to comment. 

EE lab was interesting, and so was physics lab (if you exclude the hectic part of it). CS101 lab was boring for me, so i made a classic nim game in C, where you have 21 tiles to start with, you can pick max 4 and min 1 tile at once, if you are the last one to pick you lose. You play against the computer and you always win. That was the 1st day of CS110. 

2 of the 3 tutorial classes happen in core 5 and that's quite inconvenient. We have ME101 quiz 1 and MA102 quiz 1 on Friday and Saturday respectively. Apart from that I have my birthday to look forward to this week , it's on 26th Jan. I hope the quizzes go well, so that i can relax on my birthday.  My hostel is practicing for the 26th Jan parade and I am again playing no part in it.I was in NCC from august 2018 to april 2019, and I hate parading, But in college it's difficult to avoid stuffs you don't like to do but your seniors and hostel mates are enthusiastic about. You will be bashed often about it, and might be threatened lightly by seniors to show some health participants (they mean no harm of course) , but I happen to be an extremely obstinate fellow in few things and know some tricks to avoid ugly situations with least amount of opposition. 

I remember being scolded by my NCC mentor for poor parading, and he asked me how would I contribute to the country if a war happens, with such poor skills. I responded instantly that i don't need a gun to defend my country, that's why I plan to be an engineer not an army officer. Well, if you see, not all wars are won alone by the power of army, and the country needs good engineers/intelligence as much as good army officers. We all are fit for the roles we like, and there shouldn't be a comparison. But again sadly a lot of people do not understand logic or at least they pretend they can't. 

Everyone in IITG  hates 75% attendance, even I do. But I guess there is a proper logic for it. After graduating many of us will have to attend to a 8 AM to 5 PM job, and the college is training us in punctuality and discipline for that. But now, you will say, we will pick the job which interests us, nothing like attending the boring lectures we have no interest in.... oh yes, that's why i read DAINIK JAGRAN in the class (it interests me, and i am still preparing myself for an 8 AM to 5 PM job) .

I am still looking forward to the SA courses that are going to start this sem. I had picked the instrumental music course and I am excited about it. Hope I learn enough to stir some hearts.
Evenings are most confusing times of the day, your inner self is in a state of inner conflict where you are unable to decide whether to remain in room or go out. Being a lonely person I often end up choosing to read something random ,  for example :

Cognitive dissonance theory (psychology/ethics). on attitudinal change.

Among other things that begin in January, the club projects open up for freshers and I took the robotic club project , but now am doubtful about working on it. Robotics project require a lot of dedication and time and the tone of my mentor was quite discouraging. Among other revelations in the 1st meeting he described how his SPI fell from 8.8 to 6.8 in 2nd semester (Well i had asked about it, he didn't tell on his own, and it's a taboo to ask a senior's grades). I was particularly concerned about the skills that I would acquire upon the completion of project, whether the skills will be useful enough to be applied in future to a wide range of problems or whether they will narrow down to the project at hand. The latter seems to be true, for now. I have also applied for a coding club project and hope to really work on it. It is a django based project and I am excited to work on it with my neighbour ( resident of the adjacent room). 

On 22nd of JAN, there is a hearing on anti CAA petitions in SC, I hope whatever it may be, that doesn't result in riots and consequent banning of Internet in Guwahati.

And , I sincerely pray from God that the world is not at the verge of a 3rd world war due to the idiosyncrasies of trump. A friend of mine has already stopped studying, cause he reckons the world is going to end anyways because of the fabled future world war 3. (well, not seriously).