College woes ..

I have been living in Pune all my life ...
They call it the Oxford of the East ... With more than 40 Engineering colleges in Pune and neighbouring areas, hundreds of schools, many Arts, Science, Commerce, Management colleges, I am not surprised ...
In fact Pune can boast about having all the colleges that Oxford could ever have ...
But what Pune ( and India in general ) lose out in quality, they make up in quantity ...

Also read somewhere that India produces more number of movies than any other country ( including the US of A ) ... Quality anyone ?

As I can speak for the course that I am pursuing, I can comment on the general situation of the Engineering colleges here ... Dismal at best ...

Barring a few ... numbers which can be counted on your fingers ... none have the facilities and infrastructure to speak of as such ... my college included ... which I will get to a little later ...

Colleges here, now that the government has removed the leash, have turned into money making monsters ... no surprise there ...
The colleges which are considered to be better than the others, have hiked their fees to unprecedented proportions ... something that a common man will think twice before getting into ...

Merit is out of the window ... if you have the money, then we have the degree ...
Almost anything that pays goes ...

Our batch was lucky enough to be the last batch to get into colleges when the Government was in control of the admissions and fee structure ...

Getting back to my college ( this is the fun part ) ...
Beggars cannot be choosers ... and I was happy to get into this college ( at first anyways ) because of the terrific proximity to my place ...
While my other friends were calculating time to reach college in hours, I would proudly boast that on a good day ... with the traffic signals off, I could make it in 7 minutes :)
The other good thing about this college of mine is the timings ... 8 to 3 flat ...
That leaves us plenty of time to go home, hog and get a good hour's siesta.

But thats where all good things in life end ...
I hate to be a whiner ... but then there is no other alternative ... DTE ... are you reading this ?

Lets start at the place most important to all the Engineering Colleges ...
When I first saw our new computer lab after our new building came up ( we have switched 3 buildings in 2 years already ! ), I was very impressed ...
We have about 50 - 60 computers ... which run on the Pentium III series of processors ...
Now this is all useless if your computers are plagued by worms and virii which thrash the hard disk and it takes almost eons to really get anything done ...

Then unlike the other ( better ) colleges, we do not have a Centralised login system ... mainly because only 16 computers are connected per network and these are further not connected ...
This means lugging a very dubious floppy diskette around ... everytime transferring files when we move comps ...

Another social activity that we indulge in the college is fighthing over the printer ...
Now, our college advocates the use of only dotmatrix printers ... Inkjet and lasers are a strict no no ...
The printer to student ratio is about 15:1 ( per class ) and the assignment submission to day ratio is 1:1
Add to this the factor that print outs can be taken only during the second half hour break which is common to all the four branches ...
This hikes the printer to student ratio to 60:1 ... which ultimately further adds to my new study on how chaos helps us students to be better, stronger and more able individuals ...

Then add to this - half the comps having defunct floppy drives ( half of these just eat up your floppies ) ... the networks being down 90% of the time and this makes you not want to enter our computer lab.

"Ma'am ... why can't be take printouts in the 10 o' clock break also ?"
"How do you expect us to eat in the Comp Lab then ?"

The other brilliant feature of our college is our library ...
It opens up at 8:20 ... closes at 2:40 ... does not issue books after 2:00 and is closed most of the times during the breaks ... beacuse you guessed it right ... our staff ALSO eats during the break.
This has resulted in a very unusual phenomenon of the students bunking ... and then instead of going out or home or a movie ... end up in the library !

On the extra curricular front, zero takes on a whole new meaning ...
For playing sports ( I play basketball ), you pay for your petrol to go to remote places to play tournaments, pay for eating there from your own pocket ... and to top it all up, get marked absent in the roster ...
If you are wondering this is bad enough, imagine out miseries when the teacher asks us to submit assignments the other day irrespective of which part of Timbuktoo we have just returned from ...
And when I last heard, other colleges pay their players 30 bucks per match ...

We do get colours from the college, but have to get it made from one shop only becuase the self elected sports incharge of our college gets a cut from that shop keeper ... no matter if the material used is so shitty that the colors come off before the half time ...
The principal naturally is blissfully unaware ...

Its okay ... we say ... atleast something's better than nothing ...
I'd write more ... but have written a lot already ...

Hey ... can I get thrown out for all this ?