Its Money , Honey !

Its official…..India today is out with its anuual joke book-its survey on the best colleges of india or (lets be more specific) on the best Engg colleges of India. The latest moneylender ….. oops…. sponsor…oops again….patron…goddammit,im sorry…..entrant (finally i get it right) is none other than VIT , i.e Vellore Institute of Technology.Lemme just rewind a bit and tell you how they did come out the rankings.

India Today has divided the rankings into 2 parts namely the factual rankings and the perceptual rankings. Factual rankings means that the ranking has been made purely based on facts and figures that they have collected (hmph…uh ! ) from various colleges. Its like college A has more XYZ than college B so college A is ranked better. As simple as that. Perceptual ranking is the ranking based on the perception of the expert panel (hmph…uh again). So its like if u think IITK is better then IITKgp then the former is ranked higher again as simple as that. These two rankings are then merged together in some ratio (which i dont care to rem’ber) to arrive at the final rankings. Now then after the boring intro comes the funnier story.

Factual ranking said that VIT is actually ranked at 4 in India which is better than some 4 IITs of India. If so is so, then we might actually see Bansal classes training students for VITEE (wich by the way a large number of students care not to give) than IITJEE. Wait ok, the story doesnt end there actually IIT Mumbai the instute wich has 3 of its streams finishing up under 100 in IITJEE AIRs has been ranked at …..<hold your breath>….a whooping 21 …..yes u read it correct 21…..worse than so many Jhumri Tallaiya colleges of engineering. (well now u can release ur breath and start laughing actually). Luckily for them the perceptual rankings in which IIT Mumbai scored consisten 1s nd 2s (as expected) in rankings saved their arse. And by mixing things up the managed to smuggle Mr. VIT into 10th spot.

Lets take a broad view of what this translates into. See generally speaking given the brand name of the IITs … nobody is goin to give a two penny about this but this means that colleges like ours slip out of the top ten spot …. im not saying that we should be in the top ten or whatever but at least we are better than 2paises like VIT, arent we ??

India today is a widely read magazine and students are bound to be induced slightly when they take a look at the readings.i hope they have an open mind when they take this into consideration. Like our placements are like miles ahead of even NIT warangal rated just ahead of us leave alone VIT. I noe i noe how can we judge a college based on placements, but remmeber im not shouting 100% placemnet like some private colleges do but the fact of the matter is the quality(read :repute of companies) dat we have in that 100% is hardly matched by non-IITs. Plus the quality of companies tells you a lot about the confidence they have in the quality of students they might get.

Another counterpoint may be – who cares what India today writes ; we know we are better than most but the shameful fact is that our college actually advertised India todays rankings last year when it was included in the top ten last year….its almost as if we are vouching for it…and we are not BITS that we can drag them to court over misleading facts (which is the reason by the way for the absense of both BITSP and BITSP-GC in the survey but was cleverly not mentioned)..I think we and aspiring engineers both know very well what a reputed institution ours is and we dont actually need India Todays certification xeroxes stamped on the NBs of CLC to remind us.

So the next time a VITian come to you with its tail up, you know exactly what to say, dont you ?

Force India ?? Really ??

Before i venture any further into the topic i must reiterate that i am in no way an advocate of Anti-Nuclear Arms or the proposed US policy of utter hyprocitic Nuclear Arms Disarmament Policy. (which i feel is as lame and stupidly unfair as “who gets the bigger chocolate ? Me, because i’m elder to you “)

But then just think carefully will you…….? Has India’s fateful tryst with Pokhran proved in any way so essential or  tremendously useful as the media has so successfully managed to portray to the chattering class for some ten long years ?? Sure , u can say it helps increase India’s prestige and puts India into a elite Nuclear club but then if you ask me, India , with a GDP rate matching its inflation rate, and requiring reservations even after more than 60 years of independence,India does not really carry the elitist respect among its fellow nations…. does it ?? In any case that isnt exactly my point.

Ever since joining the nuclear club South Asia has become more volatile than ever . I hope theres no one disagreeing to the fact that Pakistan acquired nuke arms only to match our might but put a more deep perspective into what this translates into. Two rival nations bickering at each other with missiles that can travel cities in minutes loaded with nukes. With the kind of relationship we have with PAkistan and the admirable diplomacy our expert neighbours have manaaged to maintain with the States even post 9/11 it seems we are the unlucky ones arent we ? And let us not forget we do not exactly have the best of relations with China, another nuke-empowered nation.

Another major point which is highly under-rated in our system is the amount of expenditure we do on weapons  and nuclear related arms race. The growth in expenditure in nulear weapons of our country is actually among the highest in the world which seems ridiculous if you consider how we end up with fiscal deficits, come Budget time and the clamour our middle class creates over farm-loan waivers. Can we actually afford to spend so much on nuclear weapons race ? And the worse thing is in arms race you never know where actually to stop or in other words how much is enough ? Please dont confuse this with the research on nuclear power which i agree is the only immediate though very limited (India has little or no uranium reserves) alternate source of power.

Nuclear empowered India doesnt seem a glorious idea now does it ??