You smug asshats who study in a college with internet and LAN have little idea of how ardous life is without them in college life. Not that I’d expect you to know, since we are the only college still plumbing our misty way through the prehistoric technology age, where electricity is very much a luxury (Even when India plays Pakistan in WC semi finals).
Let me then tell you about the brutal realities of life without the internet. To start of with, you’re not on Facebook often – which is pretty much the social crime of the century, so that when you do go online you are flooded with seventy million notifications (sixty nine of those from Farmville), you don’t own a Twitter account and think LinkedIn is still a place to link other social networking sites. People back home ,think you’ve joined the Qaida and you quickly become a social outcast to anyone outside the wrought iron gates.
Examinations are the worst. The main transfer medium is gone, so people flock in numbers to the one hallowed person in the hostel who has achieved super stardom by getting hold of an overachievers notebook and taken high resolution pictures of it. In an internet enabled campus, it’d be matter of upload on DC an let everyone know on the newsfeed. Better still ping on Gtalk and transfer files. But in our campus, it involves plugging your pendrives into a million laptops and copying data from all over the place, while your pendrive becomes a raging beehive for viruses and malwares collected from all over the hostel ready to jump onto your drives as soon as it gets its chance. And Lord save those without a pen-drive, begging for pendrives on a pre-exam night is not quite the same as begging for toothpaste in the morning.
Organizational bottlenecks were quite the pain in the posterior as well. Organising events on the scale of what we do in NITT requires a lot of internet-savvy skills. Sending out publicity mails, were nightmarish, and restricted to the Heads of verticals who had taken the snail-speed but overtly costly wireless connections just to get the cranky wheels moving. Public relations are of course a nightmare, for someone who has participated in a lot of events around the country, I’d have to admit our public relations is on the wrongside of the average. Replies take days to come, some clarifications get forgotten. Things have improved over the last one-two years with a lot of people opting for the aforementioned snailers.
Lastly, the LAN, the recent movies, serials, documentaries, recorded matches and gaming – has all but turned farcical in our beloved college. In some colleges it is given that the recently released movie will be available on the LAN on the D+1 day, that weekend-nights will be nothing but gaming, not 4-5 people on a makeshift ad-hoc, but a full-on 40-50 people in an eternal battle. Lets not even get into how we have the worst TV show culture in our college. Left without choices, we are subjected to repeated horrors of mainstreams of the HIMYMs and the Prison Breaks for eternity.
Like I mentioned before, things have started improving with people resorting to slow wireless options shelling money out of their own pockets, which hardly suffice and should I add, only add to the enormous waste of time. We live in an age when movie tickets, train tickets, music, entertainment, news, opinions and a host of other things are in this other world. Significantly, we live in an age where the internet is a human right. Forget the many other benefits which are more or less first world to us in terms of internet access, like being able to research on a interesting topic, or take part in meaningful debates, or participate in international competitions. Even beyond these, there are some basic rights which every college goer shoudl enjoy like being able to talk over Skype with friends or being online on Gtalk. To be a part of a college which claims itself to be top-notch, and also stuck inside a cyber prison with no contact with the outside world, is such an abomination. You have a done many an awesome thing for me, NITT, but you’ve also deprived me of a human right for four long years. And it hurts.
