The software has nothing to do with it

It's an old ploy - newspapers put out headlines or take angles in a story just to grab our attention, but without considering the facts. And who does it better than The Times of India? Today's newspaper reports the unfortunate murder of Darshana Tongare, a recent COEP grad and IBM trainee, who was stabbed by an unknown figure. Apparently she wasn't robbed, so the motives aren't entirely clear yet.

The Times of India takes the view that "The safety of women techies in Pune has come into sharp focus once again". So far, nothing suggests that the profession of the victim had anything to do with the incident. The safety of every woman in the city, professional or not, traveling at night could be called into question. In fact, the general safety of the populace at large. What's more shocking was the lack of response from the police control rooms, when passer-bys tried to report the incident. The ToI buries that deep into the report.

Many newspaper articles, particularly in headlines, report incidents of crime with the profession of the victim embedded. In most cases, this is incidental. "Techie" is now a cliched and obnoxious word - and not everyone working in a software company is a technologist. Cases of suicide caused by overwork may qualify. But to papers, just 'man robbed' isn't sufficiently eye-catching, I suppose.

In fact, the same ToI report lists 7 other cases from the last 2.5 years where Pune women associated with the world of IT-BPO have been assaulted. In four of these cases, the suspects/assailants were known to the victims, and were crimes involving personal disputes. Nothing to do with being in the software profession. But yes, at least two of the remaining three could be said to be directly related to the nature of the industry, involving late working hours and being situated in poorly connected/lit/policed areas of Pune.

Such a lack of perspective affects the city and the industry as a whole, and dilutes the focus away from such issues such as better policing and systems that could both prevent and solve such issues. Incidentally, the ToI's sister publication (to my mind, the more reliable and less hypocritical of the two) Pune Mirror takes the angle of the emergency number "100" being unmanned. The Indian Express report is expectedly sober. From a non-Pune-paper view, The Hindu largely report the facts, editorialising only in the end (which is their prerogative), quoting the appropriate earlier cases.

One hopes the case is swiftly solved and that the right lessons are learnt by the police. Might we dare to hope for the same for India's most selling newspaper?

Three men of the stage from B.J.Medical College

Until I saw an interview of his today, I didn't know Dr. Shreeram Lagoo was an alumnus of B.J.Medical College, Pune. This means that the college has produced three of the most renowned Marathi names of the stage - Shreeram Lagoo, Jabbar Patel, and Mohan Agashe (who also taught at the same institution).

Given this, one wonders what the college did (or does) to provide an ecosystem for such people to emerge. The Pune college circuit for plays is rich and well-established with theatre groups and competitions such as Purushottam Karandak and Firodiya. COEP too had a couple of students who later turned pro - Ravindra Mankani and Girish Joshi, for instance, but no one of the heights of the BJ trio.

Jet Wings article on the COEP Boat Club

January's edition of "Jet Wings", Jet Airways' in-flight magazine, was a "City Secrets" special, and with newer people flooding into Pune each month, the presence of COEP's Boat Club may well be a secret for some of them. The BC isn't really a tourist haunt or 'a place to be' or (importantly), 'a place to be seen at'. In essence, it's 'a place to do', where "do" can range from boating to reading to performing to quizzing or just sitting.

I wrote a small piece on the BC, which appeared in this edition. You can read it online at the JetWings site (pages 63 to 66) or read a scanned version here (it's a .pdf file, ~1.3 MB).

Tomorrow is COEP's Annual Regatta, its 82nd edition (in step with the Oscars, as this trivially-minded author keeps reminding people). If you are not attending the BCQC March Open Quizzes (yes, that's how we get the BC in our name), you should attend the show in the evening!

(The magazine is produced by Spenta Multimedia; the photos for this article are by Parikshit Rao)

"And now for something out of the syllabus..."

About five months, I was "commissioned" (without pay, naturally) by Kapeesh to write an article for the COEP magazine "Abhiyanta" (unimaginatively titled this year as "The COEPian" - what happened to all those deep-sounding sanskrit titles, and shouldn't it be "The PIET's COEPian"?), which I duly turned in. They published it (gratitude is in order to Abhishek for obtaining a copy for me). As a result of which, in the mag, I happen to be sharing space with an invitation to the (inter-caste) marriage of our prized Babcock-Wilcox boiler and a lathe machine, and (much to my horror and indignation) a running footnote paean to a partial set of COEPians studying in the US. An online copy is available here. This one is for all the COEPian bloggers.

They say that education is what is left over when you've forgotten all that you were taught. Normally, I'd salute only the wit in such smart-alec quotations, but in light of having spent life at COEP and now contemplating it from a safe temporal distance the size of an engineering batch, I can see the depth in what some of those old, grizzled and dandruff-ed grey hairs were saying.

For the more I think about it, in the guise of giving us an engineering education, COEP slipped in a lot more. It gave us a right royal lesson in the grand concept of "life", right from the spankings to the plaudits. But before you dismiss this account as a teary-eyed narrative of those "rosy and sunshine filled hours spent under the sweet-smelling coconut tree as we became fine citizens", let me disabuse you of those concerns. First, we don't have any sweet-smelling coconut trees at COEP (even if they were, I doubt if coconut trees could be sweet-smelling). Secondly, the rosiest times were spent at home in the PLs when one set of storms had been roughed and more squalls were expected.

So this account is a little anti-nostalgic, for it tries to take a more balanced look at the real post-learning-amnesiac education referred to at the beginning. For instance, let's invoke the popular memory of the COEPian in the queue. I don't know if autonomy has abolished the long held tradition of the COEPian queues; I hope not. For hours in that one serpentine ("Slytherin" for the modern generation?) mass of collectively increasing infuriation would teach you more lessons about pain, patience, obduracy, chivalry, fairness and fatalistic invocations than a month in a Benedictine monastery run by Pai Mei. For the first two years, I struggled and whined: why, despite the easily obvious optimal methods to apply to the process of collecting fees or marksheets, did we have to stand under the baking sun, growling at each other and whimpering at our inability to prevent those who conveniently discovered long lost pals ahead in the line. Gender wars originated and were resumed every six months, with the feeling that the glass ceiling had suddenly become a pane in an imaginary wall that let the smarter sex creep into the sanctum sanctora however late they showed up while separating us out from the "tatkaal". Only in the second half of my personal production of "My Life at COEP" did the zen-like realisation dawn that this was meant to be the introductory lesson, a one-oh-one into going with the darned flow. Later in life, you couldn't wring the neck of everyone who cuts you off ahead in the traffic, on the corporate ladder, in competition for that lass's affections, so learn to bite into your stiff upper lip, sonny boy. With such low-intensity tutorials did COEP make malleable your mind.

So what other life-threatening and life-altering lessons did the venerable Since-1854-er throw our way? How about the concept of submissions? I'm sure you've heard about Mr. Parkinson (of the Law fame, not the Disease) and how he cleverly figured out about the elasticity of work w.r.t. time. I'm convinced that we should have him over and get him to give us a few commendations. For few places such as us have embodied wholeheartedly the spirit of the elastic nature of work and have actually gone as far as to experiment with extremes by mixing in the eleventh-hour principle. Result: a searing lesson in how to get by, just before the clock hits twelve (or twenty-four). That's pretty much how the whole world seems to operate, so fine training for a bunch of youngsters in being grasshoppers during the summer and slogging away like ants in the winter, and what's more? - surviving till the next folk tale!

Or how about the famous "repeats" of the workshop, more legendary than real, but scary yet. Again, I wonder if the march of modernity and autonomy has filed away (pun intended) the bluntness of the workshop instructors, but once you've gone through that experience, it takes a lot to rattle your steel-forged guts (unless of course, you did better at plastic moulding).

Note that most of these vulcanising processes are placed early in the COEPian experience (further evidence: Applied Mechanics, Engg. Graphics, case rested). On a less sardonic note, look at the Punt Formation, a splendid example of teamwork, hoarse throats (of the PFOs), a general sense of "oh, it was so much better when we did it" renting the air among the alumni, and best of all, the experience is much more pleasant when you've finished it. Inside, it's closest to compulsory military training that our pacifist generation will ever get, with the mosquitoes, the something-masquerading-as-water, the hyacinth and the lack of bug repellant. But you survive that as well and slowly it begins to dawn on you, who is used to topping all that you do, that sometimes survival is good enough.

So what's the point of this little piece then? Well, a grand unified point wasn't quite intended, but perhaps a few little guppy points spring up. One, like a lot of great comedy, there's humour to be found even during the darkest times one may experience at COEP; that these darkest times are often found to be usually piffling little blobs of black paint at best later; and that there's much you'll do there that will give you a store of anecdotes to liven up the party. Probably, a lot like the real thing sometimes called Life.