Mood Indigo 2011 - India quiz questions

This December, like last time, I conducted an India quiz as part of the quizzing festival at Mood Indigo at IIT BombayThe questions (from the prelims and the two main rounds in the final) have been uploaded to Slideshare:

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Mood Indigo 2011 - India Quiz - Prelims with Answers

View more presentations from Ramanand J

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Mood Indigo 2011 - India Quiz - Finals

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If you have a look at these questions and have any feedback, do let me know!

Mood Indigo India Quiz questions

Last December, I conducted an India quiz as part of the quizzing festival at Mood Indigo (IIT Bombay's annual college fest, for those not in the know). The questions (from the prelims and the two main rounds in the final) have been uploaded to Slideshare:

Mood Indigo India Quiz Prelims

View more presentations from Ramanand J

Mood Indigo India Quiz Finals - I

View more presentations from Ramanand J

Mood Indigo India Quiz Finals - II

View more presentations from Ramanand J

I also have another quiz of mine (called "Balls, Ballots, Bollywood") in the same account. It can be accessed here.

If you have a look at these questions and have any comments, do let me know!

Lamenting convocation speeches

Why don't we have good speakers at convocation ceremonies in India? Each year, a commencement speech or two from a US university will do the email rounds. Usually by a leading figure, the speech will be amusing, inspiring, interesting, and even personal. It's quite a good way to sign off a graduating year's stint in that academic institution. And some may finally learn something useful there!

In contrast, most convocation ceremonies at Indian institutions are boring affairs, with the chief guest's speech crowning the insipid cake with the dullest cherry of the day. It doesn't help that chief guests are often politicians, called to the ceremony because they are ultimately influential patrons of the educational system, or because the powers-that-be get a chance to rub noses with the ruling elites. On occasion, figures from business are invited, which is usually an improvement on the politicos. But oratory may not really be their strong suit. Forget diction or command, even the content is mundane and in danger of adding decades to Kumbhakarna's slumber.

The three convocation speeches that coincided with my stint at IIT Bombay were largely uninspiring. The first was the then HRD Minister, Arjun Singh (2005), incidentally in the middle of his reservations controversy. Montek Singh Ahluwahlia (2006) followed - decent, but I can't think of anything memorable that he said. Invited to preside over the convocation ceremony of 2007 was industrialist L.N.Mittal. On paper, it seemed a decent choice - he was riding several waves of fame. But the hour-long speech was, sadly, one of the most boring that it has been my fate to sit through. If it wasn't the small matter of picking up a degree certificate, I might have succumbed to that most primal of social urges: of escaping from a boring colloquium, by hook or crook. What made it worse was that he repeatedly referred to the hallowed institution as "double-I-T" or even on occasion "double-I-I-T". Depending on which rules of association one applied to the latter, we wondered if we were taking leave from "I²IT" or even "I⁴T". (Incidentally, earlier that year, his namesake Sunil Bharti Mittal had delivered a guest lecture in the nearby School of Management, which was quite impressive in content and delivery.)

I note that this year's IIT Bombay convocation featured more science-oriented individuals: Dr. Kiran Majumdar Shaw and Prof. Roddam Narasimha as chief guests. (I was even more intrigued to find out that the convocation had been split into two sessions over two days - apparently, too many people graduating! The Convocation Hall is huge, so the space overflow must have been considerable.) I don't know how their speeches went, and it's not a good idea to automatically assume people like these will be any more inspirational than their predecessors.

It's a pity that most public function speeches in India are so poorly delivered, and that everyone involved has come to expect nothing more. The speakers don't do us listeners the honour of diligent practice, and the listeners in turn, do the listeners no favours of attention.

Some of the more famous commencement speeches alluded to in the opening of this post:

* Steve Jobs at Stanford, 2005: video, transcript - probably the most famous of the lot
* J. K. Rowling at Harvard, 2008: video, transcript - titled "the fringe benefits of failure"
* Jon Stewart at The College of William and Mary, 2004: transcript - quite hilarious
* Atul Gawande at Stanford School of Medicine, 2010: transcript - interesting, cautionary, and thought-provoking thoughts for a graduating class of doctors

The inevitable top ten list is here.

Three Idiots...

...Aamir Khan has now kissed both Kapoor sisters.

...a film so designed to be 'feel-good' that it's almost obscene in how 'good' the audience is made to 'feel' - solicitation of pleasure laws should apply, for aren't people paying for this?

...if you want to make movies with 80s sensibilities, then you should have made them in the 80s.

...the lack of attention to detail is often insulting, that this is almost a sci-fi film. Predicts mass use of futuristic tech in the late 90s (calculating for an engg. student born in '78) such as cell-phones, webcams, broadband.

...in addition to Chetan Bhagat, the writers did not prominently credit those who write the jokes that eventually become email forwards.

...funny that a film whose story consistently praises 'innovation' over the 'formulaic system' uses a mix of old Bollywood techniques, with only the occasional meta-film references that we are used to from modern Bollywood films.

...the best 2-3 sequences or one-liners in the film went largely unnoticed in the audience; occasional sparks of originality glimmered anonymously.

...Engineering education might need a positive PR exercise in India.

...after vamps, kisses, and revealing costumes went mainstream, certain hindi words that were solely the preserve of Ranjeet & co. have ceased to be embarrassing in family films.

...life isn't worth living if one isn't a hero of one's film, i.e. if your life has an Aamir Khan and you are not him (one more coin in the doesn't-Aamir-Khan-do-the-same-characters? fund)

...and finally, we're in serious trouble if such a large quantity of people in the audience need to be given hope and reassurance (but ultimately, you've got to take the hard decisions about what you want; watching it vicariously is no use)

Alternatives: read Richard Feynman's "Surely, You're Joking Mr. Feynman", get a copy of "In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones", or try a more honest, though raw rendition of the same themes in "Silicon Jungle", a film by Rabi Kisku, an IIT Madras student.

Growing big in Kolkata

Prof. Soumen Chakrabarti is a faculty member at IIT Bombay's Computer Science department (and one of the top researchers in his field in the world). Like several professors in such institutes, he gets emails from wannabe interns/project seekers. Perhaps some are of the 'academic hunger' type, but a few are just looking for CV embellishments & recommendations for higher studies.

Prof. Chakrabarti's webpage carries a prominent notice stating:

At the moment I am not offering short-term projects to students not enrolled in a regular program at IIT Bombay.

Despite that, he seems to receive correspondence hoping for the opposite, some of which is painfully delightful. He has a sample on his blog (here), under the heading: "Can't read but will apply". Such as:

[...]I am an International Rifle Shooter of India and I was a member of an INDIAN AIR RIFLE SHOOTING TEAM FOR YEAR 2006. I am a presently studding in a 7th semester of B.E. Information Technology at LLLL DDDD Engineering College, AAAA, GGGG. [...] I am sending my Resume with this. I am sure that you would kindly cooperate and oblige.

Soumen Chakrabarti comments:

How could I possibly refuse from the wrong end of a Remington?

It gets even more interesting. Quoting from the entry:

Then there is in-your-face dishonesty:
"I have gone through your research activities given on your homepage. I am looking for a challenging opportunity for summer internship for the period of May-July 2007."

When I pointed out that anyone reading my homepage would notice my statement (that I do not take external students), I got a response like this:
"it's fine if u donot want to work with me ,but such words don't suit a proff of ur standards"

Clearly there is no dearth of entitlement, just good sense.

The exchanges seem to have become more hostile in recent times, with Soumen Chakrabarti receiving email that criticises him for either his hiring policy or for making these instances public (see end of the post).

He ends with this statement that really pinches:

It's hard to overstress the liability of a nation of a billion people out of which 700 million are functionally illiterate and the rest have no wish to follow instructions, even when they are asking for a favor.

These accounts are both hilarious and depressing. We need to satisfy the demand for higher-quality education, get more good professors teaching, have fewer people attempting to bull-doze their way into cosmetic achievements on paper, and for someone to tell these people that the simplest way to stand out is to use the bits of grey matter bestowed by nature on them in a fit of pure chance.

Link to the post here

Sandeep Shelke: Adieu

As some of you who knew him may have already heard, Sandeep Shelke passed away last night. He is said to have taken his life by leaping off the 7th floor of Persistent Towers, which is in the Erandwana area of Pune. The police say that he left a note behind and sent a text message to his brother, citing a heavy workload as the reason. Persistent Systems has commented that there was no prior indication to this effect and Sandeep had not spoken to anyone at work about such pressures. According to the Zee 24 hours marathi news channel, neither was Sandeep’s family aware of this.

This naturally comes as a severe shock to those like me who knew him. I wasn’t close to Sandy, but I came to know him as a batchmate at IIT Bombay (he was in CSE and I was in KReSIT; the departments have since merged) and as a fellow research student in the NLP group (we shared the same advisor). He was undeniably smart, both by acumen and appearance. I can never recall him looking unkempt, which at IIT is quite something. It’s ironic that this incident comes almost exactly a year since the 2007 IIT-B convocation.

What do you do when you hear news such as this? You ask people, you look for the last trails online, scrabbling for information, you sit and wonder. To give you a sense of our amazement, hardly anyone in his inner and outer circle seems to have had any inkling. True, Sandy was probably quieter than most people with regards to such talk with anyone outside to those to which he was closest. He had had an uncomfortable time in the First Semester of the M.Tech programme. I never probed the exact reasons; I didn’t want to crowd him, but it was partly the load of the course (the first sem is a bit of a bitch). But we were glad to see him emerge out of that pall and do a fine job in the remaining 18 months. Which is why this is a shame. I wish he had thought about that Ph.D more. He had such a fine time in France in the spring of 2006.

Predictably, this is going to spark the inevitable “techies under stress" stories in the local media, some of them likely to be half-baked. Having also been at Persistent in the past (overlapping with Sandy’s first term) and with several friends there, I would not like to think that the situation could have become so arduous (but in this case, it somehow did). I’ve already seen some forums say all sorts of things about Sandy and the situation (some of the content being factually incorrect, such as confusing the bio of a very different Sandeep Shelke from Pune with this incident). All I’d like to say that there’s a family, some friends, some colleagues, who’re probably even more baffled, devastated, angry, and incoherent than we can imagine. Please give them their space. I do hope that there isn’t much more to this than we have heard.

The life of a depressive isn’t easy to fathom. Instead of speculation, take a look around, have a chat, pull yourselves together. We still want you around, you still want me around for a little time more. Sandy: how do we tell you all the nice things we thought of you if you aren’t around to hear ‘em, hmm? Cheers man, and will remember all the little moments.

A few links:
Sandeep’s CSE homepage, his Orkut page, his blog, and his younger brother Yuvraj’s Orkut page

Some updates – 8 Aug 2008
The incident received a lot of coverage in local newspapers. I overheard several people talking about it; all were very upset and saddened. Sandeep’s Orkut scrapbook was filled with messages today, most of them from strangers, who lamented the loss and wished things had turned out differently. I was busy for most of the day, so I couldn’t find out what the mood at Persistent was like.

Links: Times of India (Pune), DNA, Indian Express (contains factual errors that “He had completed his higher studies from America and had been working with Persistent Systems for two years."). Like many other blogs and news sites, the Pune Mirror cannibalized content on blogs, online forums, and Orkut scraps to fill a second page on the incident and the predictable “IT engineer-stress" theme. It also incorrectly claimed that Sandeep was in the IT industry for 7 years.

Update – 25 Aug 2008
I haven’t been able to find out what progress has been made in tying the threads in Sandeep’s case, but this news article in the Times of India (assuming it has been accurately reported) gives some clues to the current status. The report quotes a sub-inspector as saying:

What baffles the police is that the CCTV images before his suicide do not show any abnormal behaviour . "Sandip (sic) was seen walking freely and working on his laptop. We also enquired with his friends, who said that neither did he have any problems with anyone nor did he have any quarrel with any of his superiors,'' said sub-inspector U.K. Yadav.

"Probably, Shelke was bored with the mechanical life he was leading. We could gather that he was unable to spare quality time for himself due to the work pressure,'' Yadav added.

Perhaps "bored" isn’t the right choice of word, as it is hard to imagine Sandeep taking such steps because he was "bored".

The report later says:

But apart from work pressure, at times the inability to do the things which one actually wants to also leads to frustration. This was particularly observed in Shelke's case.

It doesn’t give any particulars though.

I (and others) still remain puzzled.

Lovingly Smelly Phrases

Not sure if it is the lack of rain or something, but many of us are reporting Unusually Funny Objects. George picks up two instances from two classes of people genetically hardwired to generating vacuous material, film stars and politicians. Salil found Jack and the Item.

I, for my part, found this outside the IIT Souvenir Shop yesterday (it was the first day for a new batch) (quoting verbatim):

ATTENTION FRESHENERS!
Free Gift for you at Souvenir Shop!*
*condition apply

Missing Mood Indigo

Missing Mood Indigo

Suddenly realised that I am missing Mood-I, after two consecutive years of soaking in the crowds, the pronites, the sideshows, the quizzes, the transplanting of BC quizzing to IIT-B for four days, the word games, the music, the December cool of the campus.

A Tear for memories of 2005 captured then. Pity I didn't record much of last time.

Math for snakes

Math for snakes

When did "maths" become "math"? I hear a lot of people say and write "math", (short for "mathematics", not as in the "Ramakrishna Math") these days (especially at IIT-B). Have school teachers started using this term too?

Nothing really to get upset about, but still, it makes me uneasy. More subliminal American influence? I can see, since the cult film, how you started saying "may-trix" instead of "ma-trix" (as in good old Matric-pass). Perhaps you converted to "skedule" after watching "The Apprentice". But how did you drop the "-s" from the abbreviation? Pray tell.

Keeping the house in order

At the end of his quiz report, Harish writes, a touch angrily, about how a hall of people can leave so much litter around without bothering to pick it up. I end up have the same apoplexies seeing some of the behaviour in common washing facilities here at my hostel in IIT. People breeze in and out, and by means of some predictable poltergeist effect, all the lights come on and the taps are leaking and the place is as fragrant as an abattoir.

I am no cleanliness-conservation-maniac who can boast of ISO-9000 standards, but it was drilled into myself from fairly ancient times (relatively speaking) that it was stupid to waste. So when one sees people leaving all lights on when only one would suffice, an irresistible urge to clean up behind them takes over.

I also find it hard to believe that these people could have lived so long without someone close to them not telling them to show better civic sense. It also doesn't forebode so well for their offspring.

Convergence '07

A public-service announcement: my department, KReSIT, is organising its annual research workshop which is called Convergence. We're focusing on research activities in the field of Networks this time, and the line-up of speakers seems very exciting for those working or studying in this area. All the details at the afore-mentioned link for those of you interested in the workshop.

Bloodsports

Messages from my hostel's management continue to rock like a cradle in a typhoon. One such recent crowd-pleaser:

It is my pleasure to inform you all the about the outstanding performance of [hostel] in techfest'07. Two teams of our hostel won topmost prizes in the most gruesome competetions. and the other teams also performed really decently.

Previously correspondence: Grassy trolls and getting in-ti-mate.

Ivan Lendl not invited

Announcements, like sign-boards, have donated more jokes to humanity than all late-night television put together. My hostel is organising a fest of sorts for "its inmates", which in the finite wisdom of those in the naming committee, has been named MARDIGRASS.

Probably it's just me who has a less-than-pure mind, but it sounds like an invitation to partake of marijuana in Punjabi. Let's do the bhang, da.

To their discredit

CNN-IBN had a story about credit card fraud which affected Supratik Chakraborty, a Professor in the CSE department here.

Curiously, the story is headlined "Paying by plastic not safe anymore". I wonder when it was (completely) safe in the first place.