I am a back-bencher and am proud to be one. Let me show you those 15 hrs of week in class through my eyes.

1. The Tedious Machine: Some make wonders happen, some see wonders happen, and I wonder what happened. If every single word that comes out from the mouth of the prof were to be visible, imagine how the classroom would be. That reminds me of those video games where we had to catch the bricks falling from the top, only in this case the game is 3D, the arena is horizontal and except for catching a few words which fall down owing to the grace of gravity(notice grace :D), I dont even try to catch the words as they seem to be going so high over the head that even if I stand over the bench(dont worry I wont fall, the new ones are wonderful!) I wont be able to catch them. I just admire the scene where the words are flowing like flocks of birds all over the sky and finally crash into the walls. Some people have adapted their antenna to go high over into the sky to catch those words, others like me catch watever gets scattered by crashing into those antenna.

So lets come to the course itself. We are supposed and expected to just throw away the number system which our ancestors invented after a hell lot of toiling and sweating and embrace the “Cave Man Calculus :P”. You know nothing but a symbol zero, so now you have to generate all the numbers which you can think of by repeatedly operating on zero as many number of times as you wish or you can endure :P. Even the cave men were better I suppose. They just had to put a line to indicate an increment, and not a weird mathematical formula with those weird signs provided by the Romans. Oh God, why dint India colonise Europe. 😛

Then comes the world famous Tedious Machine. Theoretically it can solve any problem of the world, though I have no idea whether it would solve your problem of gf or not. 😀 But lets skip it, so I was saying that it can theoretically solve any problem of the world but practically none. 😛 To solve even the simplest problem, You have to rely upon that bulky magnetic tape which is supposed to be infinite(God knows how!), and a greater problem is if the tape goes into an infinite loop, its not the tape’s fault, its actually tape’s method of saying, “What the hell! Cant you give me a correct input!”. OK! even if I somehow figure out how to detect whether the tape is working or it is in an infinite loop, I have no guarantee that I would get my result in a reasonably good time. “Efficiency to Moh-Maya hai”. You should solve the problem, however inefficient it may be, just solve it. Just start the tape and let your grandson or great-grandson take the credit of the result.(Hope theres no syntax error :D). Thank God those EC people came up with the idea of IC or I d have shifted to arts or commerce :P.

2. Network-Timed out: When speaking of networks, speak as network administrators do. Its easy to imagine the class, Just imagine the AIR(All India Radio) Vivid Bharati Prasaran. With each class, the AIR broadcast centre begins its broadcast which lasts for 1 hour. And sooner or later or never, we radios(dumb nodes in terms of networks :D) tune up to the correct signal. To respect the fact that we are IITians, Id like to give a better title than dumb radios. So the class consists of some near about 70 IBM Desktops and 5 Apple PCs(our gals, remember those adds a few years back where the PCs appear in red green blue colors :P), hopelessly trying to communicate with the base station, the AIR broadcast station.

The basestation, a mainframe computer, with its monotonous broadcasting, interrupted again and again by some of the desktops, reminds me of Lord Ganesha, scribe of story tellers, though in this case the story is more of network protocols and topologies. And among those 75 desktops, I am sure 74 of them have their OS as linux, stable and secure, so secure that some even block their listening ports and dont even allow the broadcast to enter into the system. Who knows it might be a malicious code sent to cause harm to the system. 😀 And of one I am damn sure its windows. Remember how the windows comes up to you seeking permission to send a list of 140 or so error reports, none of which ever get solved. 😛 Now I know what happens to those 140 error reports. They all get so messed up that when unicasted to the mainframe, the mainframe hangs, and even those 74 other desktops which had their ports blocked open their ports to listen to the conversation. 😛 It would be a great degree of generalisation if I mention all the desktops to be of the same shape and size. But if I get into details, I ll have to afford a whole range of desktops available in the market to cover each and every person. Though I d just like to mention that atleast one of the 70 IBM desktops and one of the 5 Apple PCs do not actually fall into the category of desktops, they can actually be counted as laptops or palmtops( 😀 guess who!!).

3. The Dreamworks: A suitable name for this course, for everything happens in dreams. You come to class to dream(some call it sleep but thats so wrong), you build a model of IITG in you dreams(which wen coded in OpenGL as we do, has no resemblance to the real IITG even in dreams :D), and the more you watch the movies like Avatar and Finding Nemo, the more you feel that you can do something like that only in dreams.
There is nothing animating about this course of animation, oops I overrated it, its actually just a course of graphics which is supposed to be a base for animations. I entered into this course expecting to discover my aesthetic side, the sense of beauty within me. But as and when I enter into the class, I feel myself dumped into a dungeon with all the light suffocated out, though the tubelights are always on. I remember the days when I was small and I used to be so scared of the command-line based DOS mode. I used to feel blinded, suffocated, handicapped, with no “graphics” to support me. Well thats the same feeling in this dreamworks class. 😀 As of now, I am a command line enthusiast. And I think that even the Younger Sanmukh would prefer the MS-DOS class to this dreamworks class. 😛

4. YACC(Yet Another Cursed Course): Nothing much to say about this course as nothing much happens in this course. Remember the game I mentioned before. Its the same game being playing here. The only difference is that in this case the words are not thrown to hit the wall, but they are just slipped off the tongue to let fall by themselves. They dont even manage to reach the first benches, leave alone the last bench. And even if somehow they could be caught in bits and pieces, I have got no idea how to compile them. Its like asking a C compiler to compile the language of JAVA. 😛

As apparent, it contains highly exaggerated and fictitious content. So dont take it seriously :P, just enjoy. And one more note, I am not truly a back-bencher. 🙂