I remember the ghastly silence at home when my Class XII Mathematics marks were announced. The bar was set so low that my sibling found the rest of his schooling a breeze and I was forever banished from the world of science. So, the red-brick grandeur of the 1794-established College of Engineering, Guindy, was a place I only saw from a distance when I journeyed elsewhere. Till one rainy November when I was 19 and marched into CEG’s 200-plus acre campus for an NCC camp.
A road straight as an arrow runs from the gate to the statue of CN Annadurai, former Chief Minister of Madras, who lends his name to the University that comprises other technical institutions on the same campus. Behind the clock tower, in its many hostels and tree-lined football grounds, is where people who shaped India in the fields of sport (K Srikanth and Kutraleeswaran), film (Crazy Mohan and Madhan Karky), diplomacy (G Parthasarathy) and food (K Verghese), apart from great engineering minds, found their calling.
Beyond the labs are opportunities to discover wildlife and photography, music and mischief, in a kinder, gentler way than folks across the road can ever dream of. Where else in a city dying from thirst will you have to wear a pair of wellingtons and wade through knee-deep water to retrieve your target at the firing range with boys lounging on the stiles cheering you on? For that experience alone, it is worth learning calculus.
- Deepa Alexander struggles with numbers every day; the epilogue in her biography should fittingly read ‘Death by decimals’.
If you’re a school-going kid living in India who just finished your board exams, you have probably been asked this question: ‘Why don’t you write JEE?’ Calculus may get you into CEG, but if you’re aiming for IIT, then you better pull up your socks! Ask any student his/her dream, and it will invariably be cracking the code to this premier academic institution. Unfortunately, I was less-ambitious.
I never bought the idea of ‘paradise on earth’ until our family moved into this lonely-yet-lively forest called Indian Institute of Technology Madras, populated by trees, deer, and monkeys, when my mother landed a job opportunity. For a six-year-old at that time, IITM was not just a place, but a gateway to Pandora’s universe.
Its chilly breeze and never-ending supply of fresh oxygen make you fall in love with this place again and again. The campus is split into four regions; one that leads you to technical departments and laboratories, one where the hostlers live, one for the residences, and the last one for cafeteria and sports complex. Every time someone gets lost in IITM’s 250-acre campus, they end up at Gajendra Circle, which is like the equator separating the region.
For the most part of my life, going on a vacation meant taking a stroll in the vast campus of IITM.
Where else in Chennai can you see a motley group of deer, blackbucks, monkeys, and crows share a snack together? That’s the society Karl Marx envisioned.
- When Srivatsan S isn’t writing, you can find him staring at the wall, thinking about a film/song/scene.