Extra

We were traveling in one part of the country. We never found gentler people in any other part of the country. They were always 10 on 10 about manners and the way they treated guests like us. However, there was one practice there that we had been told in advance.After paying the cost of the service offered, there is a practice of giving some extra as bakhshish, however small that amount could be and they never argue with that. For that little extra they bow to the customer with a smile in face, offers a salute.

Who does not like extra? And it is time for me to take a bow with a smile in face and offer my salute - the charge is handed over yesterday, the 'extra' academic engagement that lasted for last six years comes to an official end. Thanks to all giving me this opportunity. It had been a long association - first as NSS Program Officer, then as NSS Program Coordinator and finally as NSO Health and Fitness Program Coordinator. I thankfully acknowledge the cooperation received from larger campus community, local people, alumni and last but not the least - the beloved student community who I used to interact with, about 1000 of them in each semester. But for the huge goodwill shown by the students, it would not have been possible to undertake the journey over such a long period and together. 

A quick flashback shows that my first post on NSS was dated 30-08-2008 on this blog (Link) on my first day experience. Earlier I got acquainted with the undercurrent of social entrepreneurship of IIT Kharagpur by attending a student meet here in March, 2008 (Link). The NSS unit I served was named 'Team Vivek' (Vivek comes close to Conscience). The student members came up with a beautiful website on a free server and regularly updated it (Link). It is still live. Then a UG student here, now a researcher at University of Waterloo redirects traffic if any web search leads to him as member of that webteam. I had NCC as EAA in IITKGP during my student days here. NSS was a whole new experience. The little effort the team put caught attention of student community. Scholars' Avenue, the campus newspaper run by the students came up with an article in Oct., 2009 (Link). 

The NSS Camp of 2008 was important as it gave lots of confidence and showed the latent strength of NSS team. That was the first time I was communicating beyond my unit and to students of other units. The camp feedback was great. Some of them can be found here (Link).

There was no looking back since then. NSS Program Coordinator responsibility came in July, 2010 (Link). Senior students came with donations for instituting scholarships for village school children (Link). And NSS, IIT Kharagpur found a place for itself in in the front page of IITKGP website in the NSS Day 2010 function (Link, Archive). To have easy updates on our activity, we launched NSS Blog in March, 2011 (Link). NSS newsletter was also launched to have higher impact (Link).

By 2013, NSS, IIT Kharagpur was ready with committed and experienced faculty and student team. The maturity of its exercises, the visibility made students confident to mention their association with NSS in their resume. This year in Gymkhana election Soap Box, I heard one G Sec. aspirant mentioning the engagement in NSS activities as one of the credential and it is interesting that candidate got the highest vote. The baton was passed to new Program Coordinator of NSS in July 2013 (Link).

There was a requirement and thought that may be I can give sometime to another EAA program that was asking attention. It had about 900 students enrolled and there was a great opportunity to serve. Started building team and motivating ourselves (Link). The program was launched in Feb., 2013 and was a success from Day 1 (Link). The journey in that program is captured there in regular session-wise updates. It took some effort from me to be consistent on that front but it had a great effect in launching a big program with so many students being addressed together. Without fail, a mail used to reach every student every TUE and FRI motivating them for the WED and SAT early morning field activity. There were many special activities. Students came up with newsletter for this program too (Link).

Comes July 2014 and the new academic session. It is time to hand over the charge to next in command in this EAA program and post the last one here (Link). Is it time to revel in the joyful and satisfying experience of this EXTRA academic journey? There was a Scholars' Avenue article in March 2013 (Link). The title chosen by the students showed why they are our greatest teachers - and what we think as extra is essentially the core of our existence. 

Epic

[Pictures are from yesterday evening's visit to Rathayatra fair, just outside IIT Kharagpur campus.]

We cannot be faulted if we take ourselves too seriously! After all, this is the only life we have!! One suggestion would be to follow Dadi of Kapil Sharma's popular comedy show on TV. When told, "Dadi, think second time," she shot back,"When life is one, why think twice?" For the believers of more than one life, one may say that we had chance before, we shall get chance again - why worry? If nothing works, we have the liberty to become more philosophical than usual - Many like us had come and gone, many like us will come and go, let us not get stressed!!!

Star Plus is now beaming the epic Mahabharata with new castings. "Dharme cha arthe cha kaame cha mokshe cha bharatarshabha. Yadhihasti tadanyatra yannehasti na tadkvachit" i.e. "O scion of the Bharat race, whatever dharma, artha, kaam and moksha exists in the world, exists in the text, whatever is not in the text does not exist elsewhere." We can watch all episodes here (Link) and take life easy. Of course, we should avoid 'what-if's and draw conclusion out of it. For example, if the battle of Kurukshetra could be avoided if Dhritarashrta dealt Duryodhana differently at various stages - Dhritarashrta could become neither a true king nor a true father. Probably if one is true in one, he automatically becomes true in other.

The other epic Ramayana of Ramanand Sagar production, probably holds world record as the most viewed mythological TV serial. Our young days had "Sitaram charit ati pavan / Madhur saras aur ati mann bhavan / Puni puni kitane ho sune sunae / Phir bhi pyaas bujat na bujae" filling the air on Sunday mornings.  All episodes of it can be seen here (Link). This too offers lessons that places eternity over transients. Often it is laced with humour that we can appreciate if we know that life is more than stand-up comedy, but comedy it is!! Here goes one such story from Ramayana that is taken from this place (Link). 

One day in the forest, Lord Rama was standing with his bow rested on the ground and talking to his brother Lord Lakshmana. After some time Lakshmana noticed that Rama’s bow was rested on a frog and it was struggling to survive. Rama took the frog and asked, “Why didn’t you speak up when you were in pain?”. Frog, a self-realized soul, replied “when others hurt me, I call your name “Rama, Rama” – but here it is you giving me the pain – who else can I call? So I accepted this pain as a blessing.”

Endnote: "We play our parts here — good or bad. When the dream is finished and we have left the stage, we will have a hearty laugh at all this — of this only I am sure." - Vivekananda in his letter to Sister Nibedita on 28th August, 1900 (Link)

 

IIT Counselling

IIT Kharagpur: 

Dedicated to the service of the nation 

by serving those 

who are to serve the nation as global citizens.

Please refer to http://why.iitkgp.ac.in/ and may be my previous post(s) of this blog on this. This is to help answering the phone calls being received these days on the title of the post, better.

IIT Kharagpur Director's Message for JEE Advanced Qualifiers:

Finally: Could not stop myself from re-sharing this 'Salutation to the Mother' post.

Updated: Phone Call, SMS ... prospective freshers from far-off places are worried about getting train reservation ... want to know reporting date here ... if they make it to IIT Kharagpur ... if it helps.

  

Senior There, Junior Here

135 likes, 54 comments and still counting, from fellow campusites of IIT Kharagpur and within 14 hrs. of the facebook post of a student here. There is something special in it! Could not help re-sharing in my wall. Few weeks before received the following message from a student who graduated from this place and is now doing PhD in a top US school. This is from a senior to juniors with love. Feeling proud of the feat and the sense of responsibility, maturity shown by our dear students. Hope, this will make way for the manifestation of our inner strength to its fullest by unlocking of our true potential, and we shall see flowers bloom here, there and everywhere! 

Dear friends,

Its been almost a year since I started with my PhD in ECE at one of the top 5 schools in US. Over this period, I have met fellow graduate students from all over the world which includes people who have done their B.S. from MIT, Princeton, Cornell and Tshinghua. I also went through 5 years of kgp life, being in awe of these universities and the kind of courses they have access to. More often than not, I used to feel kind of inferior when applying to grad schools for my PhD when I looked at undergraduates from the above mentioned schools. But from my interactions with people over here, I got to know somethings which surprised me to the core and I am sure will surprise you all as well.

I will start this with my first day here, when I met this guy who was going to be an office mate of mine and also my group mate, who did his UG from MIT and he specifically wanted to know which IIT I was from and believe it or not he could spell out Kharagpur. The same happens most of the times when I meet any person for the first time inside the university campus. Most students around here have very high regards for IIT's in general and a lot of it comes from their knowledge of JEE. This is something which might make you feel good, but as you would know sometimes truth is very different from hearsay.

Coming to the education system and my first day of classes here, the instructor specifically asked in a graduate class as to how many people in the class were familiar with matrix algebra and linear algebra. I was surprised because I could see only 5 hands raised in a class of 50. You wouldn't really expect this in a graduate class given that it was a class of PhD students from ECE/MechE/ChemE. After the class that day, I had a discussion with my group mates who are from the above mentioned schools about undergraduate curriculums. They have complete freedom right from 1st year so as to choose what courses they want to take unlike us. So, if you pick a student who is interested in VLSI from one of these schools, he/she won't has very little knowledge about Signal Processing/Communications and vice versa. Even I went through periods of frustration when I had to spend hours working on Cadence for doing the layout of some circuits and that too a full custom layout, because it was not my primary field of interest. But at the end I do realize that at the undergraduate levels breadth of the knowledge does help you a lot in the future. Research these days is extremely inter-disciplinary, and many a time ideas from other fields can do wonders in yours. The number of courses we had to take, and that too from various areas amazes my friends here. In a semester taking 5 theory courses and 3 labs here is next to impossible. 

The classroom environment is very different here. There's absolutely no attendance. You would be thinking, I am going to rant about the classroom environment we have in kgp. Let me go on and tell you some more about the environment here. You can come in and leave the class anytime you want. You can keep working on your laptop right throughout the class. You have complete freedom inside the class. But I have realized after 4 courses here, you get to learn the most from assignments. The assignments are mostly tougher than midterms and endterms. More importantly, you would have to spend a lot of time on these assignments which means you are always up to date with the content being covered in the class. So before midterms/endterms its not a mad rush to find out what was taught and what was not. Added to that, you can't copy assignments from anybody else because if you are found to be involved in plagiarism, you are probably going to be expelled from the university. Now just think of the number of times, we do assignments by ourselves in kgp? The classroom teaching levels are more or less the same here. So what's the only thing which separates us from them? Its just assignments and nothing else. If you do your assignments sincerely, it would be more than enough to keep you in a very good position as far as the course is concerned.

I will also give you a reason, why you would hardly find anybody skipping classes here, which everyone of us does every now and then in kgp. Education in general is really expensive in the US. Semester fees run upto tens of thousands of dollars. So leaving out the extremely brilliant and extremely rich, most people are neck deep in loans and have to work their way through school. When I say they work their way through, they do part time jobs which include being a waiter, a bartender or something which you would never want to be. So apart from managing their schedules perfectly, people here won't miss a single class and try to get the most out of the school for every dollar they paid as tuition.

So, my friends don't look down at the education you get at kgp. I know there's always room for improvement, but given all the constraints we have we do get top notch undergraduate education. So, next time you think of comparing yourself to somebody from MIT or Princeton, have confidence in yourself. Having said that, don't forget to do justice in every possible way to make the most of the courses you take and before blaming any course instructor for not being able to induce an interest in that particular course, just ask yourself how much effort have you yourself put in for that. I hope to see you all to continue to fly the KGP flag high in India and the world. All the best to you!! 

Best Regards 

A senior

Dhiman Sir

Yesterday evening there was an address by Dr. Srikumar Banerjee, Chairman, Board of Governors, IIT Kharagpur. He recollected his IITKGP days, strength of IITKGP and how we can leverage upon our unique attributes. He also explained how some of our perceived weaknesses can be converted to strength with right positioning. Our semi-rural background is considered as weakness. Getting a job for spouse is perhaps easier in a metro. The other perceived weakness is coaching of kids. Dr. Banerjee reminded the faculty that a teacher is not himself/herself, because a teacher touches lives of hundreds, thousands students and thus attitude of a teacher is very important.

While I was listening to Dr. Banerjee and taking down notes for the student in me, there was a quick replay in mind of what happened in the morning -my daughter of Class VII coming out of school crying, many other students also crying.... Took daughter to hospital but by that time the carriage has moved away. At home she told her mother that her dream of becoming an 'art teacher' has been shattered. No other teacher can be the substitute. He was so loving - never scolded, always encouraged and inspired students.

In a massive heart attack in the school premises itself, everybody's beloved Dhiman Sir passed away yesterday morning in his forties. A big shock for all of us. May his soul rest in peace and his family and students who were so close to him, get the strength to overcome this. Hope that as a faculty I can live up to the expectation of our Chairman; closer home, Dhiman Sir had been an example of that. May we be able to serve our students as nicely as he used to be.

His facebook page is this (Link). The latest post there from his daughter says following.

what to say and what to write i dont know...today i had lost almost everything...ok ok let me introduce myself I am Pritha Paul daughter of Late Dhiman Paul..I know that this "Late" word is inappropriate to use before this name...my dad was everything for me... OK NOW THIS IS TO INFORM ALL HIS STUDENTS THAT THE ART EXAMINATION WHICH WAS DECLARED TO BE HELD ON 1st May 2014 WILL BE HELD ON THAT PARTICULAR DAY ONLY...HE NEVER EVER PAUSED IN COMPLETING HIS WORK..SO WE ALL SHOULD THINK LIKE HIM..BECAUSE WE ALL LOVE HIM VERY MUCH..AND THIS WAS HIS LAST WISH TO COMLETE ALL HIS INCOMPLETE TASK...THEREFORE I REQUEST ALL THE STUDENTS OF KHARAGPUR ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS TO COME AND APPEAR FOR THIS ART EXAM ON 1ST MAY 2014.. Thanking u ( Pritha Paul)

Presented below are pictures that my daughter used to draw in 2011-12 session followed by the transformation brought by Dhiman Sir in 2013-2014. Coloured pictures can be shared in some other occasions.

2011-2012 series:

2013-2014 series:

ISWT Course on Neuroscience

Registration for the International Summer Term course "Methods and Techniques of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience" has started. The course will be conducted at Dept. of Electronics & ECE of IIT Kharagpur campus, during July 02 - 12, 2014 with a Sunday break in between. The course brochure can be downloaded from here (Link).

Learning Outcomes:
By the end of the course, a student will be able to demonstrate an understanding of: (a) neurophysiological basis of various techniques (correlational and causal) to measure brain activity patterns; (b) state-of-the art data analysis methods  for complex brain responses (single unit, EEG/MEG and fMRI); (c) pros and cons and appropriateness of each method and the relationships between different methods. 

International Faculty:
The principal faculty, Dr. Joydeep Bhattacharya, Professor, Goldsmiths, University of London is well-known name in this field for his long list of contribution (Link). We at IITKGP worked together with him on quite a few neurosignal processing problems, the research output of which were published in high impact factor journals (Link1, Link2, Link3). Dr. Caroline Di Bernardi Luft, a Senior Research Fellow working at Goldsmiths, University of London will assist with her extensive knowledge of EEG, fMRI and MATLAB programming for neuro data analysis. 

National Faculty:
Among national faculty, we have Dr. Abhijit Das, MD, DM, the Director of Neurorehabilitation and a Consultant Neurologist at Institute of Neurosciences, Kolkata, India (Link).  His expertize includes Cognitive Neurorehabilitation, Cortical Plasticity, Non Invasive Brain Stimulation (TMS/tDCS), Neuroimaging etc. We at IITKGP got acquainted with him through a collaborative research initiative (Link). My departmental colleague, Prof. Sudipta Mukhopadhyaya (Link) and yours truly too will pitch in time to time and supplement!!!

No. of seats and Course Fee:
No. of participants to this course is capped at fifty. We intend to reserve ten seats for participants from Industry and R & D organizations. Initial application fee is Rs. 500 only. Upon confirmation, one has to pay the following course fee.

Course Code	Course Name	Course Fee: Participants from		For Students
		Industries & R & D organisations	Academic Institution
IST 0118	Methods & Techniques in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience	Rs, 20,000	Rs. 15,000	Rs. 15,000

Course Fee waiver for faculty / students:
There is a grant available with us which will allow us to reimburse full course fee on successful completion of the course to most of the participating faculty of recognized institutes of India. Students from Indian institutions, interested in this area are also eligible for fee waiver. We are asking to pay up initially, to avoid cases where one blocks the seat and then does not turn up, wasting the opportunity for another and if one is casual in his / her approach in completing the course. There will be exam. to clear at the end of the course. IIT Kharagpur students will be able to earn two credits from this course. 

How to Register:
Please follow the guideline available at following webpage of IIT Kharagpur:
http://www.mymail.iitkgp.ernet.in/iswt/registration.php
Last date of application is June 02, 2014.

Priority Rule:
Since there are limited no. of seats and the course is virtually free for most of the participants from academic institutions, Course Coordinator reserves the right to give priority to faculty, then research and pstgraduate students and finally UG students working / intend to work in this area. We shall try to confirm as early as possible whether one gets selected. We are trying hard to arrange full reimbursement of course fee to all participants from recognized academic institutions of India. If it is not possible to waive fee for all, the priority rule will follow first-come-first-served policy among selected, confirmed candidates who complete the registration process and successfully complete the course. 

Travel Booking and Confirmation Schedule:
We would like to confirm candidature of 1st set of applicants of this course by 30th April so that there is enough time to get reservation done for outstation candidates. Train reservation now starts 2 months ahead. Those who apply before 30th April, will get the confirmation on 30th April from the pool applied till then. After that, we shall release list every 10 days till last day.

Accommodation & Food:
While we are trying to arrange reimbursement of course fee for most the candidates from academic institutions, the accommodation, food etc. are chargeable. Accommodation will be provided from whatever is available at campus at that time. We shall try to provide relatively inexpensive accommodation for student participants.

Other information:
It is expected to be monsoon time here in the first fortnight of July. Last year, during the course period, temperature varied between 25 and 35 degree centigrade. For any query of this course, please email me at gsaha.iitkgp@gmail.com or gsaha@ece.iitkgp.ernet.in

SSLS Recruitment

Trying to reach out to the maximum and get the best out of  the collaborative research initiative, Signals & Systems for Life Science (SSLS) where experts from IIT Kharagpur and leading hospitals / Life Science R & D came together. Please visit this (Link) to know more about this.

MS Application online:     http://erp.iitkgp.ernet.in/IITKGPApplications/index?admiss_ch=21
PhD Application online:     http://erp.iitkgp.ernet.in/IITKGPApplications/index?admiss_ch=22

Interested persons can apply from today till May 05, 2014.

For other instructions and project code for filling up of application, please download these 3 pages (Link).