Mayhem at SRM Engg. College

Mayhem at SRM Engg. College:

Ever since i heard something screwed up at my college, i was wondering what it was some paper scandal or some stupid ragging this time.. looks like some serious shit happened.. students smashing computers.. maybe a good time for the management to think they got to update the computers but wonder who is gonna get the money... robert marsilamani is not there to buy celeron procesors and saying them as p3`s anymore.. maybe they buy coro solo and say them as core duo and i wonder who is there to do it this time...

i hope the college realises at some point that theres something apart from making money in running a college...

its such a lucrative business these days.. i feel very very bad and sorry to write abt my own alma mater... but i am really disappointed to see all this happening in my college... maybe darmalingam was way better than venkatramani.. who knows...

and article via sambahar mafia, to NDTV

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UPDATE

Well after seeing all this happening and esp after the flickr pool of dream chaser(ya right... http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreampics/tags/rampage/)

I was a little depressed to see the places where we roamed about getting thrashed so bad. Maybe its the result of all this fine opression they had all along.

Lets analyse it in steps

1. Number of students

Boy, the year i joined there were 540 students split in 11 sections in year 2000, the year before was only 380 odd students

My immidiete juniors, they were abt 800 in number, first and last batch under anna unniversity.

Then the first batch under SRMIST came in that was more than 1500 students i believe.

Around this time speculations started if the college would start working as shifts.. no idea if it has but that would be hilarious.. schools do that during board exams but college.. too much. They started building too many buildings after that.. our workshops got roofs from asbestos sheets and new classes began to sprout up there... college was expanding and the management was making more than ever

2. Money, Money, Money....!

Mr. Green Pearl a.k.a Pachamuthu, as he is known fondly on campus seemed to get a freen color benz every year must be all from our parents money that we paid as fees. I still remember how pissed off myself and my dad was when they collected 45,000 rupees as miscellaneous.. i paid about 95,000 totally for the first year when the stipulated govt fees was around 32000. To top that, we had fines. Man anyone in SRM knew about fines... For every punishment you ahd a fine, you bunk half a day pay 100 bukcs, no ID card(a dog kinda treatent for them to rememeber your name) 300 bucks, fail in mid term - 500, forget ur hall ticket - 1000 bucks.. and so on and so forth... the fake rubber seal scandal too came up(all u had to do was pay the money to the bank and in a chalan they put a seala nd u submit that to get ur hall ticket... some students made the rubber stamp to avoid the thousands of rupees in fees and they found it)

3. Film Shooting

There used to be a so called green patch in front of the library.. you walk on it they give you a fine... but on weekends(that is sundays and mondays) they rent the place to film shooting and i still remember that song. sight adipom, tham adipom in april mathathil.. everybody was dancing like crazy on that and no fines... i mean WTF

4. Fees (more money)

Well the fees itself was too much, in third year of my batch the class reps from all depts went and met the principal (we had a nice man, Mr. Dharmalingam as our princi then, he was much much better to reason with than Mr.venkatramani, i dont know y... students were so happy.. we had panache then, morale was good... but his misfortune, first time anna univ students screwed up the exams and it was blamed on him) to get our fees reduced.. we fought for it and got 10000 bucks waived off the 65k fees... man and in the last year myself and my classmate we got an international paper published and they wouldnt even sponsor us to go and present the thing..

5. Canteens

You had to pay loads of money for crap food, i mean a barotta with which you wrestle and a idili that could very well injure somebody.. and a meals was 18 rupees... too much... And look at the state now.. when i was in india recently this jan i go to my college, i see some 15 dif canteens all over selling coffee.. and what not... The college had some shops around that sold cheap food, and the management drove them away in 3rd year... but ti was a good gesture to help students in a way but at the end of the day it felt like they wanted to get a monopoly for the campus canteen.

These were all some of the very many incidents that pissed most people...

Staff Ramblings...

I dont want to name him, but recently i heard them say if 15-20 people come to class, its a big deal. Cauz the morale or the word on the street was u pay the money and at the end of 4 years u get a B tech degree...

Departments becoming schools...

i am not sure why they did it but this is the deal...

Dept of mech and eee became school of mech engg and electrical engg so they can give a b tech in mechatronics degree... i mean there r loads of masters and undergrad courses and not to mention PhD.. does the college have infrastructure to handle all this... i am not sure.. maybe they bought something over the last 2 years but i doubt it..

they used to charge 5 bucks/hr for internet in the library and for a crazy slow connection... isnt that lame... we dont even get a @sruniv.ac.in email address... forget students atleast staff atleast when thye have a deemed thing.. and go to our website.. most of the links say under construction.. that is just lame.. cant they hire people to develop a proper site

for a long time the word application was misspelt as appliaction form.. that just sounded real bad to me when i wanted to show my professors here that this is the college i come from.

All the courses and stuff they talk about is real cool, but i leave it to the students who are there now to judge it.

Coming to yesterdays news article on hindu (http://www.hindu.com/2006/
03/01/stories/2006030115090300.htm).. i was laughing abot 3 things...

1. we have a pro vice chancellor... does that mean we got a standard, lite vice chancellors too... common ... Oh and just on a side note(kick..?) we called him red head becuase he had a red dye on his hair.. he was kinda stiff faced.. and never agreed upon to whatever we proposed...

2. look at that flickr photo.. i think it came on hindu again..

(http://static.flickr.com/37/106124174_7d02ece25a.jpg?v=0)

I guess he was some kinda peon in the dept or in the office.. and today he is a celebrity...

3. the same page of hindu had one more article abt ssn trying to do some new research and a corporation having some fights just like ur college... i felt bad thinking abt the irony...

4. Serious the last but third para that says....

"...said that students had entered the hi-tech computer block through the air-conditioner cabinet and went on a rampage, destroying the Apple Macintosh systems as well as other sophisticated equipments..."

Man now i love my alma mater.. cauz they use apple computers... apple rocks... but i seriously didnt know we had one back in india... and sophisticates systems u mean those intel celeron machines with 128mb ram and 20gig hdd... oh ya... we had workstations form IBM that was 10 times slower than my desktop at home... maybe they got new ones but i dont know....

And if you think i am joking go check out... http://www.srmuniv.ac.in/faculties/engg/mgmt/mgmt3.html

They have

SERVERS:

WORKSTATIONS:

NT servers are equipped with Intel Pentium IV
processors. Linux server has Intel Pentium III
processor. Unix server has Intel Pentium I
processor.

Intel Pentium IV PC - 60 No's
Intel Pentium III PC - 45 No's
Intel Pentium I PC - 25 No's

I mean pentium 1 PC.. when is the mac...?

At the end of the day I hope no one gets injured and this thing stops here.

UPDATE 2:

The alumni of SRM is totally shocked by it but also very surprised to learn that satyabama too has started the same thing...

(http://www.hindu.com/thehindu
/holnus/004200603012187.htm)

Violence everywhere.. i dont know how many more engg colleges will do this... pretty fricking lame.. WTF happened to JEPPIAR

Update 3/4

More posts here..

1. http://prethip.blogspot.com/2006/03/srm-rampage.html

2. http://prethip.blogspot.com/2006/03
/i-love-my-alma-mater-truly-madly.html

Both are my own posts... but slightly off topic from this... i thought that was better put in diff posts...

ANd guess what i had a visitor from delhi who uses a mac... i wonder if its the SRM delhi campus that has a imac.. and if u read the post #2 on this update... i do accept we have imacs... with pictures.

Update 5
Now i am looking at pages of AICTE to see if they got any info on accredited colleges, regarding the SRM/Satyabama dispute... and guess what i see a word file

http://www.aicte.ernet.in/ApprovInst/engg_2004.doc from this page... http://www.aicte.ernet.in/ApprovedInstitute.htm

It has a dead link, it points to a word file in the local directory that is not available... anybody got a link about that...

And guess to my surprise,
http://www.nba-aicte.ernet.in/inst/tamil.doc

tells me the accredited programs in most colleges as of 15 July 2005 and that says SRM is accredited to run only 3 programs BE Civil and 2 ME programs.. and satyabama is not even listed if i am right... but thats just SRM Engg college, not SRMIST...
One thought this is giving me some vague under runs... i got my BE mech from there and by what this doc says my program is not accredited... we were told ME and civil got 5 year accredition when we studied... WTF...

and turn over to UGC site like i said before
we are not on the list of fake universities..
(http://www.ugc.ac.in/inside/fakealerts.html)

but we r in the deemed univeristy category..
http://www.ugc.ac.in/inside/utype.php?resultpage=5&st=Deemed%20University

SO where does this leave us... not a big deal for me.. cauz i am getting my masters in another 3 weeks... (in fact 2 masters degrees i am hoping...
but the students who are graduating this year... students who have admits in foreign univs or for people pursuing MBA.. heard HCL wont come for campus cauz satyambama is not recognized... i mean someone has to do something abt this...a public interest litigation maybe...

And some more background info.. the actual problems started only after Prof. venkatramani(the same sottai as someone put it on the orkut group of our college) went to the hostel at 10 in the night and informed students that after 4 years all u guys r gonna get a B.Sc degree not a BE degree.. that is just outright lame to do..

and someone noticed that AICTE homepage is rip off from the actual apple.com homepage.. lame work.. copy ideas not rip the design apart.. look at the top bar they just changed the names that is all...

Update 6
Now the college it seems is sending letters to eveyrbody...
"...we are disappointed to note that our students far from appreciating their privileged position and opportunities they enjoy in our college,have chosen to be misled by unfounded and baseless rumours and caused great loss to institutional property and prestige..."

i am betting when the students go back to the college they better be prepared for something strict and harsh... i hope they dont put a general fine for everybody considering that the college is very renowned on putting fines if not anything else..

Other thing people.. make sure u have this letter safe with you.. worst case u can use this to sue the college back for a degree u know... i hope nothing like that comes up but u never know...
My guess is if they want to act dirty they cna purposefully screw the students by giving poor marks.. no recos and stuff like that... and there r staff there capable of doing such stuff... so its in ur best intrests to act safely...

and in case any of u present people in the college read this.. do let me know if they really really have a mac that works on campus... i am very curious to know abt it...

and guess what someone was telling that u r gonna get mullangi smabhar for the rest of ur college life if u stay in hostel... my suggestion get a monthly pass in andhra mess...

Update (next whatever #)

Well i am surprised to note that nothing regarding the riot has been put in the college website..
i see a reopening date schedule alone there. but nothing else.. i wonder if the people in the international board know about this.. maybe one of the students should just email those professors that such a thing happenend and if they would like to comment on the issue.. i think i am gonna do it.

Update
Well,
the latest scoop is that SRM engg college and satyabama has decided that they will not submit to AICTE approval, if forced by the court they will appeal to a higher court. My understanding was this case was pending with supreme court.. so higher court than this.. god knows.. i dont think the international court at hague accepts pleas from engg colleges.

Well Hindu reports that a judgement was issued by the high court in chennai
http://www.hindu.com/2006/03/16/stories/2006031618460400.htm

"..Says it is for assessing technical, management education standards

# Submits that AICTE must prescribe technical education standards
# Proper notice for inspection must be given
# Inspection team should include UGC representatives and university faculty

..........."
I am not sure whats going to happen about this, but i have a bad feeling in me.. hope these guys get a B tech certificate and not a Bsc certificate....

And guess what... a 2000 rupee fine for all undergrad hostel people.. the true idea behind the SRM management starts coming out... give holidays, break a few macs, get 2000 bucks from eveyr guy as if what they give is meager...

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