Insight-The third eye
Volume XI

Computers: boon or bane?

Teja and Ghaza talk about the good and bad effects of computers on student life at IITB

Life @IIT before computers Life @IIT after computers
8:00 a.m.
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz		 Zzzzzzzz
8:30 a.m.
Zzzzzzzzzzzz		 Need to find the brush before class!
12:30 p.m.
What’s wrong with the potatoes?		 What’s wrong with IRCTC?
5:00 p.m.
Time for football		 Connect 10.4.201.65
Establishing Network Connection to Server...
Preaching Resources...
Parsing Game Info...
7:00 p.m.
Need to crack that Dram GC again		 Need to watch that movie again.
8:00 p.m.
We will be on the left side of Convo. Raja Hindustani is being screened today.		 BUZZ
hiii.....der???
10:30 p.m.
MI meeting in lounge		 I have just mailed you the poster. Take printouts after class tomorrow and put them up at the shack, BJC and hostels
12:01 a.m.
Hey, the Soc. Secy. has rented the VCR for tonight. Let’s go to the Lounge.  		What’s the portion for tomorrow’s quiz??
1:00 a.m.
Ssh, let’s start from that corner. Tonight the entire wing has to get wet. Are the buckets ready?		 Hmmm....Obama was good. [SHIFT + DEL]
Now, where did I leave the tutorial?

Notwithstanding the radical change that computers and the LAN have made to our lives over the past ten years, the “good” effects of these seemingly harmless contraptions and applications are in no way small. With Google and Wikipedia, knowledge has become more accessible. Blogs changed the way people expressed themselves and got read. Facebook stole all your excuses for not saying ‘hi’ to the guy who used to eat his tiffin at that quiet corner of your high school classroom. And here are some of the ways in which life @IITB changed:

  • It takes us only a few minutes (and some patient refreshes) on IRCTC to book our tickets compared to the cold journeys all the way to the Thane railway station at 5 AM.

  • Research of any kind (UROP, BTP, etc.) can be conveniently done at the comfort of our room as opposed to sneezing in the Library and pinching the guy on the lone computer at the Department Computer Room. [We overlook the impact of the numerous distractions in our comfortable rooms]

  • Applying to numerous colleges simultaneously in a very short time for interns and easy apping procedures are great boons, as opposed to the almost offline procedure of using snail mail and filling application forms. [We overlook the negative aspect of arbitrary spamming from two generations of the ever expanding IIT student fraternity]

  • It takes us less than half an hour to design a brilliant poster announcing a meet/event on Photoshop as opposed to making them by hand. [We overlook the loss in creativity, thanks to Google Image search]

In addition to the above we now have the unlimited advantages of Web 2.0 starting with preparing for the CAT and GRE online to ’A Word a Day’, ‘Send Free SMS’ and ‘Recommend and Win a Reebok Shoe’ as opposed to, well, nothing. 

So, as with every other change in student life at IITB, computers have had both good and bad effects. Whether you think that the bad effects outweigh the good or not, computers are here to stay.

N. Sri Teja is a third year student of the Mechanical Engineering Department and Gautam Hazari is a PhD student of the Electrical Engineering Department. They can be contacted at iamteja@iitb.ac.in and ghaza@ee.iitb.ac.in.