Academia Blues

(For all of the misery we've been put through all of these years...)

When you curse the apple that did fall
Wish Schrodinger's cat had better hit a wall
E doesn't equal M, C squared
Einstein had better only played the violin there

Yes, you're doing the academia blues
It isn’t a joking thing, isn’t easy to get through
We're talking nasty, we're talking academia blues
Beat you each time, like a hammer on the head
There isn't any 3-D path harder to tread

Each time you're put through a chain of Carboxylation
You feel it's bad as asphyxiation
Feel that carbon had better not exist?
Life would have been better, much better than this!

Math stopped being, numbers and signs
Long back, long back when science too was fine -
Simple and easy to comprehend
Minus the uncertainty, minus the Hamiltonian grand

Then bombed we were with fat boy and little man
Statistics, semiconductors, scientific slang
Observe, analyse, record – they ask us to do
And then to mug up formulae without a sound or two

For we're living through them, academia blues
From morning till the day is through.
You should for once try our shoes
It's the oldest and the latest news
The spited and the spiteful - Academia blues!

To you the periodic table was never nice
Neither the DNA, all of which you wished to splice
Couldn’t care less if copper salt was blue
Wondered Murphy’s Law couldn’t be more true!

When you're going roughage – oh, I meant bananas
Doing crazy vectors, or studying the wild Savanna
When you're going insane, going Academia nuts!
When the light at the tunnel end has clearly shut
You may give it a rest. Might want to cut loose
You can wait till they haunt you - come Monday, Academia blues!

IITs and BITS - Exchanging Places?

Until a few years back, the IITs were considered the place only for the exceptionally intelligent, that evident in their short but highly difficult entrance test, the IITJEE. On the other hand, BITS accepted students on the basis of their score in the boards - ensuring invariably, the student intake was some of the most hardworking and diligent students from across the country, maybe not with as much amount of grey matter (only according to the set measuring scale) as IITians.

The new scheme of things, seems to me, to have BITS assume the place of the IITs and vice versa. The reason - the current IIT-JEE paper requires a vast knowledge of details and trivial information, especially in the Chemistry and Physics sections, thus ensuring a place for the industrious. Add to that the fact that the percentage of reservations in the IITs has gone up considerably and you'd be forced to rethink. BITSAT - the online admission test for BITS, accepted a few years back, focuses on skills such as language and analytical thinking (apart from PCM) - which one would be safe to say, have more to do with gray cells rather than sheer hard work. 

A good number of my friends who came out with flying colours in IITJEE achieved scores in BITSAT, modest for their JEE scores. One wonders if that was because of their carefreeness after JEE, or reflective of what I've mentioned above.

PS - Admittedly, an inspiration for this article may be some of the most exceptional people I've encountered in my life after coming to BITS Pilani.