chutneys

2006-04-30T06:03:00.000-07:00

cvit rocked icpr this time. 4 papers selected!!
And the most important consequence is that we got a party :)
The party was dedicated to "all those who are supposed to graduate
but are not about to graduate"

Hosts: Suman Karthik n Tejokrishna

Here are the lucky people :-)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
57 Target Model Estimation Using Particle Filters for Visual Servoing - Outcome: Poster,
Hafez

1991 Visual Servoing in Presence of Non-Rigid Motion - Outcome: Poster,Santosh

2027 Learning Mixtures of Offline and Online features for Handwritten Stroke
Recognition - Outcome: Poster, Karteek, Lahari

2108 Efficient Region Based Indexing and Retrieval for Images with Elastic Bucket
Tries - Outcome: Oral, Somankarthik
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
some pix, courtesy official photographer of cvit - Vardhman :p

Coding after a long time!

2006-02-17T14:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday attended the coders meeting cum 2nd intra iiit coding contest.
i luvd it.. the questions were good, the environment was good .. felt like we were really coding for some online programming contest. We were the mavericks, pradeep rajiv, dileep vaka and me.

The people behind this club deserve more than a pat in the back.. Great work Manikandan, Ramachandra, Vardhaman, Visesh and others.

You can see the questions of yesterdays contest here . Questions were tricky (See the first one) The obvious method of coding will not work bcoz n can be as large as 10^11, so to get the program running u need to write an algo in root-n complexity :)

But, we would have njoid it better, had the meeting been arranged after the midsems.

Xams in 2 days :(

Fine Arts : The Anatomy of a Fraud.

2006-02-08T03:00:00.000-08:00

{Update} Fine Arts course dropped this year.

For the uninformed, FAAA(Fine Arts and Art Appreciation) is a 5 credit HSSM course taught in the spring semester by Mr.Saroj Sarkar at IIIT.

Before the course began .. i went to some seniors to get some advice abt which hssm would be better. I had a personal bias towards Fine Arts. drawing _had_ been my passion since my childhood.

me: how abt the fine arts course ... how is it like
senior: The professor is a completely money minded person and A's are for people who pay him 500+
me: What if i can draw well
senior: oh! then u can take the course..

How wrong he was! The last thing one needs to get a good grade in this course is ability/passion to draw . Nevertheless i took the course .. for one.. i dint believe such rampant grading could exist.. and i believed i could draw well . I was curious though,

how could a professor take money and grade the students based on the amount, that too when there was this method of student feedback on the professor.
how can he satisfy everyone in the course. I mean when u r doing smth seriously wrong, u take care that noone complains abt that. how would he do that?(a prof is bound to give some bad grades)
if this is how he operates every year, how could he keep doing it every year??

Now that the course is completely over and the grading is out, i got all the answers :) Thought i could share these with you. Evrithing will be clear by the end of this long post

The course continued pretty uneventfully.. every class the routine was that He would be there in the class by 6:30 pm drawing on the board. Once he is finished with the drawing, he retreats to the loneliest corner of the room and sits there .We had to draw those in the drawing book which would be checked at the end and this was supposed to have some weightage too ..lol.

The million $ question was how would he ask for money.. The answer was stunningly simple!
"You ppl will have a fine arts exhibition in January. For that we will have to frame your drawings. You people can give money to the CR. I shall take care of the frames " Then the details "Each one of you will pay 600/- for two frames" (effect of inflation.. hike in prices, amount which fetched an A till last year became the minimum ) I was like "if evrione pays 600 then how is he going to grade ppl?!!" then came the gem of a statement "... and some people can have big frames also if you want.. last year also 4 or 5 seniors opted for big frames .. this time also 2 or 3 people can give money for big frames .. you will pay 1100/- if you want big frames ". (Note: This amount got increased to 1150/- later , poor sir couldnt get them framed for 1100/- and the honest soul that he was, promptly increased the rate to 1150/-)

I wasnt sure how many people would go for big frames. the amount was a staggering double of the normal ones.. moreover he would take only 2 big frames :)) .

Then next comes the propaganda phase .. Saroj Sarkar calls the person who should collect the money and tells him "Be careful abt who is giving money for big frames.. make sure they can draw. Because later the Dean will check the drawings of people who get A grade." (see the connection?)What a statement!! and the statement did pay off too..:)

When time did come to collect the amount and handover it to Him.. the statistics were astonishing.. 22 people out of 39 people in the course paid for a big frame !!! and Mr. Sarkar dint have ne problem with this ('at most2 or 3 people can have big frames ' ;) ) I paid 600 for small frames. The end total was somewhere near 40,000/- .. and to think that all this was spent in 2 days in room numbers 302 and 303.. funny

Someone asked Him.. Sir .. what are these big frames .. i mean we have drawn things on A4 size sheets .. how are u going to make them big frame size .. Saroj Sarkar says ".. thats no problem .. I WILL DRAW THE PAINTINGS FOR BIG FRAME PEOPLE" ... ever heard of this phenomenon?
The idea of a student buying a painting from a real artist for a fine arts course is revulsive enough.. here it is at a different level ! the artist turns out to be the course instructor!. And it was what happened here... when the time for the exhibition did come .. all the big frames paintings were seen by the persons whose names were etched on them for the first time on the exhibition day itself. Except a single big frame, EACH OF THE BIG FRAME WAS DRAWN NOT BY THE STUDENTS OF THE COURSE, BUT BY THE PROFESSOR HIMSELF.

There were two midsems (drawing + viva) ... the results of which will never come out. The image Mr.Saroj wanted to create in the minds of people was that he was in complete control of the grades.. you can do nothing to change it .. (you may draw extraordinarily well , write midsems A class .. nething .. those results never come out. So till the grading day you never know where you stand in the class, i bet even He doesnt know the standings and it is to his convenience that those results are not given out.. he can always justify a bad grade at the end saying u did poorly in midsem1 or mid1 viva while the truth is u dint pay high , and u never know how others did in the xams ).

This year, the professor `extended` the curriculum to include pot painting. It was to be done in groups of four. our group wasnt in his favourite list, only 1 of the 4 went for a big frame.When we asked for his opinion on our pot on the last but one day of the course.. this is what he told us .."this is hopeless, ur picture is too small. Where is Nataraj in this painting ? Now that ur primary picture is bad and u cant do nething more abt that, draw some flowers well at the borders"

On the last day , a guy from our group goes to the professor and says 'sir, can i pay money for bigframe now ..'(the deadline to pay the money was over loong back) he actually was getting ready with some stories abt how he missed to pay the money before the deadline... but 'when u pay to saroj sarkar, u dont need to bother to xplain.. he will take nething ,netime'. he says .. 'hmm.. lemme see.. (takes a list) already 22 people have paid for big frames .. 23 .. no problem .. you can pay .. can u pay it right now?' He pays the money ( xtra 550/- )and then he calls the professor to our Nataraj pot saying .. sir we did some modifications after ur comment last day... plz see if it is ok now... Sarkar comes over to the pot and says " Wonderful composition ! nice colors . this picture is nice " .. the changes we did were minimal.. i think that the only thing that changed was that one person in the group paid xtra bucks!

The professor tied up everything in the course with a threat abt the grades. "you volunteer for the exhibition .. or ur grades are with me."
Finally the grades have come and as expected there were 25 A grades( 22 ppl paid for big frames and AFAIK only one person who paid for big frame missed an A , 2 people got B, and the rest got A- )

Now the analysis :) , how could he do all this?

1) How did he escape the student feedback forms ?
By the time the students got their feedback forms, there was a widespread talk that .. he will come to know if we write badly abt him. why take a risk with a 5 credit course ! (This could easily have been avoided if the management makes it clear that the feedback forms will not go into the hands of the professors before the sem is over). So evrione ended writing "the prof is great. we love the course "

2) How is he going to escape the complaints abt his taking money ?
He gives you no reason to complain. He gives the highest number of As and A-s in his limit. (it is said that the dean has to okay the grades of hssms ) And the only people who have bad grades are in a serious minority that they cant approach the authorities for fear of being contradicted by the other ppl of the course who have got good grades.Moreover nearly evrione knows that the grades are for sale before they take the course.(and there will be some who take the course specifically for this reason ..)
The professor also takes care to maintain good relations with students who have some voice.
This time the precautions he took were ... 'invite evrione in the staff to the exhibition.. but if the dean is not very interested .. dont ask him a second time' . This is because even a child who looks at the drawings can say that these were drawn by a profesional. and he dint want the dean to find that.. He tries to make up for it by donating half of our drawings(which we did draw) to the institute ! If you got a big frame, then you dont go to the dean because u yourself have paid in anticipation of a good grade. If you get an A or A- grade you dont complain because , you cant lose your sgpa. And if you still want to complain .. you have this feeling that the Dean will ask why he wasnt approached before and why we dint write all these in the feedback form.So this circle goes on.

The funny thing is that .. this guy (sarkar) wanted to take a course Advanced Fine Arts during this semester.. he wanted a round the year income.. but sees that not many are interested in taking a course under him again. so he gives an offer.. if 14 people out of this course take my next course .. then 11 of those 14 people will get an A next semester.. (this is because 14 is the minimum number of students required for a course). He stoops to ne level to earn money..

It is not because i got an A- that i have written all this .. my reaction would have been the same in ne case.. because this is not the way we were taught things happen. I never knew you could buy a professor, a grade or a course. What actually drove me to write this is that the best artist in the class ends up getting an A- and a guy who is AIR 2nd in B.Arch ends up with a B all because they stood for morals.. I have heard some people say that the frames and the paintings we got are worth the money.. i say .. i dont care if the frame i have in my room is worth 600/- i never asked for it .. there is some dumb painting somewhere worth 10,000/-.. will you buy it? No.. it may be worth it .. but u dont have nething to do with that.. The feeling that a person with these morals controls a chunk(5 credits) of my future is unexplainable.. The course turned out to be rubbish(learnt nothing), costly, results independent of ur performance and full of hardwork(dissertaion, portfolio, pot painting, exhibition ). There is no reason why neone should like to take that course. Hope my juniors are reading this.

If Saroj Sarkar happens to read this blog, then i want him to know this 'you dint earn the money u got through that course ,.. neway keep the change '

My take on life!

chutneys

Coding after a long time!

Fine Arts : The Anatomy of a Fraud.