Now and Then

18th august 2003: GIET, Gunupur, Rayagada, Orissa 

       This is the 1st day of a new session in a private engineering college in south Orissa. Young boys and girls from near and far who have sought admission in B.Tech course in different disipline gathered in the small auditorium to attend the orientation program and to listen the long, boring speeches of the chairman and teachers of the college. Many of them are accompanied by their parents. Most of them looked frightened and for the rest of the boys and girls the facial expression was a mixture of joy and sorrow. A young boy of 18 year is standing all alone in the end of the auditorium and listening to the speeches mindlessly. His parent couldn't attend the orientation program because they had to rush back home. After sometime both the audience and the speakers got bored of their respective jobs and finally the orientation program ended and a packet containing some snacks were distributed. The boy didn't had breakfast, it was around noon and as soon as he got the packet, he felt relaxed and rushed outside to have a look in to the content of the packet, which soon became history.

         So this was the day when the engineering career of this young man started and the next four years of his life in that college were quite eventful. As the first batch of a new technical university along with ill informed teachers and sluggish college management there were difficulties all around. No body was aware of the expected questions, lack of experience, lack of enthusiasm made the classes boring and a large chunk of the prescribed syllabus remains still untouched by the teachers. The young man worked up to his limit to understand the basic of subjects and eventually after lot of rise and fall he managed to successfully complete the degree.   

18th august 2010: Thapar University, Patiala, Punjab

               The academic session has long been started. The 18 year old boy has now grown up to a 25 yr old man, with blackened eyes, rough beard. Currently he is pursuing master’s degree in instrumentation engineering. He is heading towards the nava nalanda library to spend a couple of hours with thick books of fuzzy control system and power plant engineering. He has to draft one research paper which has to be sent to a IEEE symposium. It is the usual routine life in the campus. The final year M.E (instrumentation) student is trying hard to do some good research in the area of process control and publish his research in a couple of reputed and referred journals. Recently he went to London to attend world congress of engineering where his paper was published. He gave presentation there and enjoyed a week in London. It was a welcome break for him from the hectic life in campus. But for the well deserved break he worked in grave yard shifts to raise some money. The total expenditure came out to be around 1 lakh for 1 week. The majority was the air fare and the registration fees. As the news of his London trip was spread, he received two things. One is congratulations and other one is sky high expectations. It is late in the night and he has to design a neural network based feed forward controller for a process control application. the neural network feed forward controller is based on back propagation algorithm which has 4 input neurons in input layer, 1 hidden layer and 1 output neuron in output layer. This algorithm has to be simulated in simulink. It is a tough job, but after a pain sticking 3-4 hours, around 3:30 AM he managed to get some ground and completed his job. But the designed controller is not giving any specific improvement in the step response of the process. he is too tired even to think, what is wrong. He signed out from the network, closed his laptop and switched off the light only to dash in to the bed. The small orpat made clock showed 4:30 AM and the alarm set to 8 AM. Darkness prevails in the room and the boy falls asleep immediately. The life moves on..