We, the new editors of The Fourth Estate, cannot claim to have caught the new academic year while still fresh. However, there have been enough changes, and of enough significance so they never really become stale. February 2002 may be considered the beginning of IIT Madras' colossal, and elaborately calculated step-hop-and-leap backwards in time and evolution. And even many months later, we students seldom tire of reflecting upon the how and why-on-earth of these changes. Some students among us make it their business to curse IIT Madras and the circumstances that brought them here. They now almost revel in the amount of slander that IITM is helping generate for itself, thereby grounding, and furthering all their freshman year theories about conservativeness as a function of latitude.

Whatever be the theories that attempt to encompass the dynamics of this bundle of contradictions, one fact is simply too evident to ignore - the management has absolutely no trust in the students and their sense of responsibility, and feels compelled by some as yet unknown logic, to control their freedom and power.

A glaring example of how little the authorities think of the students was amply exhibited last semester when the all famous "11 o' clock rule" was imposed. Students were to sign a register if they returned to their hostels after 11 o' clock at night. The reason for being late was to be given too. Wisely it was discontinued. It had to be - the registers were filled with reasons like, "Had gone out." Like we wouldn't have known! One of the best reasons we saw in a register was, "Saw a light... went out to investigate. It was an alien spaceship... made friends with extra terrestrial intelligence." What good did that whole exercise do, except make the residents of the hostel feel like they are inferior beings, reminiscent of some kind of Big Brother suppression?

The one act which really takes the cake was the Talibanesque restriction on the movement of girls last semester. Apparently, if a girl returned to the hostel after 11 o'clock she would have to sign in a register. If she signed in late five times, a letter would be sent to her parents saying she was late. What are parents supposed to think, with an Institute letterhead diaphanously hinting that their daughter is up to something? "If you want to work late in the lab get a letter from your prof. If you are out for a movie... ummm then it is a bad thing isn't it?" What did the girls ever do to deserve such vague, definitely sexist submission protocols? Wisely, even that autocratic ruling was revoked, but not until the girls finally raised their voice, sometimes literally. But even now, girls are not allowed in boys hostels after 9 o' clock, while previously such a time limit was never set, in fact, never required.

Sometimes the powers that be never realize what students want. Most of the time, the student body is clueless about the diktats read out to them at SAC meetings. There might as well be a SAC IP. There is no discussion, only unilateral communication. Is it any surprise that IITians, always ready to lap up a freebie how much ever trouble they have to put up with, do not come to SAC meetings to get their free soft drinks?

The problem is that most of the time it is only the students' diatribe against the authorities that is always heard. If only there were no regular breaches of the discipline code that we saw so often last year. The Dean especially had an unenviable job of trying to maintain semblance among some real flared up egos and tempers. Simple message to students: You be good, we'll be good.

But then again, the one development or the opposite that doesn't seem to be reasonably backed by instances of students' irresponsibility with freedom, is the advancement of the ban on powered vehicles on campus. The historic SAC meeting called to discuss, or as earlier noted, dictate the rule, remains probably the best attended and most heatedly argued ever. Entrants of year 2000 and later were reconciled to not being allowed to drive powered vehicles on campus, and prophecies of doom to our cultural and technical festivals abounded.

But the sudden advancement put a lot of entrants of 1999 in a fix as they had just bought vehicles since they would anyway be permitted to use them for one more year. But not a single plea of the students was heard at the meeting, and some of the lamest solutions ever to be suggested, were offered by the management. Your most ridiculous fancies involving auto-rickshaws and taxis may just be concurrent with what they thought would solve the imminent Saarang and Shaastra crisis. And about the electric vans, the less said, the better. So much for an institute of technology - not content with not solving the world's problems, we seem to further want to create problems that we cannot solve, so that in short, we cannot solve anybody's problems - not the world's, not ours.

Meanwhile, the promise of any form of networking in the hostels is two years old, and remained just as far from fulfillment as ever throughout these two years. So there are problems in implementation, and we are expected to be sympathetic. But we are supposed, again, to be an institute of technology, and are supposed to overcome. Instead, we remain the only IIT without room-to-room connectivity. Surely the others had their problems to deal with too. An intranet was promised, and is still eagerly awaited. The issue of Internet connectivity is still mired in indecision. The Alumni have long been promising to buy us 34Mbps of bandwidth and yet, during class hours everyday, one isn't to be surprised at speeds of a few hundred bytes per second.

Agreed, work towards the proposed intranet has finally begun in a few hostels. Students, who feel blessed that even so much is coming their way, very uncomplainingly put up with up to three days of drilling in their walls, and all the dust liberated in the process. That's the small price we must pay for living in hostels which are a few decades old. What one fails to comprehend, however, is why Sharavati Hostel, which was built only in 2001, was built with absolutely no forethought, and it must now break a few hundred hearts to see holes drilled in those precious tiles and walls!

And yet, even this is a great improvement over the situation two years ago. One isn't sure whether to commend the improvement or lament what in absolute terms is clearly a pathetic state of affairs. The only resort a student has in the hostel zone is the moon lab, now reduced to a monument to the depressing callousness with which students maintain a facility that's entirely under their control. The coordinators have done an admirable job in keeping it running against all odds. It is the users, however, who have seen to it that barely one or two computers have both a working keyboard and a working mouse.

And now coming to the new academic year, some of us were sufficiently forewarned, that Sarayu was to become a fresher hostel for boys, thereby upsetting what was the best scheme for interaction and mixing. However, the sudden reallocation of new students out of Godavari and Mandakini made for a great amount of disillusionment. Godavari now has 54 M.Sc students, and Mandakini has 45 Preparatory Course students. And in being denied a regular, randomly chosen batch of B.Tech students, they have had to suffer a one-year-wide chasm in what has been a strong Lit-Soc tradition in both hostels. Of course, it may be understood that Lit-Soc futures are clearly the last thing on the minds of the Hostel Management. But even the randomness that usually ensures fairness seems to be suspiciously absent this year. It almost seems like some shadowy figures there are chuckling in self-satisfaction at creating what they hope will pass as a curious coincidence. But what is one to think when all but two or three freshmen out of sixty in Saraswathi are localites, leaving two wings deserted every weekend?

Finally, lest we carry the mood of dissatisfaction too far, we must acknowledge the few changes that mildly offset the barrage of seeming punishments. All of them somehow, have to do with the places that we eat in looking and feeling better. The boys have rather well renovated messes. The girls have a very sophisticated, if nothing more, new common mess. We all get pure water to drink. And everybody has a brand new Patisserie and Nescafe stall; same old Quark, though. And life goes on, caring little for whether or not, at the end of the day we are a happy lot!