This train of thought could have been easy to explain if it were fourth year cynicism speaking. But it isn't that! I could be tempted to call it professor cynicism rerouted through my system and additionally seasoned with a healthy sprinkling of my own. But it isn't that either!

One Friday in Mid-October, a group of us students were kept waiting outside the Dean Students Office for more than two hours, only to be told at the end of it, in no pleasant terms, that our plan to start an FM Radio station in IITM was pure wishful thinking. That meeting is the reason this issue of The Fourth Estate does not carry an article about the status of that effort! But FM Radio is not the point here. What was said at that meeting is.

It started out appearing to be the outlet of a mind 'frustrated' (to use the Dean's own words) at the IITian tendency to 'buy' greatly sidelining the tendency to 'build'. It started out appearing to be another of those diatribes crying hoarse about the deterioration of the system, and about those being the days. It started out appearing to be a lot of things that the arrogance of youth has made us immune to.

But now, many days later, that angry (rather, again, to use the Dean's words, "not angry but frustrated") face and tone of an unyielding figure of authority no longer bother me. The disappointment of a setback no longer taunts me. All I have left to grapple with is the inescapable wisdom and relevance of his words.

Maybe I should have spoken to the Dean again about the points he had raised that day, before I set out to write this article. But I think it's more important that we students reflect upon this matter ourselves, given a starting point, than read what would appear to us to be a discourse to be cheerfully ignored.

I am not qualified to talk about whether IITians of previous generations were any better in these respects. But even in absolute terms, I believe we have a lot of potential to live up to. Why don't we build anything ourselves? There are simple problems lying all around us, waiting to be provided elegant engineering design solutions. It could be building something as simple as a small solar powered water desalination unit or even a machine that paints the broken median lines on the roads. These were the Dean's examples. And the more you think about it, the more problems you find that we students could easily take on. I later thought about the idea of students working on building vacuum cleaners or laundromats for their hostels, instead of fighting their Social Secretaries at the General Body Meetings and vetoing their budgets time after time. Maybe my examples were not that good, but the point is that anyone could think of many more things we could design - for our benefit or for the institute's or society's; and definitely for our own satisfaction.

"What happened at Shaastra?" the Dean asked, "We raked in sponsors and money and had a lot of competitions. Did a single design come out of it? Was anything built? No! And yet I get on stage and call it a success!" This is sensitive ground. I wouldn't rush in to take the Dean's side on this. A lot of careful reflection is in order upon this particularly. It may be alleged that this year's Shaastra was all about the sponsorship and the hoardings and the ISO certification; that it was about the glorified achievements of us multi-faceted IITians in our management and marketing efforts, while our engineering efforts limped along trying to catch up with the spotlight. Well, let's not grudge it that. Sponsorship and publicity and quality management are extremely essential to laying Shaastra a solid foundation. And a wonderful job was done in those departments.

The following were a few innocent idealistic questions I asked myself after listening to the Dean: Aren't we forgetting what it's actually about? Shouldn't Shaastra be more about events like ENGenious, for instance, than Bullseye? And shouldn't ENGenious, in turn, be more about building working solutions than proposing designs on paper? Should we be compromising the ideal format of our events just so we can invite more participation? Shouldn't participation value take precedence over spectator value? Shouldn't more events be about many people working together to build little engineering marvels in their own right than about many more people applauding Power Point presentations? And if that means knocking a couple of zeroes off the number of outstation participants or amount of sponsorship, so be it! Can we put the spirit of engineering (no letters capitalised!) first and adopt this new priority system?

The fact remains it isn't easy to put these ideas into practice. These issues have been thought of. And while I believe events at Shaastra rather successfully catered to a whole lot of needs and tastes, I distinctly felt the negligence of one - the need to build stuff that achieves, rather than just does, something. There were a lot of informal events that involved building, but they are different. There was nothing to give me the one almost otherwordly feeling I got as I saw the paper bridge last year. All that came close was the screening of the videos at How Things Work. How much greater the feeling could have been if we could make something, even if it were simple enough to build in three days - a lot of small useful somethings, if not one huge something! Shouldn't Shaastra grow to incorporate this as well?

But that will enough about a heightened sense of engineering during three days. What about around the year? The Dean spoke of the (as yet unnamed) upcoming student association for engineering affordable design solutions to socially relevant problems. He says he's willing to give it all the support that it needs. But how many people on campus any longer even feel enough like engineers to want to be a part of it? I like to think there are a lot of such people out there who have it in them. But they first need to wash away the typical IITian cynicism that their seniors handed them down upon induction into the institute.

And yet, this isn't to say we don't work like true engineers in a group every now and then. I've seen three Lit-Soc Fetes and several Hostel Nites. I've seen students build all sorts of structures, work with all sorts of materials, make all sorts of circuits and write all sorts of programs - in short, put to use the same workshop and laboratory experience that they'll most vociferously disown as useless otherwise. And where does this motivation come from? I think we students would make a superconducting network or build a cyclotron if our hostel's Schroeter Volleyball gold depended on it!

How hard, in that case, would it be to get our collective brains together and work on the multitude of problems that may not exactly be the biggest facing the world, but which we could nonetheless derive an incredible sense of completeness from working on? We IITians don't need to work on complicated pretentious things like that cyclotron so we can live up to our complicated pretentious image. The simple will do. And will be a whole lot more useful.

Remember the kind of problems that inspired school kids typically tried to build humble, cardboard-and-wood, only-spanner-and-screwdriver-in-hand solutions to. Some people branded them geeks for it. Some others said, "That kid will make it to IIT!" Many of us did make it. Think about that.