Yaadein: Semester 3 (JU)

This semester started in late august 2005, due to the delay in the previous semester caused by the Semester Boycott. The earliest memory of this semester that I can recall was that of the first day, a particularly cloudy day, with me, Dripto and Souri sitting outside the department below the Jupiter Building and discussing an Ashes Test match. Soon the classes started. In this semester, unlike the previous two semesters, we had interesting subjects. There was Data Structures, which was taught by Prof Chandan Majumdar (CM). He taught better than the previously seen JU teachers, and gave programming assignments which had to be done in groups of two. My partner was Arpan, a particularly "aggressive" (a term which i am in no mood to explain here ;-)) guy when it came to assignments and projects. His "aggressive" behaviour caused him to be disliked by many classmates, but i managed fine with him, at least in this particular semester. We implemented linked lists, stacks, queues, heaps and even b-trees and 2-3 trees - structures i have never used after that :-P. Besides there were the sorting algorithms. It was hectic, but enjoyable.

The other subjects included digital logic which was taught by DKB (never knew the full name). His teaching was quite horrendous, but i liked the subject. In fact I loved it. And I also loved the electronic circuits, 555 timers, schmidt triggers and all which were taught by Manojit Mitra- a part-time faculty in JU (actually based in BE College, Sibpur). Although I did not use them subsequently in any project, and gradually forgot them, these two subjects instilled in me a love for what I was studying- Computer Science and Engineering- for the first time.

A particularly interesting experience of my college life was the project at IIM Calcutta. It started in this particular semester, and continued for two years. It all started when Sayan mentioned to me, Arpan and Arijit about Debasis Saha, an ex-faculty of JU, currently a faculty in IIMC, was looking for 3-4 students for a project. At that time i had absolutely no idea of what exactly a project was- "a food or a hair oil". But Sayan and Arpan, the two guys who were always 1 year ahead of the others in class particularly in matters related to going to US for phd, convinced me and Arijit that this was very important for our careers. Shortly before the first visit to IIM, I fell severely sick, and the other three went there. I joined them in our second visit. We boarded a S-31 bus from the 8B stand, and went through unknown roads to an unknown place called Joka- at the southern extremety of kolkata-where IIMC is located. We entered the campus and went to a building called "CAM center"- to the first floor. After waiting for some time in a air-conditioned, tidy but empty lounge, the prof called us in. He gave us a paper - "A survey on sensor networks" to read and prepare a presentation on it for the next meeting. He also asked us to write a C program to display some circles randomly moving around and occassionally overlapping- each of which represented the range of a moving sensor node. For the next few weeks we were busy trying to make sense of the paper- most of it made almost no sense to us at that stage. However after going through Tanenbaum's textbook on Computer Networks, it started to make some sense, and I started liking it. However, soon after this meeting Sayan dropped out, and was replaced by Souri.

In november 2005, there were again prolonged strikes in JU- on an issue which I have forgotten now. It was at this time that I started making close friendships with other groups in the class. Beyond my established circle of friends consisting of Sayan, Arpan, Souri, Swagato, Dripto etc, I got closely acquainted with the group of Debarshi, Chiradeep, Pinaki, Haimasree, Sourav and Anirban. Debarshi, Chiradeep and Sourav were computer-addicted, technology-obsessed guys, but all of them were nice and jovial. Pinaki was a peculiar character -a bit rustic in taste but with a weird sense of humour that made him loveable. Haimasree was a nice and sweet girl, always keen to talk about romance and relationships. Their company induced a joviality in my own behaviour, which had probably been missing till then.

In a nutshell, the third semester was important to me because 1) it was the first time i learned to love Computer Science 2) i got a new circle of friends and a new dimension -joviality- was added to my character 3) the IIM project started and 4) It was a semester full of peace and tranquility despite the rather hectic workload - a peace that i never felt again in the subsequent semesters in JU. In fact the subsequent semesters were often marred by tensions, as will be described later.