DILEMMA OF ENGINEERS

An air of lull blanketed this cozy place which housed a gamut of pissed off faces jabbering with frenzied gestures, a set of provoking creatures (toppers as in) strutting around “ common yaar we too sabotaged our exam…loosing 5 marks can u believe it……oooo shit forgot to mention this detail do u think it might count against me”  and two girls gaping at the thali placed on the table in front of them with a sense of what seemed like an introspection-

Bunny: come on duck just push that thing through your food canal .25rs buddy, I haven’t ordered it to sit staring at.

Duck: what went wrong??? I slogged the whole day hardly slept for more than 2 hours yet I goofed up………..

Bunny: well!! Slogging must have been our motto right from the beginning of the semester not 24 hours prior to the impending catastrophe. But don’t feel guilty we indeed have been working our way through other stuff………..

Duck: (interrupted) other stuff??????  Chuck it alright is it going to hold any credibility after all in this place which worships 80% scorers. You agree or not but we’ve made a grave mistake poking our noses into robotics, tpp’s and tech fests.

Bunny: I least expected you to take sides with this cliché hypo critic thinking I mean we’ve landed in these activities not because we were confident that we could manage academics and non-academics juxtapose, but rather because if we weren’t engaged in those we wouldn’t be ourselves. The semester starts with a 30 marks minor and there starts your marathon into the ordeal of eternal practicals, tests, assignments and before you gasp for some more breath you find yourselves face to face with an ugly demon ‘the semester exams’ this is so inhumane.

Duck: why crib about the system when you know you can’t change it. It’s better we plan our activities accordingly, see if we could squeeze time for those and if found impossible just dump them. After all it’s that highly esteemed 75%+ stamp that’s going to fetch you a job and some respect from your relatives.

Bunny: you’ve got it wrong duck, a company does not rate a college in terms of the no. of 75% scorers it has churned out , but rather in terms of the no. of accolades it’s students have achieved in various innovative projects, national level competions and inter college fests.

Duck: but don’t you see through the irony of this whole situation the outside world recognizes the   college due to people like us but allows only those high aggregates to sit for the aptitude test. All your achievements will hold no water in their judgment.

Bunny: But that’s exactly what irks me the most and the worst part of it is a handful of people responsible for this are not addressing the issue in a way it needs to addressed. Moreover our paper setters seem to be more interested in testing our assimilatory and presentation skills ……… creativity and scientific temperament seems to have lost it’s stand.

Duck: precisely ……… the methodology to study for tests is poles apart from the way one needs to study for application based understanding.

Bunny: yeah maybe we’d find open book tests and challenging assignments more interesting than scrabbling down experiments in the practical files.

Duck: ahhhhh…something I hate to do. But good that you cribbed about practical files it has just reminded me of a promise we made a week ago to submit our analog practical files by tomorrow.

Bunny: oh common you talk as though we’ve had a past record of keeping up the promises we make to our teachers, breaking it once more wouldn’t hurt ……I am feeling lazy …come let’s go for  a movie.

Duck: no…not at all bunny ( literally dragging her by her arm)  …..no excuse to be lazy now …..I don’t want ourselves to get chucked out of the lab once again…….