A DySoc Episode

    I attended a class in Dynamics of Social Change, which I and frankly speaking, no one had attended in the past three months except for that very loci looking loci girl who nobody talked to, except that even more loci looking loci guy. Not being exactly condescending towards the course (which deals with very abstract stuff most of the time) or locis, I'm not interested in both and had only gone to see the results of the report I'd turned in about a week back.

   So as fate would have it, the prof was talking about social disorganization and delinquency, how violence and anti-social activities are a result of nuclear, broken families and the cybernetic society and what not. He drew a chain: Nuclear families -> Loneliness -> Boredom -> Anti-social stuff. Forgive me for being alarmed, but this boredom was exactly the state I had been in for the past couple of months in this very boring semester. To cap it all, he mentioned, "You guys are living in the hostel, alone and bored. Suddenly a friend comes and says, "Hey, let's do something fun", and before you know it, you're doing something anti-social on the internet."

   I decided to attend all his classes from then on. I also decided to go to the temple that day. 

   Now before you fatalists jump to the worst conclusion at the drop of a LAN cable and conclude that I'm sitting for hours together in front of the dirty screen and wasting away my life blogging, here's a bit of background info.

   The mess secretary (or was it mess representative?) of VKB mess is my good friend APS, who won by a slim margin and brought in change. This also included 'progressive steps towards transparency and dialogue' like the creation of a facebook group for the same. What he did not foresee were the far-reaching consequences of trying to reach out to a lot of angry, depressed and dead  tongues. 

  The average second-yearite is filled with a lot of adolescent angst simply because he's not a tween yet and thinks people aren't giving him/her enough social recognition required of a sophomore. His tongue has also gone through various stages denial, anger and attempted suicide in the past year, reinforced with a lot of cliched mess jokes floating around. So as soon as one particular pissed-off average second-yearite posted, "APS you sucks!", it snowballed into a major dis-the-mess-rep competition on an open forum which our poor fellow simply couldn't handle. 

   Before you know it, this small grammatical error became a slogan of sorts, with people declaring a solemn "APS you sucks" instead of saying grace before having their food. If the food was extremely good, "APS you rocks" replaced it.

   An idle mind is the devil's workshop. Me and a few friends sat down and created an internet meme "for fun" with his photo. We also added "Went to mess. You simply sucks" and "Mess employees extra friendly? Mess food extra bad" and other diabolically thought-of captions for it, and shared it on DC, like textbook A-holes. It was an evil thing to do and the DySoc prof made us feel ashamed for it. Would I have done such a thing like that if I were in school? Nope. What were we thinking of anyway? Went and deleted the whole thing later.

PS: Sad part is, he wasn't even responsible for the food part but for general functioning of the mess. Very sad.

Happy part is we weren't that bored (Read anti-social) enough and didn't make the mistake of posting it on facebook. So nobody saw it. Whew.
PPS: DySoc is awesome dude.
PPPS: Still have a couple of memes left. Message me if you want!

A Timely Update

Warning: This is not an advertisement. Drop that frown and listen.
   I was Stumbling, because I wasn't watching Modern Family and I still had another half hour to kill and facebook wasn't coming up with anything interesting apart from outdated re-posts by friends who were living a light year away and a century behind. Remind me to post about how joblessness/availability of net connection in rooms ensures that a small, elitist (and therefore, condescending) group of college-goers stay internet savvy and  always get wind of the latest viral video/meme, way before their cavemen friends.
   Lets not digress. So, I was Stumbling.
   Well, there was this website. Its called The Music Map.
   What does it do? Its like Cleverbot,  a self-adapting system, but this one learns about the outer world by asking its visitors what they like and what they don't like. Like their music tastes. And based on entries by millions of visitors, it suggests bands to listen to, based on your favorite bands. It nicely puts all these 'similar' bands on a nice "map", the funda being the closer two artists are, the greater the probability that people will like both artists. 
   Now I'm actually a stickler for not classifying music by genre (Read "The Grand Unified Theory") but the Music Map is a pretty kickass way of running into bands you had never listened to and you never thought you would like. It also tells you about the powerful force of joblessness of millions and millions of people, in creating a database of thousands of thousands of bands. There you go. 
   Do check it out on http://www.gnoosic.com/ 
   And if you haven't heard of Cleverbot either, go get some leaves, stones, sticks, some deer hide, a beard and a huge club. http://www.cleverbot.com/ is a "web application that uses artificial intelligence to hold conversations with humans". Yup, you can talk to him/her/hmm. And he/she/shh will talk to you.
    It's reported that the high suicide rates at Kanpur & Kharagpur can be primarily attributed to socially awkward students having hour long conversations with Cleverbot and asking themselves (to no end) what they are doing with their lives. Sad, no?


PS: Checkout Reddit too. And try inventing the wheel, life is not all about facebook.