Edition 50

EDITORS’ NOTE
In the very last semester of my tryst with engineering, I learnt that we live in a VUCA world -
Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous - basically a corporate jargon for “Hey, it’s crazy out
there!”, and to be fair, the world is at peak VUCA right now; but then again, a crisis is the only way
we can keep remembering what good is supposed to feel like.
The last day I walked into college, I began to appreciate the world around me a lot more when I
was not surrounded by quad digit population density. I drank in the beauty of the flowery verges,
the majesty of the memories that suddenly sprang up on me and the sweet sound of birdsong as
the sun set on another day. With each footstep embedded with a funnel of memories, scattered
across the spectrum of time.
However, I’m confident that none of us could have negotiated life in these four years without the
people we’ve met here - particularly the ones you’re ending this chapter with. For one, they are not
based simply on proximity or the coincidence of attending the same class or participating in the
same events; these are people you’ve actively sought out and befriended because of your rapport,
at a time when most of us have zero compunction to walk away from people. As you move ahead
in life, your network becomes your net worth.
It is important to keep in mind that in a rapidly evolving world, the half life of an engineering
graduate is 2-5 years - which is a perpetual reminder to reinvent yourself at every step of the way.
Arbitrary grades have, for years, been slipped into notional result sheets accumulated through
biannual examinations which are notoriously garnished each time with ideas like the due diligence
of a tiger on campus or the presence of unsocial elements in the area that begin and end their
lives as enthusiastically supported rumors in a fruitless effort to yield just one more day (night) of
preparation to squander. Three years older and wiser me realises the importance of academics.
Actual academics and real knowledge that circumference outside the diameters of classrooms and
exam halls and the only kind of activity that can induce the change we want to see.
The conventional education structure and the typical collegiate life have been one of the prominent
victims to the aftermath of the pandemic - with screens constantly dominating our ever fluctuating
span of attention and the absence of classroom interaction - it’s safe to say that college will never
be the same.
Among other casualties has been the extracurricular prospect of this life that we once knew, and
experienced. The 50 th Edition of DTU Times is a compendium of weeks of effort, sustained over
caffeinated nights (or rather early mornings), in a rendezvous to find a new working cadence in the
virtual setting. With this, I present to you the golden jubilee edition that has been 9 months in the
making - an ode to the class graduating during an unprecedented pandemic - in the era of virtual
goodbyes.
निरपेक्षो निर्विकारषो निर्भरः शीतलाशयः ।
अगाधबुद्धिरक्ुब्धो भव द्िन्ात्रवासनः ॥
DTU TIMES | February 2020- May 2020 | 3