Campus News – R&D Showcase

After a brief silence following the hustle-bustle of Felicity, the campus once again rose to activity. As the volunteers oscillated between Himalayas and Nilgiri for setting up the R&D showcase, and mobs of crazy students invented new colours and textures on Holi, the campus once again resonated with energy and enthusiasm.

The 3rd & 4th of March saw the institute hosting its Research and Development Showcase for the twelfth time since its beginning. The two-day event consisted of a showcase of selected exhibits and demonstration of research projects which showcased some of IIIT-H’s most recent developments in research and technology innovation. The main objectives for the showcase were to provide the visitors an opportunity to get firsthand experience about IIIT-H’s cutting-edge research and technology development, excite research interest in college and university students and faculty, help the industry discover IIIT-H’s innovative research and transformational technologies and identify areas for research collaboration with the institute. For the entire two days, “what’s new” was the talk of the town. With a huge participation of more than a thousand students from outside IIIT-H along with visitors from companies like Microsoft, Cisco etc, the event was a huge success on all the three fronts. Dr. Vijay Kumar Saraswat, Scientific Advisor to Defence Minister and Director General, New Delhi, was the Chief Guest for the showcase and delivered the inaugural lecture. The event featured over 200 exhibits and demonstrations and received overwhelming response from all sections of the targeted audience. Needless to say the event was a huge success, with the college looking forward to other such exhibitions in the future.

After the Research and Development Showcase, it was time to have some boundless fun. Holika Dehen was organized at the Felicity ground on 7 August at 9:30 pm. Dhulandi on the next day was celebrated with a great amount of zeal and animation (albeit arguably a little too much) at the football ground from 10 a.m. onwards. What started as a perfectly sane celebration – with people applying gulaal on others, playing with water, dancing and fooling around, soon turned into a perfect case study for thesis on behavior-of-caged-animals-when-let-loose. Each face looked like a wonderful idea of an abstract art painter, with the gamut of colours blurring the visage. People were thrown into mud, rolled over there, thrown again whenever they tried to clean themselves. The guys, half-naked, were chased and flogged with tattered t-shirts. The majority of girls giggled from the sidelines whereas a few joined the flogging ceremonies. “Anarchy”, someone might have said… but everyone present was having just too much fun for that!