Mom comes back home after paying fees at NMIT and exclaims excitedy,”Rahul..sappadu(lunch in Tamil) costs only 12 rupees in your college. Now am relieved of packing lunch boxes for you!” Little, did I know what was in store? Hate it or love it, the modest lunch still continues to be the block buster in our canteen and I have filled my stomachs innumerable afternoons with the Nitte “delicacies”. Although of late I have shifted my allegiance to the lighter and spicier chats, on 22nd May,2011 for one last time had lunch. And that’s when I realized, I had to shell out 18 rupees, 6 rupees more than what I did 4 yours ago.Yes, Nitte has indeed come a long way.
Although change is inevitable in any living institution, seldom would any organization have witnessed a change of such humongous propositions as Nitte has and change in a span of 4 years is dramatic to say the least. 17 buses have become 22. 120 hostel rooms have become 160! The two storeyed building has become three! A separate dining hall for hostellers! The one building Nitte now will become a 2 building campus. And the grapevine has that an NRI canteen is under construction and the more interesting news is that a co-ed NRI hostel coming up in namma Nitte! 4 disciplines of engineering which was offered have now grown to 6! A research lab, a satellite tracking centre,innumerable clubs on entrepreneurship, various technical,cultural,extracurricular, cocurricular. You name it… have mushroomed. Some alive, some dead! Lecturers have started coming from IITs and IIScs! How Did I forget THE VTU demon is slayed, for good or bad, I don’t know..
Yet, all these changes are more cosmetic in nature. The biggest change to me is the psyche of the average Nitteite. And the contrast is striking when I compare some of my passed out seniors and the freshers in the college. Nitte’s fabled strikes have become a thing of the past. And the last real “strike” was when I was in first year, i.e. 2007 and from what I recollect, the seniors told me it was a meek replicas of some of the earlier ones. Think of a strike now!
Another thing strikingly absent in present day Nitte day is energy. Anaadyanta ’08….Dancers like Mahesh and Salmaan really got the crowd going. And the crowd came for the fest. Cut to the current fest, the only people glued to the stage were the alumnus. Most of the current students absent or were busy with their “present” other halves..;)
While once, classes were a part of college life, now classes have become college life. The autonomous rules made sure even the baddest boys of Nitte had an attendance of more than 75%. Well, do we have bad boys in Nitte any more?;)
While, most of us may go gaga over Nitte’s satellites, patents,researches,hacks,projects to me, we have lost the Nitte in us.
Did I forget chicks?;)
