The first Bhavan you see when walking into campus from the gate is Ashok Bhavan. I remember that this was where we "checked in" as freshers when we arrived a month prior to the start of the first semester, and where we were assigned our random rooms.
The first thing that strikes you immediately is also one of the big take-away messages of the trip: the vastly increased security on campus. The ground floors of Bhavans have been walled up and barricaded with grills. Apparently, with half the students possessing computers in their rooms, BITS has felt the need to beef up security.
Here's a closer look at the grills, which vary by Bhavan,
on Budh Bhavan:
I'd talked to friends who'd visited BITS recently
and if I heard one complaint it was the ugliness of
the grills. The ones on Budh are clearly ugly.
The ones on some of the others, such as Ashok, are
a little more tastefully done, but leave a wide enough
gap at the top to allow anyone with modest athleticism
to climb through. So it's a little hard to understand
what's been gained.
In addition to the grills, the space between some Bhavan's has been walled up with a grim grey wall of East German appearance:
Whatever you think of the grills, this
interlocking wall can't be good. It couldn't
possibly stop a determined intruder, and it
makes anyone wonder whether Pilani has run out
of its signature wheat-colored paint.
Here below is a picture of the Gym, looking exactly the same and, further below, another picture from the past: some kids in NCC. As a snooty city-slicker, I must admit I always looked down on the NCC as, well, just too disciplinarian and too military. Now that I have two kids, I sometimes wonder if a bout of Scouts wouldn't do them some good. How things change.
Here below are a couple of views of the Gandhi/Shankar
intersection and the Ram/Budh one beyond. Or, if you
remember the statues, Patel and Gandhi.
Now, here's a pleasant surprise: Gandhiji has his specs on.
This either means the specs have been firmly welded on, or
it says something about the current students' ability
to resist temptation. Both Sridhar and I think it it's
the latter. More about students later.
How much modernization and technology has come to campus?
The Bhavans are now, thanks to generous Alumni donations
and a gift from the Birlas, completely wired. Each room has
an ethernet drop and about 1,500 rooms have PC's in them.
Every common room has cable TV. And of course, everyone
has cellphones. Here's Sridhar chatting with his family
in Delhi. Note the road signs on the roundabout and
the number of bicycles beyond.
Before coming, I'd heard rumors about cars and
motorcycles roaring about campus like a busy Mumbai
intersection. I'm happy to report that this is not true
at all. Yes, there are cars on campus, but they're all
driven either by faculty or by visitors such as parents
picking up their kids from Balika Vidyapeeth.
But even these, say, about one every 10 minutes,
aren't frequent enough to radically transform the
streets on campus, even if the sign pictured below
conjures up visions of a campus gone mad with automobiles.
Here's a solitary SUV piking down the road past
Shankar Bhavan.
What has changed, however, is the number of bicycles
on campus. Crossing between the M-Block and C-Block is
tricky just after class has ended. You have to pick your way through
carefully through the swarm of
bikes clattering by. While bikes are hardly the dystopian
nightmare that cars would be on the campus, they still
make the landscape and its inhabitants look busy, even
harried. Seeing these bipedaled busybodies dashing about,
I would probably be guilt-driven into quickening my walking pace.
I think wistfully of the unhurried pace of our time,
especially for those of us, well, less academically driven.
Now, 20 years later with kids, a busy workweek and a full
schedule on the weekend, where's that time when you need it?