Bloggable Extracts from My Masters’ Thesis – I

This is from the preface.

When I joined the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, I did not have a computer of my own. I soon realised, like everyone else, that a substantial amount of learning here would require a computer: I would have to read and find journal articles; write term papers and assignments; make presentations on powerpoint and friends on Orkut (later facebook); find time to watch movies (at least some of which were connected to academic courses) and documentaries; learn new softwares and the technique of productively wasting time by getting into pseudo-intellectual arguments – all of which required a computer. Thankfully, the department provided a Department Computing Facility (DCF), an air-conditioned room with the most advanced computers I had ever worked on, 19 inch flat screen et. al. The fact that an overgenerous PhD scholar called Nalin used to sit there till late in the night meant that all assignments could be completed just in time.

In the second semester, I fought with my parents to buy a laptop, which, as expected, did not contribute much to my grades, but instead allowed me explore the depths of several Tera Bytes of stuff shared on the institute Local Area Network. The laptop served me well till about a year and a half, but went Kaput on a rainy day, after rain water miraculously found its way inside the laptop bag. Devastated, I had no option but to return to the DCF. There were assignments to be done, projects to be submitted, and movies to be seen. This continued till I went to Germany for an exchange semester, where I saved some money from my meagre scholarship, and bought a laptop again. Buying the laptop meant that very little was left for basic expenses and that most travelling plans had to be shelved. Still, it was worth the sacrifice, I thought.

Except that two months later, the laptop fell from my study-table, and its 15” screen got damaged. It still would work, but the screen would be blank. Thankfully, my German university also provided a similar facility as the DCF at the department, and work did not suffer much. I made very good friends with a mechanical engineer from South Korea, who treated me with countless sandwiches he got from home, and whose Master’s dissertation I proofread and edited (which was in English, a language he had little mastery over). Nevertheless, the laptop was repaired when I got back to India (at half the cost it would have taken in Europe), except that (yes, again!) in February 2011, it was stolen from the computer lab in my department. Most of the work of this Master’s project was on that laptop, and I had no back-ups. 5 years of collected papers, articles, movies and music were lost (some of which were so difficult to find), a loss that I would perhaps never recover from. I sometimes want to listen to a particular song, only to later realise that I no longer have it, and that is inaccessible on the internet. The same with many academic papers, which were requested from friends who had access to them (IIT Madras, despite its robust online journal access library, still lacks access to some important journal collections, such as ProjectMuse, LexisNexis or WileyOnline and many articles in even the repositories we subscribe to are behind pay walls). Thankfully, I could still manage to complete this thesis and do other important tasks thanks to the computer lab that the department had generous funded. At no point in my time have I been grateful to public facilities.

While doing research for this thesis, I have often thought about public facilities such as computer labs and their ability to provide “protection” to people who are careless with their belongings (or those who often seem to be suffering from terrible bad luck) like me. There are many more who need such facilities in the department not because they are careless but because they cannot afford computers or a laptop. One could, in principle, attack such facilities on various grounds. For instance, it is easy to argue that these facilities, with so many computers and air conditioners are a waste of taxpayer’s money. One could also argue that if someone lost their computer or could not afford it, too bad, but that’s how life is: harsh. Or point out to the fact that students just play games, chat and facebook, thus wasting these precious facilities (which, to be fair, is not uncommon). Or ask if this form of assistance can be given in a more “efficient” way – as full or partial grants to poorer students with meritorious grades, or restricting entry to the labs for only a few who “deserve” and “really need” these facilities (thus reducing the number of PCs that would need to be provided). Indeed, these are important questions, and none of them have easy answers (hopefully, this study would help to answer some of these questions in a slightly different domain). There is much to be improved here, and we are already involved in a protracted debate on whether current ways of social protection are adequate or enough or to how best to achieve the goals we seek to achieve. But what cannot be denied, however we may enable everyone to have access to computers in an academic department (or provide social protection in a society) that these facilities are important, and that they do enable careless souls like me to write theses like these.

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