In a world where youngsters are into buying selfie sticks, IITians in their first year buy drafters. Initially what seems to be a simple instrument of two perpendicular scales, it is well equipped with numerous plans of destroying the first 4 months at IIT.

Well, Engineering Drawing or ED(as IITians call it) isn’t all about drawing lines and circles, it’s all about testing one’s temperament to the very last bit. With a compass box equipped with instruments that could allow one to execute a full-proof murder, to type of pencils you have never heard of (HB, 1H , 2H and what not), it’s a sure shot recipe for destruction.

ED is a course which teaches you the real meaning of 1mm, since there is a convention in ED wherein letters written are of 7mm height and 5mm breadth. Breaking this convention is equivalent to a cardinal sin. The course starts with basic theory classes explaining the bits and bytes of the subject and professors forcing you to believe that ED is the “language” of engineers. And the lab tutorials are 3 hour long versions of the ‘Exorcist’,  ‘Shining’ and ‘Conjuring’ combined. This fun continues weekly for 4 long months, and the Satan regularly strikes in the form of quizzes, mid-sem and end-sem exams. 

Somehow we managed to learn the art, I mean language, to some extent and managed to pass, but fate came back to strike us in the form of Engineering Mechanics.

Mathematically defined, Engineering Mechanics (EM) course is like an exponentially increasing curve plotted with toughness against time. EM starts with discussing Kinematics and Newton’s Laws of Motion. These two topics play a very important role in an IITians life because they are the easiest topic in the lot and we start feeling nostalgic whenever EM topics are brought up. While we are in nostalgia, EM rides on its exponential curve and comes onto elasticity, a topic which probably no one studies because of its low stakes in JEE. Soon, we start regretting for not studying it during EM.

The road from here never gets easy. Weekly quizzes are as treacherous as they could be. EM quizzes have a special beauty, even the batch topper isn’t able to solve all the questions correctly in the given time which in turn affects all others as he won’t tell his answers until he finishes but we all are IITians after all, we improvise and somehow manage to get the things in work. EM quizzes feel like disaster management drill and during every drill one or the other does get hurt.

The good thing is that EM finishes in 4 months and never comes back. These two courses make us realise that an IITian’s life is full of hardships. Those who think getting into an IIT is all they have to do, these two curses act as torch bearers to prove them wrong. 

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