‘Mamma look a UFO!’
screamed a child while walking through IIT Bombay today. Families and kids
stormed the gates of IITB to visit the Tech Fest 2015 – the 3 day annual
festival targeting geeks from other colleges. While walking in
from the main gate towards the academic building, visitors get a view of
the galactic world and superhuman creatures. The pathway has been decorated
with caricatures of Superman, Batman, Boba Fett and aliens, and with flying
banners of the Big Bang Theory and Star Wars. Some visitors while walking
towards the convocation hall got the feeling that the event was themed in lieu
of the release of the new Star Wars movie on Friday. No doubt, someone must have
strolled around looking for a Darth Vader caricature. But what many students
got to see through the day was a fun fair for family and kids.

The release of the new Star Wars movie and the decor of the IITB pathways with space objects, had students expecting an event on a different tangent. Besides, many events in the fest were given a name after sci-fi movie legends like the Martian, Quidditch, Robowars, etc. But what did the visitors get when they actually visited these events? While the Quidditch game was rescheduled due to lack of registrations to play, the Martian event was a presentation competition about the possibility of life on Mars. Now that may interest some science geeks, if only participants did not present hilarious ideas like introducing a Martian currency called Marta and installing television for entertainment of martians. Frankly, don’t we have more pressing issues to solve about Mars habitation than the entertainment of martians? Like decomposing carbon-dioxide into oxygen for better survival chances? And for those who were excited about the Robowar, were left to see a monotonous cockfight between human operated robots.

Images below of decorations at IITB

Speaking about the
events that lured families with kids and grandmas into the campus. An entire
section of the campus was deployed to organise around 15 events for the
entertainment of children. These events included bungee jumping, sumo
wrestling, paint ball, etc. The startling point was to see teenagers indulge in
juvenile competitions like ‘rotate 15 times in one place and then walk on a
straight line, or a balancing act on one leg for a minute.’ A piece of advice,
‘do not participate when you’re drunk.’

What was tragic was
that in a fest dedicated to technology, some of the intelligent summits like
water harvesting and cloud computing, received minimal audience or
appreciation. The only stand out of the day was the exhibitions where students
from different countries like Hungary, Netherlands, Zurich, Israel, USA,
Bangladesh, Germany, had displayed their innovations. Majority of the student
crowd at the fest was standing in an infinite queue to enter these exhibitions.
One of the bright ideas at the exhibition was; the invention of a Smart Marine
Black Box, which uses wireless technology to immediately transfer ship signals
to the cloud. The idea was devised by a group of Bangladeshi students as a
solution to the issues faced in locating signals of missing planes like the
Malaysian flight MH370. Apart from this, a lot other countries, bound by
internet restrictions, couldn’t portray a demo of their inventions and had to
work around with power point presentations of their devices. It was
embarrassing to see that one of the premier engineering institutes in India
couldn’t provide WiFi to its guest counterparts at an international event. 

The first day of Tech
Fest had a misplaced target audience where the prominent events lured families
like in a fun fair while the more intellectual summits had a negligible crowd.