REC to ISB

To compare an engineering college to a management institute is probably blasphemous, but that’s what I ended up doing on the day my first mid terms at ISB got over. Now that I have made it clear which management institute I am talking about, I might also put forth the engineering college I am talking about – REC Calicut. It has been 6 years since I graduated from this institution.
I am not insane to compare these institutions in terms of their infrastructure etc, but purely in terms of what I liked about each of them.
To see how they fare in their respective fields, you can go to the end of this post!


What I miss about REC
1) The MC – mini canteen for the uninitiated. This is the place which will be full at 2 am in the morning, with folks pouring in to buy “chotta pepsi”, “Chikki”,”Double attached”, “Kattan” (Black tea/coffee) and noodles. MC will be packed particularly during the exam season. Studying through the night, one of those hungry folks will come out and get everyone out of their rooms and then the group starts for MC.
I wish ISB had something like that.
2) Kattangal – this is another eating joint that was about 5 minutes walk from the men’s hostel. This place has a large number of small eating joints where the staple menu is a combination of noodles and one of the multi combination shakes. It started off with “Sharjah Shake” (a glorified name for banana milk shake) and apple shake. By the time we were in the final year, the shop keepers had become bolder and was trying out combinations like “Sharjah badam shake” and “Apple Date shake” !!! and these places used to be full at 12 0 clock in the night.
3) IF MC and Kattangal were the night time food joints, then mamachan and papachan were the noon time. A hearty meal of porotta and chicken at mamachans will fill your stomach and also not hurt your purse! If mamachan was the fav of non-veggies, then pappachan was for the veggies. This place was unique because they follow a “eat what we give” policy. So you go there, wash your hands and sit on the wooden bench. The guy will come and start serving the course of rice meal and the curries, what they have prepared for the day. They will also come for a second round and the meal ends with a sumptuous serving of pure home made curd. Mouth watering!
4) The Rajpath – this was the pathway leading to the main building of REC, with a separator in between, having those cute little pink and yellow flowers! I don’t know what was so special about Rajpath, but ask any CREC-ian and he will say that Rajpath was good!
5) The canteen and the fish biriyani! – need I say more?
6) The thanni parties in final year – these are not grand scale parties as they happen here at ISB and the booze does not flow! It rather trickles, more so because we had not started earning you see! The adventurous trips to Mukkam in the night to buy beer and then getting back to the room, lights off, metallica playing, gulping beer and getting ready to play Half-Life and NFS-111. that was final year and it was Awesome, with a capital A!!!
7) The scrabble sessions – man I used to love it! There was this time when we were mad about scrabbles and used to have these team names and would actually hunt around for the shortest word which had a “Z” in it. All the bitching about profs and exams used to happen around the scrabble board. Fights too!
8) The Jeep shows – this happens once in a while where a group of people rent a jeep and go for the night show in the city (REC too, like ISB is situated around 20 kms from the city, the only difference being that it was well connected). The jeep shows reach a peak during the placement seasons, as more and more people get placed, the trips will be made to “Calicut Taj” or “Malabar towers” for the treat.

It is really intriguing to compare the demographics of the student population in Both the places.
In REC, you had three categories of people – the guys who don’t study at all, the guys who study a little and enjoy a lot and the third group, who only study. The first group will be around 20 percent, the second 70 percent and the third, a measly 10 percent. Of course, all of these are relative!
In ISB, you again have three categories – the guys who study a lot and party a lot too, the guys who only study and the guys who study a little and party a lot. The first group constituting around 65 percent, the second group around 30 percent and the last with an abominable 5 percent.
So you see, things are almost the same only for the middle group. The other two groups are at the extreme.
But again, people don’t throw away lucrative jobs and precious time with their families and also pay an exhorbitant fee to come to ISB and Not study. And the course model at ISB does not render itself suitable for people who don’t want to study too. A class missed is an experice missed, because the professors are damn good. You have to listen to each and every word that comes out of the prof’s mouth. It really amazes me how I can sit through a lecture of 2 hours and not wander off into dreamland in between. I cant remember sitting with full attention for any of the lectures in REC, maybe except for the maths class which I used to enjoy.
And CP in REC is something I cant conjure in my wildest of dreams. Forget CP, I don’t even remember anyone asking doubts in any class. (CP, for those who are thinking what it is – class participation. This is a part of the grading for the marketing class in the first term and the students just LOVE the fact that this counts towards the grade!)

Although REC Calicut is one of the best engineering colleges in India, when I look back at the 4 years, I believe that the way of teaching over there was probably not the best. This is in no way an allusion to the kind of faculty there, but the fact that even an institute of such caliber could not keep the students from not learning by rote. I still remember me and my friends going through fluid mechanics and trying to remember the whole thing up till the exam, spit it out in the exam and then blissfully forget about it. The only interesting thing that I did, with a lot of analysis and study gone into it, was my seminar on chaos theory.
Again, this is not a generalization and there have been people who have actually worked on difficult topics like robotics and have gone to prestigious universities on the basis of that (this is not an REC for nothing!)
But the fact still remains that students are not incentivised to learn through application and not given the motivation to understand the topic, but to actually just cram for the exams. Maybe the age at which they come into an engineering college and the fact that being a residential college, this is the first taste of freedom for most of them, the current system is probably the best. Make them fear the grades and get them to study by hook or crook.
Maybe this is the way in which the IIT’s score over the REC’s. I need to ask an IIT-ian!!

REC Calicut ranked 14th best engineering college in India – Go here