HIT Haldia - Kukrahati Bus Service Timings

For last several years there is bus service between Haldia Institute of Technology (HIT) and Kukrahati jetty. Kukrahati is the entry path to Haldia if one wants to come through Raichak - Kukrahati vessel or Diamond Harbour - Kukrahati ferry service through the Hooghly river (or more popularly, river Ganges). Many people from South Kolkata or southern suburban area of Kolkata avails this route for journey to and from Haldia. There is also much more but time consuming frequest  bus service between Haldia Township - Kukrahati (via Balughata, Brajalalchak, BC Roy Hospital), and Haldia - Kukrahati Bus (via Durgachak, Ranichak, Hatiberia). The timing of HIT-Kukrahati bus is as follows:- from Kukrahati: 7:25, 9:25, 11:25, 14:25, 16:25, and from HIT the timing is 8:10, 10:10, 13:10, 15:10, and 17:10. This route avoids the busy market strech of Durgachak. It will be immense helpful if the frequency of buses in this route is increased. Since only one bus provides this service, if for any reason the bus is out of road, the entire service goes off.

Secondary, Higher Secondary, WB JEE results in Online and some business minded false websites

Its time for declaration of several board and JEE results. West Bengal Board 10th examination 2016 result just published today. All the Newspapers carry an article on result declaration and various websites or SMS numbers for knowing the results. But my experience is that except the government websites like http://wbbse.org/  all companies  use this opportunity to collect information like name, mobile numbers, email ids in the name of pre-registration but they do not send you the result and instead they sell these contact information to various private organizations who use this to provide admission related offers specially after 12th. This was my experience last year. I blame the newspapers also as they provide these website names to thousands of common people in their articles.

Competitive Coding

Competitive Programming or Coding Competitions or Coding Contests are few terms used to refer online programming contests among several groups where the problems are given and to be solved within a deadline as a team. These require very intense programming skill. But don’t be afraid. What makes you feel scary today, might make you feel naïve tomorrow.. you never know of it!

To introduce and motivate to this topic, I would mention FOUR events: First, during an event in IIIT Guwahati in January 2016, I met an M.Tech pass out student of IIIT Allahabad. He said the B. Tech students there are very fond of programming / coding. From the third year they participate in different coding competitions in campus and in online. And the recruiters have the perception that IIITA students means very good programmers.

Second, I remember reading an interview in weekly e-newsletter of my alma mater NIT Rourkela with the title “Tale of a Google Girl”, where the girl, Susnata Roy narrated her exciting experience of successful interview at Google and there I first heard of the term competitive programming. Then I searched Internet for this and found that few websites are there for online coding contests.

Third, in 2015 summer, our department organized a Faculty Development Program (FDP) where a talk was given by one successful alumni of our department, Dipankar Dutta, where he mentioned his involvement with coding in his spare time from the otherwise very creative and positive working environment in Microsoft Hyderabad.

Fourth, in 2015 TCS HR Eastern Head visited our campus and met with our students and later on with the faculties and advocated the online coding contest TCS CodeVita from where they would give offer letter to the students, irrespective of their batch (First Year, or Second Year, or Third Year, or Final Year) who will qualify the rounds of this contest followed by an HR interview round. It is very good fact that four students of IT department of our Institute cracked CodeVitae. Meanwhile, it is also not off the track that according to the TCS HR, TCS categorizes our Institute with very high rank as B+ (or A?) category at par with the government engineering colleges like newly set up NITs.

To conclude, few websites that students should refer regarding competitive coding are: Top Coder, Code Chef, IEEE Xtreme (only for IEEE members) etc. Also many articles in blogs are available on these. And students who are feeling excited, do explore this field and get enriched and make your campus empowered with more vibes.

Kashmar Ramakrishna Sarada Sevashrama

We visited the Kashmar Ramakrishna Sarada Sevashrama last weekend. It is a private ashram based on the ideal of Sri Ramakrishna Deva, Sri Sri Ma Sarada Devi, and Swami Vivekananda in the most interrior place of Jungle Mahal area of West Bengal. This is situated in Kashmar village, Chakadoba Post Office, Banspahari Police Station in Jhargram Subdivision of West Midnapore District of West Bengal. We took the route NH-6 - Midnapore - Dherua - Jhargram - Silda - Belpahari - Chakadoba - Kankrajhore. We crossed the Cossaye river thrice in this route. The road thorogh hill and jungle is really thrilling. The condition of road was mostly very good. But mobile phone connectivity is very poor there, specially BSNL signal is not available there, but Vodafone and some other does.

We reached the Sevashrama Campus where Swami Surendrananda-ji (Braja Maharaj) welcomed us by opening the gate himself. We offered our pranam to Maharaj-ji and observed that Maharaj-ji himself is cooking for all of us. So some of us, took the charge of rest of the cooking from him and the rest sneaked into the vegetable garden into the Sevashrama premises. The vegetable garden is really marvelous where lots of onion, potato, cabbage, cauli flower, papaya, lemon tree was seen in the hilly soil. Few local people were seen working in the garden.The Sevashrama campus also houses one Child Education Centre, where local children, mostly tribal, get education. Among other activities of the Sevashrama are the training program of the local farmers with resource persons from outside, providing shirts, dress, cloths, and blankets to the local needy people, and providing nutritious foods to the primary level school children who are mostly tribal and includes children from Shabar community - a section of tribal who are among the most backward and under-developed. I was wondering at the energy level of Maharaj-ji when I saw him supervising the work after the meal without taking any rest and then meeting with all the people who were coming to him and talking. He was discussing about the the program of second foundation day to be held on 17th November, 2015. He was thinking how to reach out to wider section of the society for help towards temple construction to be started. What I was feeling that the struggling times of any organization with limited resources but with strong will power to progress further during the initial period before it gets firm on its own feet is really to be saluted and is to be shared. 

We visited Kankrajhor, 10 KM from here. The route towards Kanrajhor, after Chhurimara is completely hilly and forest area. We spotted the trekking route from Kankrajhor to Bhulaveda, 15 KM trekking route. The road condition here has been well maintained. Also we marched from Kankrajhor further towards Amjharna through Amlashol, and spotted the Elephant Corridor, also the house on the tree top to watch the elephants.

While returning back from Kashmar, halted at Midnapore RKM for few minutes and offered our pranam at the temple in the late evening.

National Workshop on Cryptology 2015, 11-13 September at Bhubaneswar

15th National Workshop on Cryptology is being organized during 11-13 September 2015 at KIIT Bhubaneswar. The website link is http://nwc15.kiit.ac.in/ although this link has not been given yet by CRSI website http://www.crsind.com/

Professor Bimal Roy: Padmashri Award for Serving Coutry and Sacking Reward for not bowing to All Mighty Politicians

Politicians believe they are empowered by the people to take steps sometimes even to tarnish the image of our motherland.... and if you can not prove your point by argument then bring the weapon of financial and other irregularities!

we often wonder why our institutes do not figure within top institutes of world! How do we expect so? If our institutes of higher learning are forced to abide by the rules framed by funding bodies such as MHRD or such... And if do not follow the government specified line then you either resign or get sacked!!!! After all they are paying!!! Centre of excellence can not be achieved without freedom...

As an Indian citizen, Indian Constitution gives me the freedom of speech.. and I condemn the government order of sacking the ISI director Professor Bimal Roy.

Looking Back 6 Yearsand Looking Forward at CSE department of HIT Haldia

Following is the content that I wrote for CSE departmental Magazine, in Haldia Institute of Technology  “Hash Define” first edition of 2015.

I still remember the day when I was about to enter the class room 9001, the room beside HOD office in July 2009. I was given the subject Microprocessor (EI-502) to teach. My heartbeat increased. I could feel that. But only thing that was giving me little bit confidence was the fact that I had teaching experience.

That class included a sincere student Tulika Bose, and later on the students like Sanghita Kanjilal, Priyanka Chiraniya, Anupam Majumder, Zaved Mahamud, Saheli Dhar, Sudipa Bera, Prakash Rai, Madhumita, Anindita, Shalini, Payel, Saptarshi, Zahid, Amir, Kamal, Gitanjali Lama, Rohan Chetri, etc joined the class which I think made the batch very good.

Next semester, I taught the elective Network Secuirty to final year students. There I found a student named Rajneesh Kumar, Whom I consider an extra ordinary student. In subsequent years, I got many good students in terms of academic, behavior, extra curriculum, event management etc. The list is long but few names can be mentioned: Huma Nazneen, Deepak, Arpita, Meghna, Shikha, Gaurav, Anand Chetri, Dipika, Debasmita, Buddhadev,Shristi, Ankita, Namrata, Nirjhar, Harsh, Sanjib, Buddhadev, Ramkrisha, Debadrita, Farhan, Anjani etc. It may be mentioned a very brilliant student Swarnashree Chaudhury left all of her dear ones few months back….

When some students of these batches come back to college for some reason and meet us we do feel very Happy.

What I observed is that students do come here in campus with lots of dream, courage in their eye, but that courage demises as they progress towards higher semesters. What might be the reason(s)?

Somewhere I read that ordinary people adapt themselves and adjust with the existing environment surrounding them if they do not like the present environment. But extra ordinary people change (upgrade) the present environment itself to meet their expectations. Shall we not try to uplift the campus environment in our small capacity if we don’t like it as it is….

As our ex President APJ Abdul Kalam said: Dream is not what we get during sleep, but dream is what does not let us sleep.

The fact is that most of live either in Past or in Fututre. That is we think of our old days like school days, old friends, previous campus, last semesters etc. or we think about the future – what we will achieve in future etc. But most of us never live in Present. Only on focusing on Present, and gathering lessons from the Past we can make our future brighter.

Regarding semester, mostly classes are held for around 160 days. If we can’t make sure that we will attend most of the classes and be there in class/lab in correct time, then how do we expect that we would be regular and punctual in office when we join some organization after we graduate?

Extra curriculum activities are very helpful in shaping our personality towards perfection. My personal experience suggests that sports, cultural activities, techinal activities, weekend trips to neighborhood tourist spots or trekking (off course following the college protocols properly), watching good movies, reading good novels or autobiography really inspire us to go ahead. That is we have to balance our academic life with our positive non-academic sides.

Doing interships in semester breaks really helps us a lot to familiar with the environments in top grade Institutes/companies. But compare to the huge number of students in our country, the number of students got chance in these top grade organizations is very less. But nonetheless, we can do internship in our Institute only under some faculty member.

At last I want to convey what I heard in a program in Shibpur when one student was giving a quote: It is our Attitude, not Aptitude  that decides our Altitude in future.