IIT Kanpur to restrict AIR SUPPLY to students!

Okay, not literally, but they are restricting internet access! OMFG! (response to the news on right)

Here is what Times of India quoted the Registrar of IIT Kanpur as (the points marked in green are false) "The campus is wi-fi enabled and it has been found that students use Internet throughout the night on their laptops due to which they are sleepy during classes and it adversely affects their academic performance,"

He said poor performance leads to stress among students and some of them commit suicide after being unable to cope with academic pressure.

A decision to restrict Internet access between midnight and six am in the campus will be implemented only if a consensus is reached on the matter, Kashalkar said.

I better hope the consensus means an actual consensus & not just an emergency senate meeting attended by 2 senators to pass this bill!


Now coming to the points in green :

• IITK campus is NOT wifi enabled.
• Most students (who attend classes) are not sleepy because they "surf internet throughout the night"  but because some of the lectures are very boring & tedious!
• Surfing internet does not affect our academic performance, it enhances the academic performance, as internet is also used to :

• Wikipedia, nptel, research papers (yes, I am not kidding), scanning & sending notes to each other, download stuff the Profs. sent, chatting & discussing solutions etc.

• It helps to relax in the night, during exam time when you may decide not to go & pay tennis or something eg. facebooking, blogging etc.
• Poor performance leads to stress, I agree, but poor performance is not just because of internet surfing! C'mon, even Siddharth Chatterjee surfs internet! (Yo Sid! :D) Bad (or Good) academic performance is because of the priorities you set.

Most important point : I'd said this when lan restrictions were implemented, IIT Kanpur is about freedom. Being here, one of the most important things I've learnt is how to have freedom & use it wisely. By putting such lame restrictions & bring a grand daddy of IITians, the institute is killing this crucial part of learning & being an IITian.

In more practical terms, when an IITian passes out, he(or she) has unrestricted access to internet (he'll buy a Tata Photon+ Device with 500 GB data, if nothing else) will IIT Kanpur go & tell him then, "Dude, you have office tomorrow at 8 in the morning, stop j***ing off & go to sleep."

I just hope this bill is not even brought to the table, because supposedly IITians are "the future leaders of India", so please stop treating them as children.

UPDATE : Since the point of this week's suicide (sad) came up in the news by Times of India, he was anyway a first year student & first year students in IITK do not have laptops so this whole argument that surfing internet leads to suicide is futile!