by Ms. Suranga Date _______________________________________________________________

The monsoon just shying away from the Konkan belt, and the campus glistens a natural green in the sunlight. Roads look unnaturally clean, since the Roaming Cows have not set their eyes on them as yet. Thats wonderful, because Dussera is upon us, and its that time of the year, when all the PC's , servers, UPS's, line printers, in our lab , get, what can very kindly be described as a "flick of the cloth".

Recall the days of the Russian system EC 1030....generations got their B.techs , Mtechs and Ph.D's , all the while engaging in guerilla warfare with the existing hardware, software, not to forget humanware associated with it. .... Dussera pooja was when Prof J. R. Issac , accompanied by those who worked those machines daily, came in , and broke a coconut in front of the CPU, the vermillion and marigold-strewn card readers,printers, tape drives and disk controllers looking on indulgently.( Certain observers of the proceedings, looking through the glass from the outside, would have probably and fervently hoped that the coconut would break ON the CPU.......!). Everyone appeared as if by magic , at the time of Prasad, which was bits of coconut scraped/cut out of the whole with the help of strip of metal, that originally was a respected part of the card reader.

Then came what everybody then called Microprocessors. PC was still a short form for Public Call. Various labs had these small machines, and Dassera puja simply got Decentralized. Everybody organised their Lab's pooja, and sort of sauntered over to the Old Ec-1030 room for tea and "light" snacks. For old-times sake, the coconut was still broken in the computer hall. Maybe this sort of "initialised" the rat network that operated below the false flooring.

The Golden Age really happened when we got our first Unix system. Folks started talking of Node 1, Node 2, monitors..... the computer hall got partitioned into a "Console Room" , zealously guarded by those who earlier policed the EC-1030. There was an equitable mix of humans and machines in the computer hall. Dussera pooja took longer now as there were more terminals to decorate, more keyboards to sprinkle vermillion on, and more chairs to navigate thru in the hall. Computing was getting more humanised.

Our finest years were obviously when we got our Unix system V machine which was named Kailash. The earlier system was scrapped and one fine day, EC-1030 and other unused stuff actually got carted away in a truck, never to be decorated for Dussera again.....(sniff).

Someone once overestimated the number of tea drinkers in the department one Dussera, and we sent a broadcast message over the system about "free" tea being available in the corridor outside. The constructively interfering scrape of Software lab chairs, followed by a mass exodus of students into the corridor, was a credit to the IIT students single minded devotion to certain things.

We are now in the New Computer Sciences building. Very big, very roomy, we have several systems now, but Kailash plods on, somewhat like an aging patriarch, presiding over "these modern new fangled types". The number of machines and terminals, that are decorated has increased drastically. There are also a lot more different labs in the building, with a larger variety of hardware.

Sometimes one feels it is all getting out of control. Too vast. Too BIG.........

So it was with a sense of wonderment that one ventured out of the lab this Dussera, to observe a bunch of students of our department doing a Rangoli at our Department entrance........ decently large, and with potted plants placed strategically to curb any enthusiatic types from charging out of the Softwarelab and messing it up..... Mango leaf torans at the entrance with marigolds , all the PC's indside preening with their flower power, keyboards shrugging off the occasional vermilllion dust across their face.

And the HOD announcing that the puja would be done by our Office Superintendent, as the eldest person. There was a whiff of agarbatti's, and all our servers shared in that. A mild refreshing sprinkle of coconut water, must have got those megahertz into a wild state...and then there was Music!.

The students of the Computer Science and Engineering association (CSEA) sang a Saraswati Aradhana, (didnt know these engineers could sing so well). If Kailash, Nilgiri, Everest, Bhishma, Vindhya, and other servers of our lab had feelings (I am not sure they dont:-)), they would probably crash and reboot with joy!

A nice cup of tea and a plate of snacks later, courtesy the CSEA, technology ceases to look threatening, and humans loom larger than ever.... In this age of faster and faster machines, quicker and quicker responses, smarter and smarter users, its nice to know that in IIT Mumbai, our students still remember that big SYSTEM ROOT , up there, and celebrate the day with tradition, music, flowers and color.