Everything seems to going so fast that you are afraid to even blink or sneeze for the fear of missing an important link, a secret password that is uttered but once, that too in a hushed whisper. Miss it coming the first time around, you are doomed to spend the rest of your life in a dinghy and dark hell-hole with your own feeling of defeat for company. Nothing is a cliche when it’s happening to you, claims Max Payne, a popular hero of a video game. The same seems to be true, with respect to all of us, who are studying here at NCST for the sake of gaining knowledge. To say that we belong to a minority would be an understatement as most of the people here seem to be here, seduced by the figures of ‘100% of the students placed’ tag that is being flaunted. Whether this manner of flaunting skewed statistics is good for NCST in the long run is anybody’s guess, but is anybody bothered? The entrance test for the courses offered by NCST is no big deal, seriously. Anybody with a flair for learning things by rote will be able to perform even brilliantly if he puts in a few dozen hours of intensive cramming. The picture here is altogether different and the transition is not always smooth. The most common result is students who are thoroughly disinterested in the course, just waiting for the placement activities to start so that they can claim their promised prize, whether they have done any work or not. After all, the ‘100% students placed’ tag did not say that all the 100% worked to get their prize now, did it? Their attitude reeks like that of b*****d children claiming property rights just on account of being sired by their irresponsible parents.

There are several lessons to be learnt from the prevailing mess and I hope that the concerned(?) higher-ups take a note of the situation and stop the course from turning into placement promising machinery which doesn’t care a damn about the learning outcome.