Chapter 12: The Submissions!

Women are competitive by their very nature, and more so if it is about ‘their guy’. So as Vidya saw Aditya being the centre of conversation and Veena talking to me more than she’d have wanted her to, she shifted closer to me and looked forward to seek my attention, “Leave aside all of this. So, what next now? I mean, what should be our next chapter?”

How could Veena have tolerated being snubbed so easily! So she enthusiastically suggested that we had mentioned in the “viva” chapter that there would be a theory on origin of submissions. As we all agreed to write a chapter on submissions and its origin, Vidya made a face at Veena’s presence of mind and I consoled her with half a side hug.

Meanwhile, Chitragupta recollected that a few years ago he had grilled a Marwari businessman from Mumbai while making an account of his good and bad deeds. Surprisingly, his bad deeds had totalled to about 96%! That was a kind of record in hell, too. During interrogation, he had confessed about starting the ‘Submission Scam’ in the engineering colleges in India. So, Chitragupta searched on his database and after much effort tracked down the report on the Marwari’s origin of submissions in engineering colleges.

The following is an extract from that report.

------------------------------------------

Corruption is the mother of submissions in engineering colleges!

Yes, you read it right.

Till the late 1960s, there was no concept of submissions in engineering colleges. Boys with bell-bottom pants and girls with full-sleeved kurtas used to go to college, attend lectures, play badminton in the evenings with similar Bollywood numbers in the background, and have fun in the canteen. They were lucky enough to take exams only once every year.

Around the same time, a young Marwari guy belonging to a village about a hundred kilometres from Bikaner in Rajasthan was shunned by his family for his being very lazy and being a rebel to their traditions (which included pouring two spoons full of ghee for every plate of ‘daal-bati’ or eating six ‘choorma’ laddoos on alternate Wednesdays). He also did something that was totally unacceptable during those times; he fell in love! He loved a Japanese girl who had come to Bikaner as a tourist. The Japanese girl spoke with an American accent and was two feet taller than her lover Jethalal Shah. One fine evening, Jethalal and his Japanese girlfriend Yee Kee Karaa were summoned by Jethalal’s family. Everyone – right from the one-leg-in-the-grave grandfather, the oldest member to Chinki, Jethalal’s niece were present to see Jethalal get screwed up.

Jethalal’s mother (an avid Punjabi serial viewer) asked her son if this girl was going to be her daughter-in-law, “Jethalal, ye Yee Kee karaa?”

Jethalal corrected his mother, “Yes maa, after marriage she will be Yee Kee Karaa Jethalal Shah.” After that, he stood facing his mother, quiet as if unsure of his own decision. Then followed a fierce verbal battle; Jethalal’s defending her lover led to his being thrown out of the house immediately. Jethalal was aware this would happen, and thus, had packed his bag in advance; he was a visionary. He also took three saris from his mother so that the scantily-clad Yee Kee Karaa would manage making at least fifteen dresses out of it. The couple in love headed towards the nearest railway station and waited for a train to arrive. The station master announced two trains – one going to Delhi and the other going to Mumbai. Jethalal knew that Delhi had an extreme climate and since it was already winter, he and his girlfriend would have found it difficult to bear the harshness. So, they took the train to Mumbai.

After a tiring journey to Mumbai, Jethalal and his girlfriend stayed at a cheap guesthouse for a week. In the meantime, Yee Kee Karaa managed to get a job as a Japanese teacher at a posh school in Colaba. Jethalal was of the opinion that in a new city you get to know a few secrets and make the best of friends either at a tea-stall, or in a beer bar. So he started smoking and drinking. In a very short time, he mastered the art of sweet talking coupled with making contacts with a few social and anti-social elements in Mumbai. While he was loitering around in a few gullies in Colaba, he happened to talk to a raddiwala. He ordered a special masala chai from a nearby stall for that raddiwala and half-an-hour of interaction led to a Eureka moment! “I have to start selling paper, and make people in Mumbai use as much paper as possible!” He headed straight to his guesthouse and shared this idea with his girlfriend. Highly intelligent that she was, she also suggested a few strategies by which he could realize his dream. Jethalal then went to a famous bar in his vicinity where he met a few businessmen acquaintances who could invest in his idea. He met one Mr. Verma and as luck would have it, that Mr. Verma was a cousin of a very high profile person in the Bombay University.

Jethalal explained the whole plan. He said that the engineering students in Bombay University just had one yearly exam with no submissions. This meant that engineers were coming out of the system way too easily than what was expected of them. Engineers in those days were supposed to be a very different species. Fathers-in-law in those days were crazy after engineer-sons-in-law and were even ready to sell their piece of land at their native places to make sure that the engineer-sons-in-law led a happy life! So, for that value for engineers to be justified, Jethatlal suggested that they be put through a more rigorous process where they need to submit various small assignments – just like “school homework”. The submissions would be made to account for 25% of the total marks. And in all these submissions, all you need is more and more paper. Having such a system in place will ensure that there is more demand for paper and that’s precisely where Jethalal and Mr.Verma and his nexus would come into the picture! The logical justification that can be given to kids would be “to make better engineers who would contribute to the betterment of this country”. Within a year, the high profile people at the Universities (not only in Bombay, but also other cities) passed an amendment to the existing engineering study format and hence originated the concept of ‘submissions’.

Jethalal used to buy paper at very low prices from smaller cities and used to sell it to his nexus in cities at a higher price. This paper was supplied to bookstores adjacent to most colleges, which was easily accessible to students and thus, sold out in great quantities. Poor engineering students thought that they were made to do this crap of writing assignments and submissions so that they could be better engineers. Little did they know that corruption was the mother of submissions!

         

If you go to an engineering college and find some girl asking a boy to get two Inners for her; or some boy requesting the girl to give her two outers that she is about to use, please don’t get baffled. You have reached the college during the submissions time – a time when you will find students scrambling for folders, indices, covers, Inners and Outers, etc. So, what exactly do you do in a submission? What do you submit? Why do you submit? Does the professor really care what you have written in it? Does he read whether you have written the correct formula and then arrived at a proper conclusion, or invented your own formula and then arrived at a conclusion? I wonder what is the use of such submissions at all when even the professor does not care for its authenticity. These are a few questions that will torment you even after you graduate as engineers!

So, the least we can do is to try to answer a few FAQs - Frequently Asked Questions on submissions.

What do you submit?: The professor gives you a set of questions that you need to solve by yourself so that your fundamentals of whatever he teaches become strong. He expects you to read the chapters, understand the concepts and then apply them to solve the problems in the assignment. But what you end up submitting is a Xerox of the original made by the most studious or the most diligent student in the class.

What if that most studious student makes a mistake in the assignment?: Simple! Those mistakes will trickle down to every assignment in the class.

Doesn’t the professor come to know that students have copied?: During submissions, you can categorize the students into various categories, namely:

1)     The original guy: The student who makes the original assignment is normally a nerd. He comes to college on time, attends every lecture, eats tiffin given by her mother, maintains an excel sheet of daily expenses that include even the cutting tea he had in the canteen, refers foreign authors to clear his concepts and totally believes in the statement, “every Indian is my brother and sister” and ends up single till the age of thirty! The assignment done by this guy is done the soonest and is like a prostitute that is used by every other guy in the class. Everyone xeroxes his assignment and then writes his own either verbatim or changes as per his or her own will. If this guy makes any mistake in his assignment, the same mistake trickles down in every assignment. So, becoming this kind of a student is like becoming a leader. If your assignment is not criticized by the professor, then you will be praised by the whole class. But if you make any mistake in the assignment, then you will be no better than the state a young man is when seen by his father smooching his girlfriend in public!

2)     The 80:20 guys: These guys copy 80% from the original assignment and add 20% from their own intelligence. When the professor accuses them of copying, they redirect the professor to that 20% of the content in the assignment that they have written on their own. The professor then okays the assignment and these students come out smiling wickedly, humming to themselves, “C$#%$a banaya, bada majaa aaya!”

3)     The scriptwriters: These students keep the original in front of them and pick up only those lines that they like. Most of the times you will find no relation between the first and the third line in their assignments. The same is applicable to every other line too! If you try to copy, or try to make sense of any bit of such an assignment, you will either go mad or you will end up becoming a scriptwriter yourself. The assignments of these students are like scripts of a few “comedy” movies in Bollywood! They make no sense at all!

4)     The cartoonists: These students are so lazy that they don’t even care to understand what is written in a totally undecipherable font. They prefer to go with their gut feel. If the handwriting in the original assignment is extremely bad and reads something like ‘wand’ or ‘uuand’ or ‘vvand’, then these students will use the classic formula that has been used to solve such problems since time immemorial – Akkad bakkad bambe bo assi nabbe pure sau, sau mae laga dhaga, chor nikal ke bhaga. They just ‘re-draw’ whatever words they cannot understand in the original assignment. If the professor asks them what is the meaning of that obscure word, they will just keep quiet and hang their heads in shame. These guys end up being very good husbands; their engineering submissions have trained them in all adequate skills. So if you know such a guy during your engineering college life, do advance booking right now!

So, if only one guy makes the original assignment and the rest of the students copy, then what is the meaning of having such assignments? – Only God knows!

Does the professor really care what you have written in it?: As it is his duty, yes, he cares that the students solve the questions in proper manner.

Does he read whether you have written the correct formula and then arrived at a proper conclusion or invented your own formula and then arrived at a conclusion? – This is a debatable question!

If even the professor doesn’t care about the authenticity of the assignments, then why have such submissions at all? – The system has been set in that way since ages and no one is willing to change it.