SNIST experience Part 2

Room service was made specifically for lazy bums like us! A quick meal aside (remnants of the biriyani still haunted us), we soon learned the auto drivers of Hyderabad are a much more honest folk than those in Mangalore/Bangalore. We had to take a college bus from SNIST at a place called Uppal which was about 7.5 Kms away from the lodge and it was there that we met Dr. Ramagopal Rao who was responsible for inviting us to participate at the conference and, as a friend of Mr Prasanna, promised to help us in every way possible despite being the coordinator of the entire conference.

From first glance, he seemed a good chap and by the end of the day we were jealous of the SNIST students to have such a good person among them as a professor even! The college itself is in Yamnampet, Ghatkesar- about 28 Kms from the main city and has great facilities. The entire Dept of Biotechnology is air conditioned and the building which houses this dept also houses the School of Management Studies and a certain room titled “English Lab” which has inside a horde of PC’s, LCD Monitors and a humongous 48” CRT TV.

The place itself was undergoing construction work for more facilities and it was interesting to see scaffolds a metre away from the classrooms. The simultaneous inaugurations of 3 workshops being held there began after registration and here we heard first hand from the main protagonists of this event: The Principal of SNIST, The HOD of Biotech dept and the Dean of research who turned out to be a most magnificent speaker:-

After all this we had a chance to finally see our conference paper in hard copy and it was a great delight to say the very least:-

In case you are wondering, VSS stands for Varun-Sachin-Sandeep and if the bacterium was only 4% off the standard strain we would have got the opportunity to name it after ourselves ourselves L

Anyway off we departed to the Electronics Dept Seminar hall which was the venue for our conference and a few guest lectures preceded a lunch after which our seminar was the very first presentation in the conference which went very well despite the computer not having the necessary codecs to play a movie file during the ppt itself! Once our official participation was over we settled down to watch the remaining presentations and soon found our stride as proper NITKians as we proceeded to find fault and make snide remarks of all the mistakes prevalent in the other works - among of course! The proceedings for the day ended at 4:45 pm and we took the same bus back to Uppal. However no bus was in sight and we decided to adventure a 7-seater…

The working mechanism of a 7-seater journey is you sit in a place meant for mice while the driver and his accomplice try to wriggle in more people heading the same way. Although there are supposed to be no more than 7 passengers, this particular trip saw a maximum of 13 people with the accomplice hanging on by fingertips as we sped across roads needing more attention than a village pathway. To say we were shaken up would be an understatement.

On the way back, after a total of ~1.5 hours of calls between us, Kiran, Rahul Nesergi and Swapna Bandi we finalised on meeting the Bandi sisters that evening at Prasad I Max and it was great meeting them after 3 months. The mall had its attractions and a trip through a so-called Hall of Mirrors turned out to more scary than the girls wanted:-

Me with Optimus Prime :P

All four of us in the Hall of Mirrors

The look down the mall from 2nd floor

Interesting Name for a Pastry

We had to leave early after dinner at Mcdonald’s since my uncle and aunt from Secunderabad were coming over to our room to meet us while getting “goodies” to take back. After they left at about 10:15 pm and a quick game of DOTA later, we retired for what we hoped would be a peaceful night’s sleep: We were so wrong…