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This year’s edition of Shaastra showcased a bio-diesel plant, a miniature version of a commercial one.

Photo: K. V. Srinivasan

From old to new: Taking pieces of waste to put together something useful. Students participating in the Junkyard Wars competition at Shaastra 2007.

‘Shaastra 2007’, the annual technical festival at the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) saw thousands of students vying with each other in a host of creative events.

“Such festivals build character and bring in a lot of team work. It is entirely a student festival,” IIT-M director M.S. Ananth said at the inauguration. From trying their hand at a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) aircraft to displaying a prototype of Chandrayaan, the country’s first attempt at an unmanned lunar mission, the organising committee had skillfully put together a potpourri of contests, lectures, videoconferences and panel discussions. There was even a workshop on origami.

B.K. Vinay Shankar, co-curricular affairs secretary of IIT-Madras, said the festival demanded a Rs. 45 lakh-budget and many companies came forward to be one of the sponsors. Mr. Ananth said the faculty insisted that students did not go beyond this amount as they deemed the sum sufficient to “sensibly spend” on an event of this magnitude. Winners’ prizes included internships in leading companies. Bosch, Microsoft, Google, GE, and Autodesk were some of the sponsors for the event.

Shaastra’s official website received a few million hits even before the event began. And bookings for on-campus stay during the fest were made so fast that many participants had to find accommodation outside. Volunteers at the registration desk had their hands full every morning during the fest as a large number of teams registered for every event. In the ‘Junkyard Wars’ contest, students had to use scrap to assemble a vehicle.

‘Master Builder’ saw students putting together a transmission line tower with sections of aluminium. ‘Robowars’, held on the final day of the nearly week-long festival, saw two small footballer-robots competing to hit a goal. Another techie event was ‘Contraptions’. About 40 teams competed to blow out 16 candles on a cake and cut a triangular slice, all through an automatic process with no human intervention. One of the teams used fans to blow out candles and a lever mechanism that dropped two knives on the cake to carve out a piece.

This year’s edition of Shaastra showcased a bio-diesel plant, a miniature version of a commercial one. The students hope to produce 30 litres of fuel a day, which is enough to run the institute’s buses. Not all the events were totally techie. The Ignobel Prizes event recognised research projects that ‘first make people laugh, then make them think’. For instance, a paper on ‘estimating the total surface area of Indian elephants’ had won a prize earlier.

A science fiction writing contest was held both online and on-the-spot. And keeping in line with the Shaastra ’07 theme of energy conservation, students had organised Bull’s Eye, an event on trading in carbon credits. Screening of sci-fi movies were also part of the fest. The food stalls did brisk business throughout the festival. The events were tracked by the Paaprika newsletter team.

The student organisers and the IIT campus can breathe a sigh of relief now that the frenzy of activity is over. But not for too long as Saarang 2008 (IIT-M’s cultural fest) is only four months away.The web editions can be accessed at http://blog.shaastra.org/newsletter.

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