Circles of Technology

This attempt at humorous writing drawing on my undergraduate days at IIT Kanpur was made while studying for exams during my first semester at UIUC.

This is a chronicle of the Circles of Technology. I sometimes wonder at the human pre-occupation with circles. Borges wrote of the circular ruins consumed by fire, and I, on a much more humble note, write of the circles of technology. What is more, so many of us end up going round in circles all our life. Perhaps it is because the circle does not have a beginning or an end that you can pinpoint in space. The endpoints are indeterminate and so you are always in the middle -- a notion both consoling and disquieting at the same time...but I am digressing here. My true intent in making this effort is to tell the tale of the great circles of technology.


I graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur (good old IITK for me) in 2002, and spent another year there dabbling in research. The four years I spent there as a student were fairly linear. Well, maybe a crest here, and a trough there, but still...The circles appeared in my last year there, when I had shed off the mantle of student. My tryst with them began in January 2003 when my friend Nupur and I travelled to IIT Madras for the National Conference on Communications. IITM has a fairly big campus, and much of it looks like a jungle. Deer roam around like cattle on a town street, even foraging for food in garbage-bins (I missed out on a potential photograph of this nature and regret it to this day). As IITK has its peacocks and monkeys (and at one time Neelgai too), IITM has its deer. Of course, to be fair, IITB too has its leopard, or at least stories of it!


The centre of the IITM campus is the Gajendra Circle, so named because of the elephantine statues that stand there in dignified guardianship (or so I imagine) of IITM. In common parlance, no one calls it Gajendra Circle. It is always GC. When we first heard "GC", we thought it stood for Great Circle (its dimensions lend strength to this belief), and recalled our middle school geography with some fondness. We soon discovered our folly though. In any case, the GC was well laid-out and had an aesthetically pleasing appearance. And if there was anything (apart from the deer) we regretted not having in IITK, it was a central nodal point of this kind. Our own "SAC Chauraha" is rather unimposing to look at. For the rest, we returned to IITK with a smug "our campus is better" notion!


I think that around this time, the IITK authorities also managed to figure out that we indeed lacked something IITM had -- a circle. And how could we be left bereft of a circle -- that mystical device of philosophical musing. And so they decided to get one.


The choice of location had to be the "SAC Chauraha". But the poor chauraha had not been conceived for such grandiose designs. So a "great circle" was out of question. Instead one fine day, a small structure appeared plum in the middle of the intersection. It was a cylindrical shell, made of brick, and painted white on the outside, while the interior was filled with sand. The ostensible reason for the circle was given as traffic regulation, and an SIS guard with a "danda" (stick) was deputed to man it. I need not regale the reader with the aesthetics of this "circle". I shall merely quote Coleridge's (supposedly rather crude) lines from 'Christabel': "A sight to dream of, not to tell!"


What the circle still lacked was a name. The authorities had forgotten about it, or so it seemed to us. But soon the name, or rather names, began to reveal themselves. During the day, the guard on duty used to relieve his hands by planting his "danda" in the sand of the circle. At night, a stray dog or two would find a place to sleep on the sand. And the significance of these two phenomena could not be lost on the fertile imaginations of Nupur and myself. Why of course...the name had to be DC -- Danda Circle by day, and Dog Circle by night...what else!


And then, the clever inventiveness of the authorities became clear to us. Hey...they had meant it all along...the danda and the dog...so that IITK could boast of DC. IITM had GC, but IITK had DC! After all, IITK couldn't do with just any other *C. The institute was established with the assistance of a consortium of the top ten US universities. So we had to follow their tradition. The US has a DC as its capital. We would have our own DC as heart of the campus.


Ah, such exquisite attention to detail! My heart brimmed over with admiration for the imaginativeness of the IITK authorities. What a boon for IITK! A circle...a circle of technology (the "Technology Circle", the IIT Kharagpur people would suggest, but I prefer the more general terminology)...a circle to match that already existent at IITM! And instead of the elephant, we have the dog, the most faithful companion of humans amongst animals, and that too live!!!


And the circle has proved its worth, by managing to arouse a spark of creativity in me. It has inspired me enough to write down my circular thoughts at a time when I (now a student again) ought to be studying for my final exams.



Vartika Bhandari
Dec. 12, 2003
Urbana-Champaign