MUKTI '09 - Zenith Scaled.

Well.. its been a high time that I write a blog on MUKTI' 09 since I am the President of the Group which had organized it, i.e., GNU/Linux Users' Group, NIT Durgapur. So, today I finally sit to write about it. I would say that MUKTI' 09 has been one of the most important if not the single most important event of my college life at NIT Durgapur.

At the very onset, I would like to mention that MUKTI' 09 was in true terms for the very first time a National Level "Technical Symposium" on GNU/Linux and Free Software. It was not a cake walk organizing and we had to go through a lot of tumultuous times. The first hurdle was that of getting the college administration to agree to our demand of having MUKTI organized seperately rather than with some other event of college. Surprisingly enough, the Director agreed to it fairly easily. The catch being, Govt. of West Bengal suddenly wanted to promote Linux and Open Source in West Bengal and our college was one of the prospective Nodal Centers for this cause, so there would be influx of funds in the college.

Anyways, whatever the case, we managed to have a stand alone MUKTI. For the very first time, we had MUKTI which spanned across one week, right from Monday, 2nd February, 2009 to Sunday, 8th February, 2009 and we promoted it as "FOSS Week". We had the inauguration on 2nd February and had Prof. Debesh Das, H'ble Minister In Charge, Dept. of IT, Govt. of WB, gracing the occassion as the Chief Guest. This was another first in the history of NIT Durgapur that a Minister had come for the inauguration of any event organized by the students' body. But as happens with white collar people, our schedule for that day got hay wire as the Minister was 3 hours late and due to this delay Mr. Shyam Sundar, M.D., Durgapur Steel Plant, could not attend the inauguration. We also organized a Sit and Draw competition and a Quiz for the school students with FOSS being the central theme for both events. The attendance for the inauguration was way beyond our expectations, with many faculty members joining in to hear the Minister speak. Students from DAV School won in both the events and it was a very successful and satisfying 1st day for us.

For the next two days, we had Workshops organized in association with NRC-FOSS. The following workshops were organized:
1. How to write C/C++ programs in GNU/Linux.
2. Python - an interpreted programming language.
3. FOSS Electronic Design Automation Tools.
4. FOSS CAD/CAM Tools.
5. Collaborative Software Development using SVN.
6. Computer Typesetting for Engineers using LATEX.
7. SCILAB, an alternative for MATLAB on GNU/Linux.
The workshops had a fairly good number of students attending them. The best among them was the Python Workshop which was taken by Shreyank Gupta, a final year student of CSE, NIT DGP and a Core Member of GLUG, NIT DGP.

For the next 3 days, we had many competitions, ranging from 2 programming competitions, a system admin competition, a quiz, web development competition, paper and project presentation. But the highlight of this year's MUKTI was the emphasis which we had put on Talks/Workshops. We had talks from stalwarts in the world of FOSS. They are:
1. How to run a successful free software business - Abhas Abhinav, CEO, Deeproot Linux.
2. How to contibute to FOSS - Satya Komarigiri, a GSOC participant.
3. Ruby on Rails - Anurag Patel, cleartrip.com
4. KDE - Pradeepto Bhattacharya.
5. Managing your online Profile - Yu Yu Din, 123greetings.com
6. Indian FOSS Community, Indranil Dasgupta, ilugcal.
We were really indebted to have Abhas Abhinav and Pradeepto Bhattacharya, the FOSS Rockstars among us.

Oh ya, we also had a Light Painting Show by Patrick Rochon and Nicolas Maranda, from Canada. Their group, ALPHA C9D is incidentally the only group in the world who perform such magic with the camera. They say that they just play with the shutter speed of the camera but what they did, completely left all us enthralled and mesmerised. I mean I have never seen the crowd shouting "Once more...Once more" twice. It was truly an out of the world experience for those who attended it. It was intended to lighten the mood of the crowd after those series of events and talks and it exactly did that.

Well, we did falter on the participation front. But I believe what we have achieved is far far more satisfying than just getting the people to attend the talks unwilling just to fill in. We have inspired the opening of 3 LUGs in NIT Agartala, NIT Jamshedpur and Kalyani Govt. Engg. College. This is the real victory of ours and we are totally proud of it because we never performed gimmicks to alure people to participate and were through out transparent. I believe that these things would really translate in getting many more people to participate in MUKTI next year. We have sowed the seeds and would definitely have the flowers blooming next year. Even the participation was not that bad when I hear what happens in other FOSS conferences. I am happy because we did what had set out to do and never ever compromised on that....an out and out promotion of GNU/Linux and Free Software. We could have easily done away with the talks and include many crowd pulling events, but we did not do so because what we did would provide us with long term benefits rather than short term satisfaction. I am already hearing that the present 2nd year of our college has become very enthusiastic about using Linux and is very quickly migrating from Windows. This has been our primary aim, to Linuxise NIT Durgapur and we are on the right track.

I would really like to thank all the speakers who graced MUKTI' 09. An event can never be possible without sponsors/partners and yes, we did manage to find some during these times of Recession/Economic Slow down :D. We thank, NIXI, IOTA, Accenture, NRC-FOSS, Career Launcher, BSNL, HP, Karukrit, Linux for You, New Scientist, O Reilly, indyarocks, Dominoes, Cafe Coffee Day. Last but not the least, I would like to extend my sincere and heartfelt thanks to the IT Dept, NIT Durgapur, especially, HOD Sir, Prof. S. Choudhury for his unfaltering support to us. Seriously MUKTI would not have been the MUKTI it was without your support, Sir. I dont want to thank my committee because I feel we all did what we were responsible to do and what was expected of us. We all rose to the occassion and worked tirelessly towards making MUKTI '09, a SUCCESS.

On the personal front, MUKTI '09 has been the best "subject" in my curriculla at NIT Durgapur. It has taught me which none of the text books could have done. I learnt something everyday, since I started working for MUKTI. It helped me acquire leadership skills, taught me how to work as a team, helped me shed my inhibitions and become a little more extrovert than I was, I also learned the way of talking with the most conservative people you could find, the professors and staff of NIT DGP and in turn my Bengali has improved considerably :). Most importantly, I have learned the skill of getting things done. Being in an Engg College, I always wanted to acquire some managerial skills too and MUKTI' 09 was the platform which helped me do so. I met so many different kinds of people and have made some of my best friends on this journey called MUKTI '09.

Now, let me tell you the real reason, why I wrote all this today. We had a GLUG meeting today and after a long time I did not preside over it. It was the 3rd years who co-ordinated everything today. It felt a bit awkward to be on the other side again after so long. I had this itching sensation and felt that "that" time has come which is dreaded by most of us, the last days of college life and the time to GO. I may sound greedy and self centered but I did not like it at all. I am feeling very nostalgic right now but cannot help it. I am very very proud of what we have done and am pretty sure that my juniors would continue the good work which we have started. We, final years always discussed that what would happen to GLUG, NIT DGP after we leave but now I am satisfied that there are more able people than us to take care of it. I congratulate all and wish all the very best for future endeavors.

Well has been a fairly loooooooooooonnnnnnnnnnnnggggggggg blog but jab likhta hun toh dil khol ke likhta hun.....

Signing off...... finally :).....uhhh