One of my previous posts threw some light on Bureaucratic System at IIIT. A few hours ago, Zenwalker posted an interesting story on his blog regarding Creation of a mailing list for the purpose of a magazine. These were few things about IQ level 🙂 Now, lets study the ego levels of people at our place. People who are in no way related to IIIT are writing blogs about IIIT. Isn’t that great?? People know us now!! A guy who happens to be a FOSS supporter, was trying to convince administration to organize a FOSS fest at IIIT and this is what he got! (I couldn’t find a way to link to the particular post from the blog, so quoting it here. You can find the original post (its the first one untill author updates his blog) here.)

We approach technical advisor X and assistant professor Y for a F/OSS unconference at a premier International Institute, and they never respond for weeks. Apparently, we knew the Head of the Institute, who whole-heartedly agrees, having been a user group member during his college years, and asks X and Y to take things further.

Now, X and Y are upset, because we approached the Head of the Institute, and permission was granted. Then X and Y show off their ego, presence, and reciprocate by not communicating at all our requests. Weeks go by, and we still don’t get any prompt response. And we decide to finally call it off with them because it was not helping us progress any further.

End result is that the students/faculty of the Institute are at a big loss for not having the event at their venue for no fault of theirs!

While, I have seen such extreme *ego* cases in India in most of my attempts to organize Free Software unconferences, I have never shared it with others. Maybe I should write a book — The Adventures of Shakthimaan: The “Lost” Chronicles 🙂

People have to agree with me that our professors (apart from a few) never reply to mails irrespective of the importance of the mail. I am glad to know that number of people who ask “What is IIIT?” is decreasing 🙂