It was a fitting climax to the four years. Like a best-selling video game, in which getting to the final boss is fraught with excitement and adventure, and the final boss himself is a lean-mean-killing-machine defeating whom can make you feel like Rambo or Rocky for weeks… the BE project is the final villain in the game of engineering. Mind you, the analogy, though wild, is not too exaggerated.

Thank god I wasn’t an MBA when we took on the project. Else we would have been lost in a series of never ending project planning phases. We took the project head on. Our team had an established track record. Maurya: the search expert, the deadly duo of Ritesh-Megha, and me. Of course, I was the black sheep.

The hatred and disdain for the corporate world manifested itself in several ways in our college. One was the strict no-no to campus placements. Our trustee actually turned away companies that came to campus for recruitments. Another evidence of the corporate phobia was the disallowance to do a project in a company. The conventional thinking was that doing the project in a company is helpful because you have access to a company’s infrastructure, have expert industry guidance, and what you work on usually has some semblance of a practical application. Sadly, conventional thinking was looked down upon in our college. The professors talked about the pride in doing a project by oneself. So what if the college didn’t have the facilities. Couldn’t the students display resourcefulness? Several justifications for forcing us to do an in-house project (a project by the students themselves) were given. They just exemplified the tendencies in our college to torment students till they give up. And we would have given up, if we had the option, but all we could do was live with the atrocities we were subjected to. Several students wanted to do a project in some company. So the appeal to allow company projects grew stronger. And though the final word on whether company projects were going to be allowed or no, we decided to try and find one for ourselves. So the budding telecom engineers that we were, we reached Reliance Infocom, courtesy contacts of Megha Gohel (now Megha Dedhia), where we were humbled as we realized the meager extent of our knowledge in telecom. The Reliance plan didn’t work out. And thinking that there would be a similar pattern of events if we visit any other corporate honcho, we thought of approaching a professor. We must have been in a distorted frame of mind when we thought of going to Kats for a project. But then, the choice would have been bad irrespective of which professor we went to. Kats, with the air of a high ranking official who knows his work will be done at the raise of a finger, asked us to contact a professor at Vivekanand. We were almost dazed by his “contacts”. He even wrote a letter for us to give to the prof. there. The letter would have been a worthy specimen of the language unique to Kats, the language Maurya calls Katnese. We wisely, decided to not show the letter to the prof. at Vivekanand. After all, the confidence with which Kats had asked us to visit that prof. made us believe that the two profs. in vastly different class of colleges must have grown up together with our Kats taking on the noble cause of enriching a not-so-great college with his intelligence and knowledge (there is an unbelievable amount of sarcasm in that last sentence.) We were disappointed, no, the word is shocked, when we reached Vivekanand and the prof there looked at us with a blank stare when we mentioned Kats’ name. And the blank stare raised a tsunami of confusion in us. Thankfully, the prof didn’t summon the security to get us thrown out. We were not used to humane treatment from professors. And this kind soul gave us hope that philanthropy was not yet extinct. After a brief talk with him, we realized that this was another avenue shut down.

Now the tension levels began to rise. We decided to do a project by ourselves. And everyone frantically started going through websites, books, journals, with the hope of finding a project. There was a weather monitor which we thought of, and an intelligent house network, and a couple of others. But we decided to go with “face recognition”. A big pro here was that there was only software involved. And also it was an IEEE paper. And IEEE for engineers is what the Church is for Christians. The profs gave their nod of approval at the mere sight of the abbreviation IEEE. We formulated strategies to make sure that our project was approved by our HOD. The IEEE paper that we would show first, the paper that we would show incase he didn’t agree, with the first one, different ways of making a pitch for the project. As it turned out, none of it was required. Our project got approved without any convincing. Seeing a scribbled signature on the IEEE paper’s undecipherable printout; we were sure that there was no way that the HOD had actually perused the document to determine whether the project was extensive enough to test our abilities. However, it was much more extensive than we had bargained for, as we would realize in the months to come. Getting back to the game analogy, getting the approval was just reaching the final stage. The boss was way up ahead. And the game would keep us on the edge of our seats, and the brink of our senses.