Goonj is a three day fest of UIET which has technical, cultural, academic and other events. All three days the UIET building looks pretty chaotic. Sponsor banners, students, confused participants, busy help-desk, food and other stalls are some of the common sightings outside the building. This year the main sponsor of our fest was Airtel.

As a member of technical committee I was also a Goonj Organiser. Days leading to Goonj were extremely tiring esp. because our dear convener has been very inefficient. Just two days before the fest he realised that the none of the required softwares for the different techncal events were installed on the computers. So at the very last moment he turned to me, and thankfully I had the resources and I provided them with almost all the required ones. And finally he assigned me to install all the softwares!! It took me almost one full day to install the softwares on 35 nodes. Since anyone hardly helped me, it made the job even tougher.

Looking at the non-technical events we had both cultural and academic events, competitions and programmes. Some of the secial events were Treasure Hunt and Young Turks. In Treasure Hunt clues are provided to reach a point in the campus where the next clue is hidden and this way the hunt goes on. Young Turks has been one of the most heavily marketed events. Many of my friends joined the team of Young Turks as volunteers. They were initially involved in hunting sponsors for the event and later turned to extensive marketing. Young Turks was extremely successful last year, so they got lots of sponsors and the posters of this event were pasted all around the city. This event has a written screening round based upon a topic of participants choice, followed by a final round in which the participants directly interact with certain celebrities like TV actors, RJs etc. Although I was extremely interested in participating in this event but unfortunately I was too occupied with the technical committee tasks. Another good event was Rendevous, in which certain executives from leading IT companies were invited to interact with the students. My friends told me that this event was awesome. Most of them liked the invitee from Microsoft who gave his presentation using Notepad. Another interesting competition was Besura Duet. As the name suggests, a team of two have to sing in a Besura and humourous manner.

Coming back to the technical events.. We had planned 22 events, but unfortunately 2 events had to be cancelled due to very less participations. The first technical event to be organised was on the software development using c\c++. Since I did not organise that event (and because of my obvious interest in programming) I decided to participate in that event. I teamed up with Varun (ECE, 1st year) who stays next to my room. He is not extremely talented in C++, but he has done c++ in 12th. First up was a written multiple choice screening. I must say that if was a very tough paper for a first year (even for me). We had to think a lot to logically derive the probable solutions. But the result was good and we were the only first year team to qualify (our score was pretty decent, we were third in screening!!). But the smile on our face was erased by the main programming question. Unlike the previous competitions in which I had participated, this had only one question. Unfortunately the question was too tough for us to understand. Each line was OHT (Over-Head Transmission). The question had something to do with Cyclic Redundancy Check, binary etc etc which overall made very little sence to me. We scratched our heads for about an hour, looked at others who were typing confusedly typing some commands and then gave up and left. Some of the other good and successful events were Mathsmania- Mini Olympiad, Sudoku, Encryption-Decryption, Photoshop Designing, Debugging and flash animation. I also participated in Photoshop Designing but I had no partner. Although I did not win anything, I liked the topic and the overall event. The last thing I participated in was Debugging with a 2nd year CSE student Siddharth who is also in the technical committee. We suddenly decided to participate in it about a few minutes before the start of the screening. 10 participants were to be selected from the screening test which was extremely tricky. A brilliant screening paper I must say. We had to spot the bug and also name the which type of bug it is (Compiler, Runtime, L-Value etc). Unfortunately we did not make it. Later on when the finals had already started I checked out the corrected paper and I realised that our paper was incorrectly checked. When I approached the person who was organising this event, I was very correctly told “You are a member of technical committee and have the liberty to see the paper but that gives you no right to contest the checking of the paper”. Mathsmania and Encryption-Decryption (Which was done entirely by me except for a small help by Rungta) were superhit events. Sudoku also had a very high participation. Ahother event that I fully organised was Data-Mining. Similar to one at our school but I had both text and picture clues and also an icon as a clue. I gave them 3 lifelines which they can use if they are unable to solve a clue. Overall I am pretty satisfied with my events.

As you all know that Goonj was a 3-day event. Each night had some special events. First night was a Lazer Show. As an organiser I was allowed to enter the exclusive section that was right in front of the podium. Each lazer show was followed by one or two cultural shows. The lazer show was brilliant and most of the effects left us spellbound. Never before I have seen anything like that. The following night was the rock night. A band from our university played a few good songs which was followed by a Delhi based rock band Prithvi. Their performance was terrific. The lead singer and guitarist seems to be a big GnR fan. His performance was exactly like them, the was he played guitar, his movements. They played lots of GnR tracks, Linkin Park, Bryan Adams songs from their own album etc. The whole auditorium was rocking!! Everyone was standing on the chairs, head banging, screaming, shouting…. in short enjoying a rock concert to the extreme. Infact the audi had to suffer a high loss after this concert, brocken chairs, brocken handles etc etc. The final night we got a chance to enjoy disco. DJ Nasha was invited to perform. Although he is supposed to be next best after DJ Aqeel and DJ Suketu, I did not particularly like his mixing. But his choice of music was perfect and the arrangement was very good. The sound was awesome and the volume was extremely high. I loved the quality of speakers he brought along. And that night all of us had a ball. We danced as hard as our legs could bear. Even though we would have loved to dance all night, but in Chandigarh all such night events are to stop by 10 pm. Goonj ended after the dance party with a humble request by our Department Representatives. They asked all of us to go for a mass bunk the next working day.

Over all the fest was lovely and I really enjoyed most of it. But it needs to improve even more. Hopefully next year it will be even better.