BITS Pilani presented the 35th edition of its technical fest APOGEE from March 23 to March 26. The festival hosted personalities such as Simon Taufel, Salman Khurshid, Manu Joseph, and Zakir Khan this year. APOGEE also held events like BSF Exhibition, Hyperloop India exhibit, Literature Festival, Aisi Taisi Democracy, and Indian Jam Project. For the first time ever, there is an over-reaching theme to the fest – ‘The Retrofuture’. In accordance with the theme, the student organizers of this tech fest have taken the initiative to snapshot the BITS Pilani of today in a Time Capsule scheduled to be opened 15 years into the future.
Another novelty this year is the outsourcing of the APOGEE mobile application to a company called Yeppar, which is going to build it along the lines of Augmented Reality. This was something to look forward to, considering the recent surge in the popularity of Augmented Reality based applications, primarily owing to Pokémon Go. Aisi Taisi Democracy was a performance by Rahul Ram, Varun Grover, and Sanjay Rajoura, three individuals who use music and satire to present their take on the country’s socio-political scenario. Rahul Ram, bass guitarist in the band ‘Indian Ocean’, mentioned that it was his second time performing in Pilani. Varun Grover is a comedian, screenwriter, and lyricist, and Sanjay Rajoura is a stand-up artist and actor.
The three of them made fun of famous families with strong political backgrounds and debatable nationalities. One of their segments had references to Donald Trump and his promises of building a wall to keep the Mexicans out. They mentioned that tokenism has become a big part of people’s lives and that they have started blindly trusting posts and forwarded messages on social media. Towards the end, Varun urged the audience to keep questioning the status quo of the country and to find answers for themselves, rather than rely on WhatsApp forwards. The funny, thought-provoking performance concluded with another soulful melody from Rahul Ram.
As a pre-APOGEE event, Think Again organized the talk i.e. “Why Science?” by Prof. Gautam Desiraju in collaboration with the Chemistry, Physics, Biology and Chemical Engineering Departments. Mr. Shiraz Minwalla, the chief guest of APOGEE 2017, is an eminent theoretical physicist and specializes in String Theory. He also delivered a lecture on String Theory in the NAB Auditorium prior to the APOGEE inauguration ceremony. Dealing with ‘one to one correspondence between 10 and 4-dimensional quantum space’ and ‘products of infinitely large matrices’, the lecture’s complexity was the perfect blend of detailed and mysterious.
