Schools and colleges don't allow boys and girls (or men and women) to even talk to each other. They condition students into feeling guilty about friendships with the opposite gender. Private institutions see education only as a business. To them, good education is only a matter of maximizing examination marks and placement salaries. They create endless hurdles and bureaucracy ensuring that nothing out of the mundane and the ordinary ever gets done. Perhaps that gives them a sense of power, and justifies their rhetoric that students need a strong hand to discipline and guide them. The only purpose of our education system is to take a human being with all the innate curiosity and critical thinking, and break him, turning him into an unquestioning slave well suited for slogging away for the enrichment and aggrandizement of the wealthy few.

The camp had a civil engineering student, a mechanical engineering student, and a commerce student. This is the first time I am seeing non-computer science people take on an active role in the free software movements around here. I hope this is the beginning of a new era in the free software movement, when people understand that free software is for all people, not just programmers. The Free Software Movement Karnataka (FSMK) should take a leaf out of FIST's book.

The camp expenses were recorded and maintained using a spreadsheet. This is tedious and can quickly become intractable. The much better approach is to use accounting software such as GnuCash explicitly designed for this purpose. To this end, I introduced one of the FIST people to double-entry bookkeeping and GnuCash. I hope that FIST will use GnuCash or some similar software for their future events.

We stayed at a marriage hall in Samayapuram. I was worried that the bathroom and toilets would not be good enough, but they were better than I expected – at least enough to get by for the four days of the camp. The food served at the camp was both filling and pleasing to the taste.

Only one complaint: The polystyrene (thermocol) plates provided during lunch, and the plastic water bottles provided for the speakers could have been avoided. Instead of polystyrene plates, paper plates or plates made from some other biodegradable material could have been used. And, instead of the water bottles, a common water can could have been kept. This would have been more environment friendly.

Due to some confusion, the organizers brought ADSL modem + WiFi routers instead of WiFi routers. Luckily, I had brought an iball Baton ib-WRB150N WiFi router using which I was able to set up the WiFi network required for the workshop. Typically, WiFi routers don't handle more than 10 connections very well. Surprisingly, this one held up well even with 30 to 40 connections. I don't know why this happened, and I don't understand why WiFi routers start dropping connections beyond a point. More reading and research is necessary.

I spent most of the four days talking to Ganesh, Mugilan and Niranjan. There is a bit of frustration in the air about our pet projects not proceeding fast enough. I can only hope things will improve as our projects get closer to completion. We all agreed on the importance of completing our projects properly, and blogging about them. Not publishing one's work in the name of humility makes no sense.

Having lived in Bengaluru for a while and gotten used to BMTC's high bus fares (at least 15 or 20 rupees for the average journey), I unconsciously reached out for the 100 rupees note in my wallet even in Tiruchi. Only a moment later did I realize that bus fares in Tamil Nadu are much lower and affordable! Even though the buses are rickety-rackety with a lot of scope for improvement, having inexpensive public utilities without all the advertisement thrust into your face like in Bengaluru is well worth it.

The warmth of the Tiruchi sun was soothing. Still, the monsoons kept the temperature down to manageable levels.

Chicken puffs in Samayapuram actually had chicken in them! So often, in cities, you only find "fake chicken puffs" with mostly flour, and very little actual meat.

Seeing and hearing so much Tamil was refreshing. It is surprisingly pleasant when you can effortlessly understand what passers-by are talking about. In Bengaluru, with only my survival knowledge of Kannada, I have to really concentrate and exert myself to understand ambient talk.

People in small towns are generally a lot more hospitable and friendly than those in bigger cities. The Samayapuram shopkeepers were no exception. Once, when I was having breakfast at a street vendor's shop, just to be on the safer side with my health, I did not drink the water. One of the ladies running the shop noticed this, came running to me, enquired if there was something wrong with the water, and before I could respond, emptied the vessel, cleaned it, filled it afresh with water, and offered it to me. Surprised and somewhat amused by the courtesy, I drank. No city shopkeeper would have bothered that I didn't drink water from their shop!

On the last day of the camp, just before leaving, I had icecream with some of the camp organizers at Michael and Sons ice cream parlour. The ice cream was actually made in the shop itself, and wasn't one of those things that come pre-packaged in a cardboard box. It reminded me of the ice cream my mother once made at home a long time back when I was in primary school.

1. FIST Tiruchi camp 2017 group photo by Freedom in Science and Technology (FIST), released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license
2. FIST Tiruchi camp 2017 lunch by Freedom in Science and Technology (FIST), released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license
3. FIST Tiruchi camp 2017 Michael and Sons by Freedom in Science and Technology (FIST), released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license