Vimarsh has covered a long distance, since it was launched about three and a half years ago

From a new born baby to an infant, it has been an adventurous journey

Some persons joined very enthusiastically, but are no longer active any more, i am referring to people like: Gobind; Raghav Saraswat (raghu) and Pratibha Yadav (pratt89) they were the students very active for a rather long period. Then there were some bright icons like syriac and ravithekavi, who left their mark in a shorter period
Tarun and jsbagla have been inspiring teacher members for the longest period!

Now it appears that there is an urgent need for some change. People have different choices for their time spent on a site on the Internet; Sites like facebook and twitter are apparently becoming more appealing nowadays!!

Now, that everybody presumably will have some spare time at hand, i suppose that i can request them to suggest changes in the format of Vimarsh!

Are you game???

When students move away from Delhi they are immersed in new experiences and might feel disconnected with their past activities. So why these once active students have moved away from Vimarsh is understandable. I think a format that worked for them must have got something right, therefore, I don't think that the format needs to change very much.

What is surprising is that the next generation has not caught on to Vimarsh at all. Probably they do not know that it exists. I think you need to advertise it every year, or at least every other year. Many colleges would have science societies. If these people engage in group meetings then you could ask them how Vimarsh could play the role of facilitator in terms of e-gathering.

Is it possible to have software for chat with logged members? This might increase the intimacy experienced by logged in members? This facility is available on Gmail as well as Facebook. It is sad to see how little content is being generated by members these days. I can imagine that you may play the most active role here but I have a feeling that recently it has become a one man show

That's not totally true! Our students members who are now at the Cambridge University, TIFR, BHU etc. still visit the forum to read the fresh posts, but they refrain from posting. Perhaps, they think that the forum is just for seeking answers ( i believe that their experience here has taught them to search the Net to get answers themselves) and not for sharing their experiences or new information.
Perhaps, they are not ready to put in the work! They find it much more rewarding to tweet or say a sentence or two to their friends. Now, that the university may forcefully implement the semester scheme, the number of students seeking answers would dwindle further. People will still visit Vimarsh once in a while, or when they find a link through Googling. But, that may not be worth all my effort. So, i do not foresee a long life for Vimarsh, unless totally new initiatives are taken.

I would believe that if a few enthusiastic teachers, like yourself take up the responsibility to post something about a new subject, atleast once a week ( as sometime back) Perhaps this useful intellectual activity may survive!

If that is true then perhaps your conclusions are correct. Anyway, I can surely do my little bit. Posting once a week could be a start OK, I can start from today!

Oh! that would be fantastic indeed In fact I have started feeling very lonely

Further, if you anyone else interested in writing intelligently, i would be grateful if you can invite her/him too!

Cheers

I have defaulted on my promise but tomorrow I will make it good I have tried to sell the idea of Vimarsh in the past to some of my colleagues (and students) but failed. I was always very interested in chatting about science but most other people are not so interested. That is really the crux of the problem. Most people like to indulge in activities that can benefit them in a tangible manner. For instance, if Vimarsh could go into their CV then they would be immediately interested I guess some people might say that this is a cynical reading of the situation but this is the best explanation that I can come up with. So right now, at best I can offer my own services.

Here's an email reply to my message sent to almost all Vimarsh members (a copy of my first post in this thread, that i received today. The person is a student of St. Stephens College, i had met on a few occasions personally


I can now guess the reason for students not posting on Vimarsh. Majority of students today, like to follow the crowd, a crowd they can recognize some faces in, like other students from the same college (for example, several students from St. Stephens and ANDC posted about a couple of years ago, the urge to post is fueled by the recognition in the crowd; the insignificant minority was represented by the active students in previous years, say Ravi Kunjwal, Govind, Reghav Saraswat and of course Mathew Syriac! On Vimarsh, sadly that has not been the case especially during the past six months, because there was no groups (crowds) formed. Thus, although we posted many more posters on the notice boards of several colleges, it did not inspire many students to post. Is it because Science has become irrelevant for the day to day life of students nowadays? And a casual visit to the website does not apparently suggest that there is much more to Vimarsh then the hard core science, students have to mug, for their courses. Perhaps a carefully worded banner on the opening page of the site may help?

About the question being raised whether the "Science has become irrelevant" for us, I would say that it is not possible. I am to some extent active on Social Network Facebook and have all my classmates as friends on it. I say so, because, very often we discuss things like making your maid aware of the fact that its more environment friendly to use smaller burner on a gas oven, and things as meaningless as i-Phone is something which no-one can own as i (iota) is imaginary.. Not only this, every second day, I see someone from my class posting links to the hot things found online about science. Even I myself had posted all the video links that I had seen on Vimarsh. We do discuss the presence of commutation relation on grave stone of Born and How to get out of an infinite loop while running some unusual program. We do discuss the unknown things like Cryptography on Facebook, with my posting all those relevant known points about it.

We do, to some extent try to keep up our interest in talking science, but I don't the exact reason of not doing so on Vimarsh. People do know about it. I have not been thinking about why can't we do the discussions nicely in the well-formatted portal for it.

But it is for sure not true that We're less curious about knowing and talking about science in day-to-day life.

Prasoon

Yesterday, i was talking about Vimarsh to our new director Professor H. P. Singh. To him it appears science cannot be anything more then what is taught in college classrooms. He is apparently very disappointed with Vimarsh, and perhaps will go as far as not supporting it anymore. He has nevertheless proposed a meeting in which I have to present the achievements of Vimarsh so far! I reallw if I can really convince a group of DU professors, who are anyway never enthused to visit Vimarsh, even if they were told about it. But, anyway I will give it a try

So, if I fail to convince them that science can mean something much more then the curricular physics, chemistry biology etc. etc. It may be the end of Vimarsh in a couple of months.

I have got addicted to posting on Vimarsh, It will take some effort to get over it!!

Due to Vimarsh I was able to meet a few bright students from DU, so I would say that it has been quite useful to me. It would be a pity if it is stopped completely but the way it is going right now I think its demise seems inevitable.

I think any website/forum needs : Advertisement and Activities.. So we will need the same for vimarsh also(I have already tried to advertise it on Facebook)..But one thing that everyone notices here is that, we have to think, read, search, recollect information and post here..While in most of the web forums, people just post(or say, think and post) so I think we should give people more activities and make it a little less formal here

Thanks a lot

I have been mulling on the subject for past few days!

An idea that has emerged in my mind, has two components:

1. Only a few members may be required to post directly, Only people (whether students or teachers) who love writing may be allowed to post directly on the forum, they should be encouraged to post their queries by email. Which then may be addressed to by one or more members of the editors team of the forum.

2. The forum should be linked to a twitter account, where people are free to tweet on any post

The few prerequisites of the idea would be to provide some incentives (say, an honorarium to the members of editorial team who take their task seriously) And an active hunt to find such people across the Web

How's the idea

In my opinion, any initiative to save the forum is unlike to deliver phenomenal result, unless the University realizes its educational value, and gives some incentive to the students, may be add on to the internal assessment marks; or the teacher, may be recognition in the CV for considerations for promotion!

The university communities have become smarter(?) and people are not willing to significant work (thinking seriously and then keying the thought using a PC keyboard) unless they see some material benefit in doing so

While i agree with you on that point, still i would like to attempt to do do all i can.

So, in next few days i will go and explore if opening a twitter account can help; i think i can tweet a bit about my posts here on thatv site, anybody even those who cannot become members of vimarsh, only because of the policies we have to follow here, can post brief tweets in response

Well i thought i should make a return, been long since i last logged in, even forgot my password. As for my recent adventures, there's an int phd interview at HRI, Allahabad and then there's one at IISc, Blr. I am hoping to see you soon at IISc, tarun. (I omit the 'sir' cuz i remember you mistaking it for aggression in some discussion of yore, though of course, that isn't very contextual here.) I do not know where life will lead me, doing all that i can, no luck yet Didn't clear the TIFR interview, got into Cambridge but without a scholarship (oh yes, it's the same college as Mathew's, so if i had the funding, i'd again be mathew's junior but probably that isn't going to be so.) The Matscience (IMSc, Chennai) interview was marginally better than TIFR. Also took JAM and JNU.

In a nutshell i have been almost there, but not quite there.

How's everyone doing?

Ravi

After reading the posts here, I smell a bit of disappointment, as the university funding/support to vimarsh might be stopped.

Although I can't say much about the decision, but, I think some of the ideas suggested by Hallen are good and should be implemented. I believe that positive incentives work far better than negative ones, and I believe some of the schemes/ prizes initiated by Vimarsh for its active members might work, if publicized well.

I think rather than thinking why old members are not posting something, the impetus must be to lure new members in, so that a discussion that is being initiated can be sustained, and fresh ideas keep pouring in.
Having said that, I must admit that it is quite a tough job, and certainly can't be done all alone, but at least we can try it at our own level.


Now, let me share some of my thoughts and experiences about the forum in the past few years:


I was one of the first few members of Vimarsh, as it was introduced to me by Dr. RM Hallen in CSEC, along with Govind.
It was a new thing for me, back then, a forum, where I could discuss concepts and queries related to science, along with finding out more about interesting puzzles, scientific discoveries and updates, and could question, debate, argue and philosophize about virtually anything under the sun and whet my intellectual-appetite.

It was a place where I used to wonder about things of which I was half-aware and share the day-to-day curiosities in my life.
Soon, I got addicted to it and spent hours together on the forum, with the members like builder, aditi, tarun, jsbagla, debadityo, lakshy, ravi, syriac, jyoti, pankhuri and govind to name a few.

Answering questions, and getting them right served as an adrenaline shot to me, and I couldn't resist that.

But then, exams (entrance, and otherwise) caught up, and I had to decrease the pace, at which I used to post.

After getting admitted to TERI University, I rarely got any chance to even take a look at the forum, let alone posting something there, thanks to the rigorous course-work, and the load of assignments, term-papers and presentations.

The fact that the course that I was studying was Environmental Studies, and not just science alone, didn't help either, and the distance from lively scientific discussions kept on increasing.

Many a times, I tried to log in to post something, but most of the time I used to get backed down by the backlog. By backlog I mean the older posts that one had to read, before posting a new one.

The plain layout of the forum with sober colors, and the various huge piles of threads in each of the sub-forums posed a daunting challenge, each time I tried to look into the sections.

I then used to give up on reading the posts any further and wander off after going through only a few posts. (All or none phenomena?)

Furthermore, thinking about an interesting question, then formulating it, and then posting it on a forum, with necessary background was not so easy after my honeymoon-period here, what to say of following a thread, and taking part in it actively.

To sum it all up, it has been quite a memorable learning experience for me, and would continue to be, if it continues; however, I believe we shouldn't be too depressed in case the funding is stopped, as there are many more ways of sharing our thoughts with each other, and I think Hallen will agree with me on this.