Engineering courses do not often require one to bring his/her artistic abilities to the table. Even on the occasion that they do, the requirement is purely unintended. For example, the Animal Driven Saw Mill project in 2nd/3rd year mechanical engineering.
The idea was to design a saw mill that ran on animal power, for use in rural India, with the emphasis laid firmly on design. Disinterested as we were in this rather silly task, we decided to drop in a bunch of ideas into a flashy presentation and were quite sure that it would make a strong impact on the very impressionable lecturer handling the course, on the condition that it was silly enough. Needless to say the design took a colossal beating. The final FLASH version consisted of a two headed cow (added to enhance the trip factor) going in circles at nearly light speed, rotating a 20 foot large pulley which transferred power to a rack and pinion arrangement to which the saw was attached.
Sudipto brought his brilliance to the project, adding a fatigue meter. The fatigue meter was essentially a bulb that waned when the cow suffered from exhaustion (at which point our bovine friend would slow down to move at the speed of sound). A small protest broke out in class when we presented this and all our friends who had in earnest designed complex gear systems on 3D modeling software were offended by our judicious asininity. We couldn’t care less and ended up topping the project.
For a year and a half in grad school I was only faced with rigor in coursework and there was little room to display my proclivity to art. Then there was a course I took this spring whose finals required each student to make a video on a scientific topic of his/her choice. The following video is a direct consequence of watching a lot of Monty Python before the finals week, copious caffeine and a subversive attitude. It has a dash of Gilliam, Blues Music, Japanese Cinema and an assortment of other dedications.
Polymer Brush (Slight Return) feat. Monty Python by Bhayak
OST (in order of appearance):
Main Titles and Prologue(Blade Runner)-Vangelis
A Night in Tunisia-Miles Davis
Battle without Honor or Humanity-Tomoyasu Hotei
Purple Haze-Jimi Hendrix
Malted Milk-Robert Johnson
TearDrop-Massive Attack
The Flight of the Valkyries- Richard Wagner
1009-Bonobo
Alberta!- Eric Clapton
