The 27th edition of Techkriti, the annual technical and entrepreneurial festival of IIT Kanpur was held on March 14. Abhishek Singh, CEO-Digital India, the Dean of students’ affairs IIT Kanpur, professor Siddhartha Panda was among those present at the inauguration of Techkriti’21. This year, the theme “Realm of Virtuality” has posed the idea of how virtual reality has helped us come closer and how the virtual kingdom has started to thrive.
The Director, IIT Kanpur, Professor Abhay Karandikar addressed the students and all other participants and stressed the fact that Techkriti’21 is connected from Virtuality to reality in the times of reality to virtuality. He also expressed his opinions that Techkriti is a platform of learning opportunities with the flavor of entertainment like music and comedy.
The Dean of Students’ Affairs, Professor Siddhartha Panda took the opportunity to motivate students for the innovation and talent showcase with their creativity and ideas. He also gave examples of startup incubations, research abilities and flexibilities, National level missions that are laid out by our institute. He also reflected the efforts of Techkriti to make experts from all over the world share their experiences and thoughts for motivation on one platform.
Abhishek Singh, CEO-Digital India threw some light on the fact of growing career possibilities adding to which he said how India is taking the lead in the field of startups. Likewise, Covid innovation challenges made us develop Aarogyasetu which involved contributions of people from various backgrounds which just accelerated the pace of innovation. His idea of what we just need is an acceptable idea to all the people, which can be translated to a product, truly sparked innovation ideas. He was delighted to share that young minds are designing solutions which is the first step for innovation connecting and working together all over the world. He also listed out some technical innovation which has been proved to be successful as the use of UPI for digital payment, Digi locker, etc. He also said, “Possibilities are immense”. He said the coming future is for startups based on Artificial Intelligence which will demand high AI skills.
An enlightening talk by Padma Bhushan Awardee, Bikash Sinha on “ Today’s Science is tomorrow’s Technology” was well received. He started with the fact that technology is produced out of necessity and most of the time it is dominated by science. He emphasized the importance of Fundamental Science and encouraged young minds to not underestimate its importance. He urged all youths to understand the broad essence of science. He also encouraged young minds to say, “I will discover something.” He emphasized that students must not give away. “Try hard but never give away to circumstances!”
Immediately following this was the comedy night starting at 8:00 pm which was filled with rib-tickling jokes. Performing artists Nishant Suri, followed by Vipul Goyal and Kanan Gill. Alongside these, a total of 3 workshops on Startup and entrepreneurship, Robotics, and the programming language Python, were carried out which too had participants in large numbers, students who saw the opportunity and grabbed it to learn amazing skills.
Competitions were another component which included DBatch, Mandakini, and Speed Quant. Nishant Suri was the winner of season 1 of a famous Amazon prime stand-up comedy show Comicstaan. And has since been one of the best comics in the stand-up circuit.
Vipul Goyal is one of the top Indian comics not to mention that he is an alumnus of IIT Bombay.. Kanan Gill, the software engineer turned artist made us roll with his Youtube series ‘Pretentious Movie Reviews’, whom we have watched on ‘Sketchy Behavior’ and ‘Keep it Real’, the judge and the mentor of the very much loved and famous Stand-up Reality Show, Comicstaan.
