Mr. Admin walks into the room with a black monkey-mask on. Our first instinct is that we are going to be mugged, but we realise that no one has any usable money left. He takes a seat and crosses his legs.

Hi! We’re from Watch Ou..

Yeah yeah. I know. Can you get to it quickly? It’s end-term season and the confession page gets really busy.

Right to it then. So, what do you think of IIT Roorkee. Like, what’s your role here?

Oh. This place is full of cowards. All of them are wimps, I tell you! Opinionated wimps, though. People here have a say in everything. They want to go on a rant against their professors, the mess food, the lecture timings, everything! They want to ask the guy on their floor who keeps playing loud music to shut up. They want to ask the pretty girls out for a cup of coffee. But, they also want to keep their identity hidden. Which is where I come in. I’m the channel that gets messages through to the receiver. I’m here to make sure that all this is done.

Does it get stressful, this job?

Don’t get me started on this! It gets irritating when people start messaging the page with death threats if you haven’t posted confessions over a span of 2 days. These futile attempts to menace end up messing up my ability to pay attention to those presentations in class (not that I want to pay attention). It’s funny how their haystack filled brains strive on the daily dose of who’s hating, who’s dating, who’s crushing and who’s blushing. God, I wish I could get a break! I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love this job, but even I have tutorials and assignments to copy!

Must be exhausting, copying and pasting all those confessions.

Oh you smart guys with your sarcasm. Let me tell you how tiring this responsibility is. I have to manually check and censor each of the confessions. It is almost impossible to comprehend the English. Itz jst rndm cllckn of alphbts sumtyms whch dnt evn mk snse. Recently, I found out the outrageous fact that the administration keeps a tabs on the kids by checking my page. I don’t want to put my users, however stupid they might be, into trouble because #brocode. Also, there exists a range of confessions which are not meant to greet the desperate eyes of the IITR junta, because a few secrets are meant to be buried. Thus, these end up being filtered out.

(rather excitedly) What are those secrets?

(Eyes in those monkey masks grow wider. We jump in our seats and hurriedly mutter “Never mind” and move on to the next question)

Um, what do you think of these “lovers” posting confessions?

I’ve always been a hopeless romantic. I admit, I’ve had my own share of lovestruck semesters here. I have been rendered speechless in front of the love of my life a couple of times. What can you say! Some of us are just too shy. Does that mean that we are incapable of love? True, we’re awkward, and end up blabbering nervously strung together sentences and pick-up lines we plucked off the internet in front of our crush while our palms get sweaty and our heart pounds, resonating it’s beats through our chest, but does that mean we can’t give the girl of our dreams the happiness she deserves? At IITR Confessions, we aim to give our timid, socially clumsy brothers a chance at love.

(We won’t lie. We teared up a bit right here.)

But there are so many people posting fake confessions about their friends! How do you deal with that?

It saddens me, to be honest, that today, the sanctity of a confession page is disregarded completely. I mean, seriously? IIT Roorkee needs to take love seriously. And as the admin, I’ll work ceaselessly until the fifteen thousand followers of our Facebook page know how important anonymous revelations of love are.

You don’t have fifteen thousand followers. It’s barely even ten thousand!

Still more than you guys have, right?

That hurt. Moving on. What is the recruitment process like for becoming the admin?

We get into a group of 15 people and grill the prospective candidates.

Really?

No, that’s just dumb! Our recruitment is an analogous to Darwin’s theory of natural selection. We handpick our candidates using an algorithm which has been circulating in the confession community for generations. These potential candidates are put through carefully drafted rigorous linguistic, semantic and analytical challenges. The refining process goes something like the following.

• Right off the bat, we ask our prospective candidates to provide us the juiciest gossip of the campus.( Yes, we need to judge their definition of juicy.) We weed out a huge chunk of admin-hopefuls here. You’d be surprised how very unfit people at IITR are at being paps.

• Next, we ask our contenders to process some really bad English. (V wnt 2 c if u cn hw hi iz ur glas ceelng)

• Then, we.. (Right here, the admin saw us excitedly take notes. He stopped.) Excuse me! We’d like to keep everything under the cloak of secrecy and we expect everyone to appreciate that. Are you actually naive enough to believe that I’d let you reveal my recruitment procedure to the entire campus? Come on!

We apologize. Although, could you name a couple of people who’ve been admins?

I don’t remember a lot of them. Though, Amit Singhal was an admin back in his time.

No he wasn’t! There wasn’t even a Facebook page then! There wasn’t even a ‘Facebook’ then!

I see you’ve done your research. Nice. Ok no he wasn’t. But he keeps hacking into our page every now and then. We have to change our password every two days!

Well, I guess that’s the end of this, then. One last question though. What do you think of Watch Out!?

Well, there was this outrageous rumor going around in campus that Watch Out! was behind this page, but I assure you, you guys are not cool enough to do it.

The article features in our Autumn’16 print issue. The issue delves into the roadblocks to having a truly meritocratic election at IITR and expounds on the limited academic flexibility offered at Roorkee. To read our previous issues visit: https://issuu.com/wona-iitr