This post shall serve as a kind of narration on an incident that happened recently. I should not be writing this right now because there’s too much of other work to finish. But I have started to notice that my memory of the events are starting to fade so I thought I shall take a break from everything and finish writing this.
The story begins with Abhi telling me one day that his idea of a stampede prediction model has been selected for a hackathon at Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology. During those December days of 2025 (I’m stating it as if it was a decade ago) I was in a state of mind of wanting to do some good project and Abhi was more than happy to take me in. We served as the perfect team in my opinion, Abhi with his immense knowledge of machine learning and AI and me with my teeny tiny experience with raspberry pi.
There was an online pitching round which we cleared and I won’t lie, I had zero hopes of clearing it. I have reached somewhat of a state of mind where I do not really care what happens in competitions as long as I was happy making some good project. Probably not the best mindset to have during a competition but it is what it is. I was extremely delighted after hearing the news that we were selected for the final round. A bit too excited I should say.
Due to the extremely packed schedule me and Abhi had we were able to barely work on the project till the last 2 days of the hackathon. I don’t mean to say no work happened, all the setting up of the raspberry pi and everything was done well in time that it was only the assembling of the final device and the interfacing of various modules we had to finish up. The night before the hackathon, everything was almost done. The device wasn’t fully ready, but the code was. That’s when the SD card was corrupted. I think this happened around 12 in the night. 2 raspberry pi both SD cards got corrupted. Then came the stint of setting up everything again, making the environment, copying the code from our laptops to the pi and finally we had our device ready by 2 AM.
Our initial plan was to leave Mohali at around 6 or 6:30 but we both knew that wasn’t going to happen. So finally we left for Patiala at around 8:00 AM. After reaching Patiala we went to have some food and then straight to Thapar. Thapar was an okayish campus, nothing too special to be honest apart from the park, the fountains and their on-campus Burgrill, Dominos and other food chain companies. I won’t lie, as much as I trash talk about IISERM’s campus, whenever I go for any competition to any institute, I do miss it quite a bit.
So anyways we were made to attend a panel discussion on career in AI. We arrived pretty late. The questions were mostly regarding startups and venture capitals and all that stuff which both me and Abhi were quite unfamiliar to. Ofcourse, we’re physicists. Before I could ask how I as a physics student can join an AI company the panel discussion ended. We kind of had hopes for some goodies at the hackathon but alas that wasn’t there.
The beginning phase
The hackathon started around 4:30 PM in the evening. We had some work remaining which was to establish communication between the raspberry pi and the arduino. While I was throwing my head at that problem, Abhi was focusing on something which I can’t quite recollect right now. It is most likely because I was panicking whether I would be able to establish the connection before the first checkpoint. I tried and tried and tried and after quite some time of playing around with the code I was finally able to establish connection between the raspberry pi and arduino using the nRF24L01 module. We kept running tests and the entire device was performing very well.
Then came the announcement that for the checkpoint we are supposed to submit the demo video, a presentation and also a deployment link. As soon as we heard this we started to prepare everything. Now if you know me well enough you’d know how big of an introvert I am. But something inside me wasn’t working that day because I sure as hell forgot to be an introvert. The moment I realised that the demo video should be made ASAP, I took my phone and started recording myself in public. It took 3 takes to get a good result of me speaking confidently about the project. Then when we were almost done with everything except the presentation, we got to know from another team (who are from Thapar) that there was a miscommunication and the submission is at 7:30 the next day. That was a relief, although I was quite pissed at the lack of management. So our work was mostly done right now and it was time for the first checkpoint.
The business trap
For the first checkpoint 2 Thapar students (most likely final year) came and asked about our project. They were extremely impressed, we could see it in their faces. I think they were impressed by the fact that we weren’t using any traditional AI methods but a novel physics-based method. Then came the question that left me and Abhi in quite literally a shock. After hearing our pitch they asked “So what’s the business model ?”. Now to reiterate, we are 2 physics majors, at a tech hackathon. Nowhere during the preparation of the hackathon had we though that the project should have a business model. If there’s anything physics lab vivas taught me it is the ability to cook up answers with full confidence even if you are underprepared like hell. That’s exactly what we did. We were telling about how event management companies and NGOs can use this during events to save lives. Then their question was “How do you make money out of this ?” which is a great question. Only problem being, we never really thought about it. It wasn’t just that, it was also that we didn’t want to make money with this. So they left and their suggestion was to think about a business model.
The symphony of the team
After the first checkpoint was done, I didn’t really have to think twice before understanding what Abhi was thinking. We both shared the same belief that a technology like this shouldn’t be sold for business but it should be made available for free. Ofcourse, that’s what you should do when you made something that has the potential to save thousands of human lives. So we tried to justify ourselves as to why even if we lost the hackathon because of the lack of a business model it’s still worth it. We went to sleep around 2:00 AM. I woke up around 3:15 to see that another evaluation round was announced which was to be held at 3:30 AM. We woke up and went quickly to our table.
The second day
The evaluation took place at 7:30 AM. We were standing there with barely 5 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours giving a presentation and explaining why our model is good again to be posed with the same question of our business model. So we were pretty much done with the entire thing. I had started hoping back to campus as quickly as we could. Abhi was asking me if he would be able to eat the biriyani at Bengali restaurant inside our campus. Since we didn’t really have anything proper to eat for like an entire day, we decided to go to have breakfast. That’s when they announced in the whatsapp group that we have to be present in the hall by 10:30 AM for announcing the results of the first round. Quite honestly, I had zero hopes. This is something I have started noticing about myself as of lately. I have started to not expect good things or hope for good things to happen. Nowadays, I just take life a bit lightly in the sense that I just do my job and as long as I feel content about the effort I put into doing anything I’m not really worried about the outcome. I don’t really know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing but it is something that has changed in me. Anyways, let’s go back. So yeah I was pretty done with whatever’s been happening with the hackathon that it was a drag to walk back to the hall where it was happening. During the walk me and Abhi told each other many times how it doesn’t matter what happens if we make it through or not because what we’ve done is a new work and how we can talk to a professor at our institute to take it to the next level.
We reached the hall and we were sat to hear the results. I couldn’t hear our name in the first 4-5 teams and I kind of gave up then and there. I didn’t really listen to the next team names that were being announced. Suddenly, Abhi was happy and he said that we qualified. Now to someone who wasn’t hoping for anything I was really glad. So we decided to do it once again, to ace the final round.
Before the final round, the I was starting to feel the nerves for obvious reasons. That’s kind of when I started to remind myself that we were the underdogs. We are physics majors in a tech hackathon, we don’t belong there, yet we reached the final round. To me, that’s something impressive. I started practicing our pitch and that’s when me and Abhi decided to finally make a dashboard to monitor the live feed as well.
Moments Of Magic
I have been supporting Manchester United ever since I started watching football. I still remember vividly that bicycle kick from Rooney that made me fall in love with the club. If there’s anything this club has taught me it’s that it’s never over until the last whistle. This happened here too. 5 minutes before the hackathon, we decided to build a dashboard for monitoring the live feed and the model prediction. Now this isn’t such an easy task because the live feed should come from the raspberry pi, the arduino serial monitor should be in constant communication and the website should be accessed in a different computer. I didn’t know how to do this but lucky for us Claude did. In 5 minutes, the website for VigilAI was setup. Our team name was called I think around 3-4 times and I was typing stuff and making sure the correct thing ran at the correct place for the final and the most important presentation. The fun part is that I had to close some programs for our presentation to run. I had around 5-6 terminal windows open infront of the judge. One wrong kill command and the entire presentation would’ve been over before it even began. I do not know to what I should give credit to, but that day all the keystrokes I made were perfect. Not a single mistake and that’s how we had our final pitch. I was happy, extremely happy with the work we did. I was truly not expecting any results, I was honestly just happy that we got into the final round and that we had a good presentation and project. We decided to go eat something but we didn’t have enough time for that before the final result announcement.
Final Result
We’re back where we first sat. We were both pretty happy with what we accomplished. I won’t lie though I was praying for a position in the hackathon. Especially after all the hardwork we put in and all the sleep that was missed, I was praying to god to give us something. That’s when I heard our name being called for third prize. Yes, a team of physics majors won third prize in a tech hackathon. Out of 600ish teams we were placed third. The happiness can’t be put into words.
Final Note
I have realised that I don’t really get hopeful about things as of lately. I think its because of the fact that I’ve been disappointed way too many times because of hoping for things to go good. That’s exactly when it stops. So recently my focus has solely been to just live life and not expect anything. I had the same mentality for this hackathon too. Nowhere during the entire preparation phase was I concerned about winning it. I was solely doing it for the fun of it. Maybe that’s a good way to live life. Maybe all of life is just you doing things you want to do without expecting anything good in return. That’s the major takeaway for me from the hackathon. Apart from that it was also time spent with Abhi. That guy motivates me quite a lot. The sheer amount of effort he puts into the things he love is something that I haven’t seen much in people and I am forever glad to be his friend and to do a project with him. I guess the topic changed quite drastically at the end but that’s mostly how these blogs are going to be :) I shall add pictures when I find them but for now this is it.