Shaastra means science. As the technical festival of IIT Madras, it is a testament to a rich experience of quality performance in a dynamic landscape shaped by the presence of students, professors, industries, Nobel laureates and eminent personalities from around the world. Shaastra stands for the endeavour to encourage innovative thinking and foster creative solutions. It exemplifies the rarified strata of “out of the box thinking”. But as we at Shaastra do not believe in clichés, the logo depicts this notion in a whole new light. The “Out of the box” is out and the whole new “Out of the dice” is in! The logo has two dice, yet it thwarts all conventional norms by having the same number on every face. The unconventional dice succinctly represent every face of Shaastra.
Albert Einstein, unarguably one of the greatest physicists of all time, said “God does not play dice with the universe”. The logo is a tribute to this legendary statement which immortalized the concept of determinism. Here at Shaastra, we leave nothing to chance. Try as hard as you may, roll it in whatever way, but this dice will always give you the same number. There is no uncertainty in the numbers that appear on them. Everything is ordered, perfect!
But, humans can't emulate Gods. However hard we may try, we can't achieve perfect symmetry. The two dots on the rightmost face of the right cube are not a mirror image of the same in left cube, while everything else is. “I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about”- a tribute to Richard Feynman: we try to remove all uncertainty, induce perfect symmetry and strive for perfection. Something, however minuscule it may be, always eludes us.
In short, the all new Shaastra logo embodies the essence of what Shaastra strives to achieve - innovation, quality and perfection.