My experiments with iiTruths

I feel that this is one topic which comes foremost to my mind. The reason is that I am in the IIT phase of my life. Before we I describe IIT life in detail, let me flashback to the Target:IIT phase of my life.
Year 2002 A.D, Month April
I had just given my Xth board exams and was feeling at peace with the world. However in today's world it is almost a sin to relax. And so it came to happen that the society demanded a decision of me. What way would my career go from here onwards. Now secretly I wanted to be an author. You must be smiling knowingly upon reading this fact, because my writings are amateur at best. Well all I have to say in my justification is that wait till you have seen my C codes!

For a "bright" middle class student in India there are really only two choices - Medical and NonMedical (read Engineering). Now there was a history of engineering in my family. And I hated Biology. So these 2 facts coupled together led me into the wild race of getting into an Engineering college. Much can be said about those 2 horrific years of my life. However I do not wish to suffer (or cause you to suffer) by recalling those hideous days in any great detail. Let us just say that there was hardly a weekend that I did not pass in coaching classes or hardly a week without extra classes.

Finally after much perseverance I did attain the ultimate dream of every guy like me. I was in IIT and had the branch of "my choice".
Present Day
After spending over 30 months in IIT, I have made some startling observations and come to some rather controversial conclusions. The whole of the IIT system is a farce. The society subjects the qualifying students to an unjust deification, in effect causing an apotheosis that all other wish to emulate. IITs, however have not kept the promises they made and have been utterly unsuccessful in what they set out to achieve.

The image of IIT that is projected to the outside world is one of a Gurukul. Centers of excellence where there is extreme discipline, where ideas germinate in an academically stimulating environment and where the most brilliant young minds of our nation strive hard to gain knowledge and expertise in various technical fields so that they can apply novel methods for the progress of India. This was the aim with which IITs were setup.

The actual situation is however, an absolute negative inversion of this resplendent picture.
The whole IIT system has today become a machinery for manufacturing engineers for the US.
Worse these "engineers" are nothing like Nehru envisioned they would be.They are mostly nerds who have suddenly gained freedom and are hell bent on enjoying it to the utmost.

The eternal optimists will say that I am being cynical for no reason at all. I however will prove my hypothesis (forgive me, that's my science background speaking ,not me) through some conclusive examples.

In our batch (all batches for that matter), 1 or 2 guys make most of the assignments and the rest just copy them. Not that the rest of us are in any manner inferior to the others or that we are not capable of making the assignments ourselves. In fact it is pretty difficult to explain to the TA's, what you have not done yourself.Understanding and modifying code made by someone else is no mean feat, but I am never disputing the intelligence of IIT'ians. All I am saying is that we turn into hedonists who will watch movies all day long without a care for our responsibilities. This however is not the situation of all in IIT. There are students who are sincere and donot run from work. However they would definitely make up for less than 5% of IIT's populace.

The majority of students here just study enough to clear their exams with good grades(which is nothing difficult, a good example would be yours truly). Then they get "great" jobs in multinationals or worse they fly off to the "first world countries"! A good proportion also secure admission to IIM's. They delay their departure to the west by 2 years in this way, but the end result remains the same.

The supporters of "going to US for higher studies" will say that a student interested in his/her subject has no scope in India for further development. They would say that there is practically no research going on here, and the faculty is substandard. I would like to ask them, why is it that there is no research going on in India, despite so many research grants?Why is the faculty substandard?It is because intelligent and brilliant IIT undergraduates leave the nation for going to US etc. They carry on their research there, and eventually teach there. This is a vicious cycle and someone has to break it.Otherwise how are we to march forward in this regard?

The purpose of the IIT's was to create a technical man power which would be at par with the best engineers in the world and a state of the art scientific work force which would take India into the future a confident and technically self dependent nation. However I ask how many of us are going to sit for the UPSC exams and join the government engineering services? How many of us are going to pursue our postgraduate and doctoral studies here and then go on to join indigenous research labs?Even those who stay back in India (like me) join multinational companies, thus in effect contributing to someone else's success.Even today our Delhi Metro project is built with Japanese and German help.It is a shame on those countless elite engineers that IITs have produced over the last 5 decades.

Some people are of the opinion that as more and more Indians do well all over the world, our gene pool would spread all over the world and in the future we would be the most superior race.
They also say that currently an intellectual war is being waged between the races of the world and we are on the winning side.

My reply to these people is that they have gotten their battle lines mixed. The war is certainly on but not between Indians and Caucasians or any other such race but between nations. The Indians who are going abroad are fighting for US,UK etc and not for our gene pool or anything. Humans are no longer animals, fighting among breeds for survival of the fittest. It is the fittest nations that shall survive, not the fittest races. Thus currently all the funding our government is giving to these institutions like IITs and IIMs is actually strengthening our opponents.

The detractors of this theory would raise questions against me. Am I any different than the ordinary IIT'ian? Am I not also guilty of the sins I so knowingly list. The answer is yes. I am as much a slave of modern society and what it thinks as others are. But the difference is that I realize my pitiable state and this realization might lead to a conscious effort to free myself sometime in the future. This is the endeavour of this blog. To atleast disillusion some who are enslaved in this MATRIX.

I would like to end this article on a positive note however. Recently an awakening seems to be taking place in well established IIT'ians. A change of thought may take place and we still might be able to save the day. I implore you to read the following news report for further clarification.