Rain is something I associate a lot with IIT Bombay. It was raining the day I arrived in 1969; it rained on many of the days I left for the holidays or returned from them; and if you lived in H-7, you learned to respect the weather gods, or you got very wet. I’m starting with this because It’s difficult to condense memories from so long ago into a single coherent story, and what follows may seem disjointed. Those disjointed memories, however, do coalesce into something which I could call …. what IIT Bombay means to me today…for want of a better phrase.
As events turned out, I went to IIM Calcutta after IITB. A secondary benefit of my IIMC stint, since engineering graduates were in a majority there, was that it gave me an immediate insight into life in the other four IITs. A lot was reassuringly familiar, with differences, of course, in the specifics of individual memories. The question “What does IIT-B mean to me today” can justifiably be extended, therefore, to “What do the IITs mean to us today.”
So, what was special about the IIT experience? Was it the lifelong friends we made? Certainly, but there is nothing that marks out IIT-B, or any of the other IITs, as unique when it comes to undergrad students making lifelong friends. Was it the quality of the faculty? Certainly, but again, that was not a unique marker. Was IIT-B the gateway to undreamt-of professional success? For many alumni, sure, but there are probably at least an equal number without an IIT background who have experienced success in life. Speaking for myself, I would distil the unique IIT student experience, based on my memories, into two major parts.
First, the experience of equality as an IIT student. Your family, socio-economic, school, and other kinds of background mattered little on campus. We stayed in the same kind of rooms, ate the same food, used the same loos, studied the same textbooks for long hours, and were confronted with the same exams. In this, the IITs were unique in the India of the 60s and 70s; nowhere else was this experienced to the same extent as on an IIT campus.
Second, respect for merit. Nothing else mattered as much in the IIT as performance. Academics, obviously, but also, for those who were brave – or foolhardy – enough to try and allocate time for extracurricular activities. But not those alone; probably, what garnered the most respect was the ability to get along and make friends with everybody in that egalitarian milieu.
My professional career led to me living in Delhi for a long time, and I lost touch almost completely with IIT-B. Meeting Prof. JR Isaac and a few alumni regularly at IT industry events was an exception. With the Internet in place after 2000 or so, we were all able to slowly get back in touch with each other and begin sharing experiences and observations.
Around 2010, I recall participating in an email forum, and stating that, in my opinion, the IIMs had delivered on their mission to provide management leadership to Indian companies, but the IITs had failed in their mission to provide technology leadership to Indian organizations, especially for R&D. My statement provoked a furore, with many accusing me of the alumni equivalent of treason.
How does that statement sound today? Speaking again for myself, I am happy to now claim that the ensuing fifteen years have revealed another quality of the IITs – resilience. I had missed that completely, and I am happy to have been proved wrong.
Not only had the IITs succeeded in maintaining academic standards over six decades, but they had also succeeded in infusing the same spirit among its alumni. If life is an unlimited time open book exam, then IIT alumni were, and are, always willing to step up to the challenge. More importantly, however, the IITs appear to be now well on their way to fulfilling their mission to provide technology leadership to India.
Today, when people speak of the IITs, it is not about the notable alumni alone. The speak of the 400 start-ups graduated by the IIT Madras Research Park, with a collective estimated valuation of $12 billion, of the 200 start-ups with a collective valuation of more than $3 billion, from IIT Bombay’s SINE incubator, and many other similar initiatives in the other IITs. Remarkable is the fact that many of these companies are built around “deep tech”, with applications over a variety of frontier sectors. Even more remarkable is the close involvement of the Institutes, their faculty, and their resident student bodies, in creating these ecosystems based on research, innovation and enterprise. Equality, merit, resilience. Few groups of institutions can claim to have infused such values across so many people. Enough reason for us to be proud that we, too, were a part of this phenomenon. Enough reason for us to return to our alma mater for a batch golden jubilee celebration. Enough reason for us to wish IIT Bombay well and participate in its future success in whatever ways we can.
IIT Bombay 1974 Reunion 