New Delhi: (Abhimanyu Rana studied Biotechnology and graduated from IIT Delhi in 2005. He has previously worked with the National Knowledge Commission and now runs a chain of restaurants in NCR.)
"Meet Abhimanyu. He's an IITian." That is how my friends always seem to introduce me to people. In a country plagued by horrible, sparse higher educational infrastructure, IIT has become a caste of sorts.
I went to IIT Delhi in 2000, when there were about 2000 seats for over 1,20,000 applicants; the deluge of new IITs had not hit the country yet. This meant that student quality was at an all-time high.
Also, the economy was not doing too well. There were only a few select companies that recruited on campus, and hence most of the students went to the USA for higher studies. (Poorly equipped labs and non-existent research did not help either, but that is another story.)
For a batch where most had never done anything beyond academics, it was the perfect recipe for fierce pressure-driven competition.
An incident from my first minor exam in the first semester stands out. Four of us, all in our late teens, were settling into a close friendship and would hang out together. That day, we were sitting on the steps to the library studying at the last minute before the exam - two papers on the same day.
Three of us had missed a class, thanks to sheer laziness, and now asked the fourth for notes. He refused point blank and said "if I share the notes with you guys, you may score high and get graded higher".
First exam, first semester, first year. I was shocked.
Needless to say that man isn't one of the many lifelong friends I made during my stay at IIT.
Then there is self-induced pressure to catch up on the life most had not had so far - reading (Atlas Shrugged was popular), a jab at strumming the guitar, dabbling in theater and other such activities.
But the worst of all is the pressure to find your calling in life - M.S., or a job, or an MBA (most IITians walk into IIMs), or may be a start-up. There are so many things we are confident of doing, and there is zero career counselling. I feel this was the time I felt most clueless in my life.
Life for IITians remains a high pressure situation after campus. There are expectations from all for us to do better than average our entire lives.
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