It seems that my recent posts have not exactly evoked the most favourable of reactions from a certain group of people, who believe that I (seemingly representative of IITians in this particular context) am constantly searching to assert my superiority over others merely because I happen to have studied at one of the premier educational institutes in the world.
Let me assure you with all my heart – that isn’t true. Perhaps I speak for all IITians (or at least most of them) when I say this but the truth is like all other human beings, we merely identify with where we spent 4 of the most formative years of our lives, interacting with all kinds of real specimens from all over India, growing up to be the people that we shall be for the rest of our lives. I am not any different from the chap who studied at St. Stephen’s College (New Delhi) and is proud of it, or the girl from St. Xavier’s (Bombay) and is automatically taken to be a cut above the rest, or the brilliant engineer from MIT who is close to worshipped wherever she goes.
Elite institutions exist all over the world. Just as here in America, as in anywhere else in the world (like the UK – Oxford, Cambridge), you inspire awe when you say you study at a top ranked university (I mean, gimme a break, just look at the frenzy that the US News rankings generate). The media can’t stop talking enough about it and people in society continue to discuss which universities everybody’s kids are going to and of course, the subtle (but definitely present) snobbery that exists between parents and the kids that actually to these schools.
India is no different, of course. The IITs were a product of a vision of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who believed that India needed a world-class technological institute to produce the engineers that India would need as it grew to find its place in the world. Now, there is of course, lots of controvery about whether they actually served this purpose given that most IIT graduates come to the US for higher studies and many continue to live here for the rest of their lives. That is a separate topic and not something I shall talk about here.
The IITs, as it turns out, did live up to what was expected of them. Year after year, they churn out graduates that multinational companies all over the world scramble to employ. The same can be said about MIT, Stanford, Cambridge, London School of Economics and so on. The reputation that IITians have built for themselves is certainly not by fluke – they have consistently lived up to standards that were expected of them (and perhaps even surpassed them) and this fact is there for you to see wherever you look – whether it is the media or in corporate boardrooms.
The Indian media (and society), however, makes a particularly big deal out of the whole thing. As I grew up in Hyderabad, every single news item or article in the newspapers that had any mention of IIT or its graduates, never, ever failed to impress upon the reader, the pedestal that IIT graduates are placed on. Even as an undergraduate at IIT Madras, I met many different people, from strangers on trains to friends who studied with me in school, who always treated me differently because I was from IIT. There have been times when I have wished that people would just treat me as any normal human being instead of always being conscious of the fact but of course, it never did work. There are many other good institutes in India, of course – IISc, the RECs, BITS Pilani and others – where some students are just as good, if not better. Unfortunately for us, we seem to get all the attention!
As for me, I certainly don’t need to hang on to the fact that I am an IITian to assert my superiority over anybody else, Mr. Sammy (you should write to me off-line, incidentally) because I really do not need to. I know what I am and I know as well as you do that it is the person that counts. I never claimed (if you ask people who know me well or construe my posts carefully) that only IITians succeed – as is obvious from the fact that Indians (who are not all IITians, and can’t be because there aren’t that many) in the US are in the 95th percentile for household income. And as for being a FOB (Fresh Off the Boat – a derogatory term for Indians new to the US), that I most certainly am and make no bones about.
I treat every human being I come across with respect. Whether he studied at IIT or Timbuktoo is of no consequence as far as my personal dealings with him/her go. However, if I were a recruiter, I would certainly take a candidate more seriously if his resume showed he was from IIT just as I would if it said MIT or LSE instead. Or even McKinsey & Company, for that matter. That is what any other recruiter does anyway.
Do not ask me (or any other person from a prestigious institution in the world) to grow up and stop being stuck up about “some school you went to.” Because it isn’t just some school, my friend. It is that very special place where I went from being a 17-year old adolescent to a 21-year old man; where I learnt the ropes of living life from the friends, some of the smartest minds in the world, who will always be an inseparable part of my life.
