Annual packages and other IIT nightmares | Economic Times

Recently, I came across a report in a Dehradun daily. ‘A piece of good news has emanated in tough times of corona and black fungus... Just when the ravages of anxiety were getting deeper (sic),’ it announced. A BTech student, a local boy, had landed a plush job with Microsoft. The annual package: Rs 40 lakh. It’s the stuff small-town dreams are made of. Or, as a student in Alma Matters, the new Netflix documentary, tells us: the package gives you the ‘thrust’ to get out of the ‘lower middle-class’. His friend chips in. ‘When my shopkeeper father sees me suited-booted, he knows I’ve moved up in life.’ It gives the parents an ace to play with in a card game called ‘arranged marriage’.Alma Matters is set in IIT Kharagpur. India’s youth, we are told, is divided into two categories: IITians and those who wish they were IITians. The three-part series is directed by Pratik Patra and Prashant Raj, both alumni. In the absence of a voiceover, the story is in the dialogue. A student from Bihar says, ‘Yaha log dekha dekhi se hi kaam kar lete hain’ — in this competitive fishbowl, looking at others working hard itself serves as motivation. Another student recalls feeling let down by the unassuming gate of the institute when he first arrived.The documentary deglamorizes the IIT dream (and the hostel). The mattress without a bed-sheet, the walk to the community baths with a plastic bucket, hanging underwear on a clothesline. The graffiti scribbled on the walls lists life’s priorities: ‘Roti, kapda, makaan, internet aur nasha.’As headlines play up the ‘one-crore’ placements, we see the students give job interviews over gruelling 16-hour days, chain-smoking on an empty stomach, taking naps in between. A boy calls his mother to give her the good news, ‘Mammi, baara lakh ki lagi hai. Location will be Pune or Gurugram!’ The ‘18-lakh’ boy celebrates with a salad and Diet Coke while his mates pull his leg: ‘Look at you, already moving up in life!’A sense of privileged disaffection, rather than arch accomplishment, is the running theme. Pre-IIT, students spend two years in coaching classes: dormitories on the ground floor, classes on the second, and a mess on the third. Students are not allowed to leave the premises. After the 3-tier non-AC life, the first year of IIT is like reaching paradise, minus the 72 virgins.The ratio of boys to girls is 9:1. This shortfall is more than made up for by the new laptop and fast Internet. ‘This is true freedom. Nobody wants to study and no one does,’ says one student. Freshman year is a time to celebrate that one belongs to the 1% in a million, who applied for JEE and made it.India’s caste system is reflected in the system of rankings, where one is assigned a branch — biotech, geophysics, agricultural engineering — according to one’s rank rather than one’s interest and inclination. IITians spend years studying what they’re least interested in. This knowledge, too, is functionally useless because the ultimate goal, for most, is to get a well-paying corporate job, or to sit for the IAS. It’s a circuitous route to selling soap or becoming a bureaucrat.IIT Kharagpur is a 2,100-acre world unto its own, far from the town its located near in south-west West Bengal. In the year the documentary was shot, there were five suicides on campus. The others soldier on, building small racing cars from scratch, learning to skateboard, and cosplaying. The loneliness is mitigated by an adopted stray dog — Desdemona, in happier times, now called Coco. Coco could walk until her legs were ravaged by disease. The students put their ‘cream of the cream’ heads together to design a walker-on-wheels for her. And it’s not for sale.The writer is author of The Butterfly