The republic of Kharagpur

A screenshot from Alma Matters. Pic/Netflix

The Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), of which the first one was established in Kharagpur (1951), is foremost a brand in India. As are IITians. How can you tell an IITian? Well, they tell you so. Within the first few minutes!

That said, students within IIT are further reduced to types/labels. You could be a "chhaggi", "satti", "atthi", "nehli" - depending on your cumulative grade point average (CGPA) score.

As stand-up comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath puts it about his former college-mates - in Prashant Raj's Alma Matters, a dark plus delightful documentary mini-series on IIT Kharagpur (on Netflix): "There are two kinds of ‘chaggis'. Ones who are talented (in extra-curricular fields), and others who simply chill."

If at all one, I'm guessing Rath would've been chaggi of the first kind. As would be many others. If you scroll down top alumni list of IIT Kharagpur, majority of them, besides company head honchos, turn out to be luminaries in fields outside engineering - starting from movie-buff CM of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, down to brat-pack from the YouTube collective, TVF (Arunabh Kumar, Biswapati Sarkar, and Internet's Bollywood crossover, Jitendra Kumar).

It might be fair to assume that IIT, KGP's contribution to even entertainment (politics being part of it) outweighs pioneering/Nobel-worthy works in science or technology. Not trying to explain this, of course. But unlike with other IITs - say Delhi/Bombay, that once seemed like in the outskirts of the city, but are now in the middle of civilization - Kharagpur is a small town, with a 2,100-acre IIT as the city inside it.

There is no world beyond campus. Left to yourself and high-speed Internet, life outside classroom could also simply be your room. Raj's series touches upon latent sexism on campus - the gender ratio being 1:9, which could be cruel, if you're 18/19.

What Alma Matters doesn't read in this girl-boy, demand-supply constraint is how it could, on occasion, be favourable to the fairer sex. That's what the boys told me at IIT KGP - the one time I stayed and smoked over at their campus in 2016, after delivering a TEDx talk.

Basically, if you're a dumb boy, a smart girl would have you do all her homework/assignments, in exchange for a possibility of a date, that will never materialise! Several of these super-bright kids, I sensed, were also looking to escape the lower middle class - many of them from villages, to small towns, Bhagalpur to Bilaspur, Gorakhpur to Gwalior.

They'd invested their dreams into a corporate job. As a student says in the series, during placement period, "23 saal ka conclusion, war se kam toh nahi hai, b'''''''' (it's war time, folks!)." Also, getting a "core-job" - meaning testing on the field, what you studied in class - is a lottery. Just as even getting to study a subject you like, in the college you wish to, is no less than landing on the moon in India!

Between course and college, if a school-kid ever asked me, I'd recommend them to always pick the latter. Which explains why IITians, essentially tech majors, end up in plum positions in fields as distanced as marketing or HR.

There is perennial premium attached to the screening process of a college. This is as true for say a Harvard/Oxford philosophy major, walking in quite easily into fancy corporate jobs. Surely alumni networks help.

With an IITian, the employer's hope is also that the candidate will apply his inherently competitive nature - and the rigorous discipline, mastered from years of academic grunt-work - to similarly help companies grow, and the maalik make more money.

The CGPA-based, cutthroat classroom education demonstrates that claim. As does the mini-series, Alma Matters. Several Indian campuses are modelled on the image of IIT - including coaching classes leading up to it. My own school (Delhi Public School, RK Puram), in fact, assigned different uniforms, based on your academic grades. It's popularly called the ‘Factory', for the number of kids it sent into IITs!

It's a frickin' tough life. We've viewed this through shows like Kota Factory (TVF/YouTube), or Laakhon Mein Ek (Amazon Prime Video). Or in mainstream, popular entertainment, with a movie like Chichhore, set in IIT Bombay. Or 3 Idiots, which was so universal in its theme that it effectively introduced Bollywood to countries like Turkey and China.

Alma Matters is a documentary. As a genre, it isn't something Indians seem particularly good at - given that desi documentary filmmaking tradition owes its roots/origins more to polemic and activism, than engagement/entertainment.

And the best Indian filmmakers are trained in fiction. Just look at the doc Searching for Sheela, produced by Karan Johar, on Netflix. It won't even make it to ‘bonus material' cut on the international Wild Wild Country, on the same subject - Osho, and his secy Maa Sheela.

Alma Matters is a notable exception. It's a series I hope desi school-kids in particular watch. Since so much of India's middle-class has been raised on a diet of IIT as not just a means to an education, but an end in itself. It's actually a beginning. Children must know, of what.

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14.
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