The republic of Kharagpur

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 minutesThat said students within IIT are further reduced to typeslabels You could be a ldquochhaggirdquo ldquosattirdquo ldquoatthirdquo ldquonehlirdquo depending on your cumulative grade point average CGPA scoreAs standup comedian Biswa Kalyan Rath puts it about his former collegemates in Prashant Rajrsquos Alma Matters a dark plus delightful documentary miniseries on IIT Kharagpur on Netflix ldquoThere are two kinds of lsquochaggisrsquo Ones who are talented in extracurricular fields and others who simply chillrdquoIf at all one Irsquom guessing Rath wouldrsquove 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 moviebuff CM of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal down to bratpack from the YouTube collective TVF Arunabh Kumar Biswapati Sarkar and Internetrsquos Bollywood crossover Jitendra KumarIt might be fair to assume that IIT KGPrsquos contribution to even entertainment politics being part of it outweighs pioneeringNobelworthy works in science or technology Not trying to explain this of course But unlike with other IITs say DelhiBombay 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 2100acre IIT as the city inside itThere is no world beyond campus Left to yourself and highspeed Internet life outside classroom could also simply be your room Rajrsquos series touches upon latent sexism on campus the gender ratio being 19 which could be cruel if yoursquore 1819What Alma Matters doesnrsquot read in this girlboy demandsupply constraint is how it could on occasion be favourable to the fairer sex Thatrsquos 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 talkBasically if yoursquore a dumb boy a smart girl would have you do all her homeworkassignments in exchange for a possibility of a date that will never materialise Several of these superbright 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 GwaliorTheyrsquod invested their dreams into a corporate job As a student says in the series during placement period ldquo23 saal ka conclusion war se kam toh nahi hai b itrsquos war time folksrdquo Also getting a ldquocorejobrdquo 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 IndiaBetween course and college if a schoolkid ever asked me Irsquod 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 HRThere is perennial premium attached to the screening process of a college This is as true for say a HarvardOxford philosophy major walking in quite easily into fancy corporate jobs Surely alumni networks helpWith an IITian the employerrsquos hope is also that the candidate will apply his inherently competitive nature and the rigorous discipline mastered from years of academic gruntwork to similarly help companies grow and the maalik make more moneyThe CGPAbased cutthroat classroom education demonstrates that claim As does the miniseries 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 Itrsquos popularly called the lsquoFactoryrsquo for the number of kids it sent into IITsItrsquos a frickinrsquo tough life Wersquove viewed this through shows like Kota Factory TVFYouTube 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 ChinaAlma Matters is a documentary As a genre it isnrsquot something Indians seem particularly good at given that desi documentary filmmaking tradition owes its rootsorigins more to polemic and activism than engagemententertainment And the best Indian filmmakers are trained in fiction Just look at the doc Searching for Sheela produced by Karan Johar on Netflix It wonrsquot even make it to lsquobonus materialrsquo cut on the international Wild Wild Country on the same subject Osho and his secy Maa SheelaAlma Matters is a notable exception Itrsquos a series I hope desi schoolkids in particular watch Since so much of Indiarsquos middleclass has been raised on a diet of IIT as not just a means to an education but an end in itself Itrsquos actually a beginning Children must know of whatMayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture He tweets mayankw14Send your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views expressed in this column are the individualrsquos and donrsquot represent those of the paper