A new web series created by former IITians explores why in the hallowed halls of India’s premier educational institution, indecision and success walk hand in hand
Alma Matters, which is set inside IIT Kharagpur, talks about the confusion the students go through about career decisions
The first scene of Netflix’s just-dropped show Alma Matters: Inside the IIT Dream sets the tone for things to come. You see a group of young men and women dance as the following words flash on screen: “Every year, more than a million youngsters across India dream of getting into IIT. Less than 1 per cent manage to get in.”
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This story follows those who do. The ones who find themselves in a jam, trying to answer life’s hardest questions: “I may have got into IIT, but is this really what I want to do?” The average viewer imagines that they all want to follow in the footsteps of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, who walked out of this institute’s corridors 28 years ago, but the reality is a bit different.
“I graduated almost a decade ago, but I had visited the campus with a friend in 2017, and it all came back to me. I was showing off my alma mater, and I knew then that we had to do something around it,” says Prashant Raj, co-founder of Dopamine Media and Entertainment Private Limited, and also director of the series.
Raj, who was a student of mining engineering, has also had a long stint with web entertainment firm TVF as director and managing partner. It was a coincidence that he met the series’ co-director Pratik Patra, who was planning to drop out of IIT’s architectural engineering course in 2017, to come to Mumbai and follow his dream of becoming a filmmaker. “IIT was seen as the ticket to a good life. We wanted to question some of the stereotypes,” says Patra.
The two ex-IITians started filming in the days leading up to the institution’s annual festival, Illumination. “For me, it was the romance of nostalgia. For Pratik, it was weird; his disillusionment came along with him,” says Raj, as Patra adds, “I had a love-hate relationship with the college. I had no clue what I wanted to do. But the place challenged me. I could have kept doing architecture, but I knew my heart lay in storytelling. What the college did was pose a challenge to me, it inspired me to put forward my ideas, and eventually take the decision I did.”
Pratik Patra
As you watch the stories, which are a collage of the lives of different students from across disciplines talking about why they came there and what they are feeling, you realise that their incentives are mixed. The youth are mostly confused, drained because of the hard work they have had to put in to get through, and amused as the delusion of the perfect life wears off. Some see entry into the college as the ultimate achievement, some need the degree to prove their worth to society, and most, like Raj, see it as an escape from home. “I grew up in Bihar of the 1990s. If you were good at math in school, you went to IIT.
There were no other professions that existed. I wanted to escape from Ranchi, and IIT was the rocket ship. I felt like an imposter when I came here, because the people are really brilliant. And I was good at dramatics!” he says. Patra explains that he took admission on the insistence of his parents and family. “It forced me to go within myself and ask, who am I really? I think most people find themes for themselves as they study here, and then find avenues to get there.”
Prashant Raj
The filmmakers were clear that a narrative about India’s IITs had already been set, thanks to Chetan Bhagat’s Five Point Someone and Raj Kumar Hirani’s super hit film 3 Idiots, so they had to say something different. “For me, personally, it was about mid-life introspection. But really, in the larger sense, it’s also about starting a conversation. We wanted to raise the right questions,” says Raj. Patra agrees, “The world needs to see these places for what they are beyond meer perception.”
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