No IIT, only IT

The story of how technology offers a shorter, less painful passage to the US than the IITs…

Long, long ago, there was a time when technology didn’t mean computers and JEE didn’t stand for Java Enterprise Edition. Those were the heady days when everyone wanted to get into IIT. (“Man, if four days of Mood Indigo, Rendezvous or Mardi Gras can be such a blast, imagine how four years will be.”)

It was about pushing themselves, crossing the cut-off and scaling the pinnacle of excellence – in other words, a laborious exercise that few could succeed in. But times changed. Mardi Gras became Saarang. And the word ‘elitist’ was no longer popular. In fact, the most popular word in the dictionary was ‘popular’. So, to offer more opportunities to more students (as opposed to the elitist system that offers more opportunities to the same set of students), it was decided that an IIT would be opened in every state.

The next step would be to move from ‘popular’ and make it a rage, even if it would outrage a few puritans.  For this to happen, there would have to be an IIT in every city, and if needed, in every suburb. There were a few murmurs that the nomenclature, despite its common nature, could lead to a lot of confusion. For instance, someone hopeful of making it to IIT M or IIT K would be referring to IIT Mylapore and IIT Kilpauk, though the trained mind would tend to misinterpret it as IIT Madras and IIT Kanpur.

However, since the situation was yet to arise, these objections were dismissed and those needlessly trying to look for problems were asked to look elsewhere, like in the JEE question papers for instance.

So, year after year, India’s best tech minds passed out to begin an illustrious journey. They left their campus, they left the country, but what came as a surprise was that many of them left technology too. The result? A preference for KPMG, FMCG and RPG, but not technology.

Now, all those not getting into IIT had a problem – their decent scores got them into decent colleges, but the obscene fees they paid were not translating into obscene salaries. More importantly, they weren’t able to follow the famous Pet Shop Boys diktat – ‘Go West’.

While the better brains were westward bound, there was something else coming up in our backyard, like a mammoth beehive, with honey on tap and a non-stop buzz – information technology. The IT industry had arrived and soon, IT engineers were attracted to it in swarms. Unfortunately, there were more H1Bs than worker bees and this led to several projects being hived off to other countries.

The wise men had to do something about the vacancies and opened their doors wider to ‘non-IT engineers’, with back-up options for non-engineering graduates, non-graduate students and non-student passers-by – hopefully, they would never be needed.

So, year after year, the cream of India’s engineers passed out to begin an illustrious journey. From marine to mining engineering, from organic farming to organic chemistry, everyone took to IT like cricketers to IPL. And IT took them to the US.

Where complex algorithms, Euclidean geometry and linear programming failed in finding the shortest path to the US, another form of technology had succeeded.  Students finally figured that they didn’t have to get into IIT to go west - they just had to get into IT.

Ultimately, it took the best technology to disprove the theory that two I’s were better than one.