Whats IIT all about!!

Hi Friends!!

Eccentricity is not, as dull people would have us believe, a form of madness. It is often a kind of innocent pride, and the man of genius and the aristocrat are frequently regarded as eccentrics because genius and aristocrat are entirely unafraid of and uninfluenced by the opinions and vagaries of the crowd.
-Edith Sitwell, Taken Care Of ,1965
English biographer, critic, novelist, & poet (1887 - 1964)

Before coming over to IIT Kanpur I was part of the crowd, my opinion about IITs was that it is a bunch of frustrated guys working under some crazy profs coocooned up in their labs and having approximately zero knowledge about the actual world! But after spending 5 weeks in this great Institute(IITK) my vision has been choked clear.Though no doubt IIT is a coocoon shelled into a serene and conducive enviornment in a city like Kanpur (my project partner would kill me for this statement)! Just to turn out the professionals who can mould the world in their frame of reference!!

The Indian government plans to open up 7 new IITs. But it doesnt seem to be so easy to replicate an IIT! You can tag a college as an IIT by furnishing it with the most modern facilities...but then IIT is not mere a college...it is an ideology!! It can be best described as a place where students and faculty merge to form a single unit, Ideas and innovations merge to expand the frontiers of technology, constant guidance and support churns the best out of the person.

No doubt that these Mecca of Education are equiped with the most modern facilities, but this fact has never caused the death of the zest to upgrade itself. IITs provide you wid all the freedom you could enjoy in your life as a student. You would always cherish even a single moment spend out here.

Further analysis shows that it is the team work which makes IITs what they are. So you have a professor , who earns 30,000 bucks per month and can enjoy every amnity working with you and bestowing his faith on your capabilities. They consider IIT as a historical process as evident from the extracts of convocation address given by Dr. P.K. Kelkar in 1981 "When I came to Kanpur first to join as the Director of the Institute, almost everybody I met in Kanpur asked me…..if I had wanted to commit professional suicide,… I did not at all worry about this because I was no longer myself but an instrument of a historical process". You might feel astonished when a PhD professor asks your ideas about solving a problem.This will automatically instill faith in your capabilities.

In short IITs are not just Colleges..they are phenomenons transforming the life of their students to such an extent that you would always owe something to this great institute and want to pay it back as evident by large pool of money available in the alumni associations of IITs!!

"The best way to get selected in IIT is to spend 4-5 days in an IIT. When you recognise that you will allways feel proud to be a part of such a great institute, it will automatically ignite a spark in you to get inside these coveted institutes"
-Shailendra,one of my friends after spending a day in IITK

"This is not certainly India, we are somewhwere else"
-Sandeep Kumar Singh, Collegemate and project partner after strolling through the vast campus of IITK

Aristotle must have envisioned a place like IIT when he said "The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."

P.S.: This post would be incomplete without the mention of two persons. First of them is our supervisor Prof Rajiv Shekhar, who is one of the most principle-centric persons I have ever met in my life. The second one being Mr. N.P. Singh, who is certainly the most efficient worker you could find in govt. offices considering duty as his religion.