Home

Sharan, Hen, Ashwin and Mayur.

Thank - you. For opening my eyes.

There are two types of reactions I get when I tell people about my home. Some people nod their heads as if I just said, “Meena Bazaar, Lucknow”. For them, it’s just another address. But for some people it appears as if they heard me saying, “The Vespasian Crater, Neptune”, because their faces become a human phenomenon of surprise and awe. I remain pacific both times, but the latter response always sends a secret flush of pleasure through me :)

My relationship with IIT Bombay has been like the one you have with a sibling - I’ve not always loved it. There have been quite a few times when I’ve felt disconnected from any other place. One disadvantage of living in a campus which is highly self-sufficient is that you never grow beyond it. Sometimes I feel as if I’ve lived in IIT, but missed out on living in Bombay. You don’t need to go to the public libraries downtown, so you never learn how to travel by local train. You don’t need to go beyond a kilometer out from the campus to buy clothes, so you never experience the Great Indian Bargaining Experience at Fashion Street, VT. Or the chaos of Crawford Market. Or the samosa-pavs at Dadar. It’s not a matter of personal effort; if I wanted to, I could go to all these places on my own. It’s also not about the self-sufficiency of resources. It’s about the self-sufficiency of life. IIT is like a compact ecosystem. This is good in some ways, because the students aren’t inconvenienced. But as someone whose life doesn’t revolve around IIT, it’s like being stuck on an island which has everything you need but nothing you’re curious about.

[NB. Valfi – short for Valedictory Function. When a student is about to pass out, it is customary for him to invite his professor i/c and his family to a dinner at his hostel. Things get a bit awkward with the student having to play host not only to the professor but also to his family. Dressed in choking formals which make him look good but feel quite the opposite, he is later taken apart during an extremely ego-bashing ritual called “Profile Padhna” which is a sparkling example of piercing IIT humour (more later). This is the only time that students get to interact with their professor’s families]

Living in IIT also means that for a long time, there’s a gulf between you and the students. The memories I have as a teenager stuck in a hostel during a Valfi are quite a blow to socialisation. You’re always a professor’s daughter first. And that is by no means a harmless preamble to opening a conversation with a student. It’s suicidal. Sometimes they would stick around for the stipulated be-polite-she’s-a-girl time period and then quickly shuffle away. I felt like gently telling them, “It’s my father who bites, not me.” It would become even more uncomfortable if your father and the nice fellow you were talking to were incidentally in the same branch. Worse, if daddy dearest was one of his professors.

Sometimes students are genuinely puzzled because they cannot imagine that their professor can also be somebody’s father. I reckon that’s quite natural, given the enormous cross-over in the roles played. It’s pretty empowering for a teenager telling someone who’s almost a decade her senior about how she wheedled her father (his professor) into buying her an assembled collection of Linkin Park, Nickelback, The White Stripes and Avril Lavigne CDs, including Harry Potter’s second book and a Parker ink-pen, all in one day. For a teenager, that’s parental extortion I would be proud of. Now of course, I laugh myself blue about it, because I know the patient fellow listening to me would already have a pay package of around 20 lakhs a year. But then, that’s a nice IITian for you.

“Nothing is good or bad, it’s just different.” - G.

As I said, the relationship between IIT and me is almost consanguineous. It’s an absolute thrill to have someone you can share or even better, create secrets with. It’s an incredible feeling; having an entire place to yourself you can call home. ‘Home’ is actually an extension of the usual residential concept, spreading over every square inch of IIT’s 550 acres. I feel at home under the dusky light of my table-lamp next to my bed, and I feel at home lying in SAC at night, watching the stars in their twinkling conversation. (To Hen, if you’re reading this :). The crumbling buildings along Main Gate, the swallowing darkness of Panther Road, the eternity stretching out through the Corridor, the abstractness of IDC, the photogenic brilliance of Guesthouse, the silent splendour of Gymkhana, the composure of Powai Lake, even the annoying odour of Three Poles. The familiarity which greets you every time you go anywhere is so invisible you scarcely notice just how comforting it is.

I came here as a potty one month old, mesmerised by the sheer opportunities to explore. Fifteen years later, not much has changed about that feeling except that the exploration has become an implosion of sorts. Time and time again, this place transcends what the world thinks it stands for. I think there is something very brave about having the protean ability to constantly alter, remove, develop, destroy what you were and create something from nothing except spirit. And do they create! Every Mood Indigo, every Techfest, every PAF has been an exuberant expression of the strength of the mind and its triumph.

Thanks to having quite a few friends as IITians this year, the concept of having fun has become multi-dimensional and suddenly more inhabited with colour and originality. Now, it’s not enough going for a walk – we go for a walk in a group and laugh like a bunch of rambunctious apes, just recently freed from civilisation. We sit across the lake and debate fiercely, till a patrol jeep drives over, checks our IDs and sternly tells us to “go back to the hostel like respectable kids”. We sit and sigh at the architectural magnificence of Hostel 12 and 13. We eat fluid-like chocobars at the seedy Staff Canteen. We feel humbled and insignificant while looking at the quiet dignity of the department buildings.

IIT Bombay is a place you should come if you think that magic is either a fictional affair, or just plain scientific trickery. When you see fireworks blazing across a moonlit sky in SAC, when you’re at the Central Library and are sandwiched between towering shelves full of huge books, when you’re at the Arc and you hear your voice being echoed throughout the length of the Corridor, when you’re at the terrace of Hostel 12 and you see the sun playing with pink and orange, when you’re in the Biotech building and you see specimens being kept in nitrogen by people in white suits, when you see monsoon’s first kingfisher outside your window, when you see a wind-tunnel experiment in action, when you stand right in the middle of Convocation Hall’s stage and your eyes close automatically, when you see a group of students animatedly discussing PAF preparations at 3 o’clock in the morning, you know that this place makes you believe.

And that is why this place is, what it is. This place is not great just because it’s the best institute for technology in the world. It’s great because it’s a celebration of the human spirit, and what humans can achieve, if they believe.