Tunnel Vision

My eyes widen. The disco lights and blaring music are a departure from the expected standard. I push past the mob of boys—spruced up and without school bags—crowding the hallway to enter a courtyard where girls wait in attendance. In the last few years, the female population at this hostel alone has risen from almost zero to more than 400. And the male dominated campus—about which friends from IIT cribbed endlessly years ago—is undergoing a transformation.

At yearly Informals, men must not only to show their ID cards, but also dig out ATM plastic and shell out Rs 110 to gain entry. Maybe the fact that female company is novel is the reason why the men are willing to hold hands with each other, show off their dirty socks and—gladly—play musical chairs with the opposite sex. The warden shows me to my hostel room, a bed-table-cupboard affair with a jaali that looks down on the festivities. Attendants below ensure nobody slips away to off-bound areas.

The dull drizzle next morning is fought off with hot jalebis—a Wednesday special on the girls’ hostel menu. In mortal dread of science, I hope the sugar kick will keep me going through the Core Physics and Biochemical Engineering sessions lined up for 8 am. An hour later, seated firmly on a back bench, magnetic fields and electric currents are rolling off my back. Potential, waves, charged moving particles and it’s just me. Not only are the 50-odd others nodding gravely along with the professor, this is no normal classroom. Nobody talks, nobody sleeps, nobody messages. Maybe this is how, bit by bit, they turn into happy money minting machines.

The Biochemical Engineering class is a third-year subject—gobbledygook vaguely related to distilling substances and formulae that look like ancient runes. I am rewarded for my two-hour sessions with twin headaches—now I too am thinking in terms of right and left temporal lobes.

Exiting at the ‘windtunnel’, the entrance to the imposing main building where classes are held, and where true-to-nickname gusts of freezing wind hit me, I walk down with my newfound classmates to ‘sasis’—the line of dhabas outside the hostel gate, for their daily fare of anda-bread.

There would be many happy to give up IT courses, B.Scs and M.Scs for a go at one of the IITs. The latest the campus boasts of is a round-the-buildings connection.

The brand that grants them license to swagger is more than enough to make all IITians trudge the kilometres from hostel to classroom and back effortlessly.

From the chanting of formulae also emerge amateur footballers who find time to rumble on the sports grounds. And at the quaint 24-hour Nescafe joint hidden on campus, you will chance upon an underworld of wannabe rockers who emulate Morrison and Cobain to the point of pain.

The Informals only serve to reinforce the belief that the IITian knows he or she has accomplished half by getting through. The other half is evident in their effortless grasp on quantum physics and engineering class. For while those outside the hallowed portals may term them geeks or nerds, those so classified couldn’t care less.