I have crossed the age of joining an IIT or for that matter i have no passion for college education now. Also, i strongly believe scholastic degree brings just the shit out of everybody and nothing else. So i take the right to comment about the craziness that Indian students have to get into IIT.
To give a brief introduction of how i grew up, I was raised in Madras in the so called middle class family. To this day i don't what middle class meant. Although we never had enough money in our house, our parents always referred ourselves as " the middle class". I guess its because of the brahmin tag attached to our names. My parents had their own line of hypocrisy like others but they were different from my friends parents when it comes to thinking and education. For instance my parents never forced me to study or even go to school. I went to school when i wanted and bunked with my mother's blessings whenever i felt staying at home. This became easy for me as my father was on touring job and was never home for nine months in a year.
The fact that my father was away also gave me a wide variety of opportunity to explore the world of ideas without getting influenced by a dominant male (I guess that's how the western psychologists term it).
I have always wanted to join the IIT since i was kid for no real reason. I started preparing for the IIT-JEE when i came to the 11th class like every other guy in my community. First of all, I joined the science group in the 11th class just because i had a better score in the 10th grade. I cannot think of any other reason other than that for taking up that option. In my community any one with better grades joined the science group. I clearly don't understand the reason for it till date.
I sometime think its the mentality of the salaried class people to find a job to get an initial foothold and then move on with their life. I don't have any statistics to support my statement but i can vehemently say that i am yet to come across a person who doesn't obey the above primary middle-class rule.
Coming back to the subject, well i prepared for my entrance exams for two years and i couldn't make it. Frankly i was not at all frustrated. I think i never had a real intention to go there in the first place. I guess i had been driven just by the peer pressure. I bet it caused me many sleepless nights of preparation for my exams. Going over the same shit everyday and tyring to solve the problems that i will never encounter once i clear my exams and all this i have to do with no interest of my own or my parents interest but because of the crazy peer pressure.
Well, on the positive side i got to spend many interesting nights in my friends place in the guise of combined study. Many times watching porno movies and ofcourse spent time chatting stupid subjects.
Every night we would all gather in our friends house, the person who had a house with a separate room preferably a room in a separate floor from his parents. The combined study group varied from 4 to 6 guys and sometimes more during the weekends. Religiously we would all start studying at 9:30 PM after his parents go to bed. We would waste/spend most of our time in the day playing cricket or in some stupid discussions. Most of the time its about the sex or the girls or the guys going with the girls or like the losers do, talking about sexual chastity. Depending on the crowd the topic might digress to politics, religion, caste and caste politics. All the above topics would basically revolve around bitching one particular religion or caste or a party. All those years i always thought it to be the "general knowledge". Goddam it! I still laugh at my stupidity. Eventhough i shouldn't say that all the topics were bad. Some were controversially very interesting. For example cases like Babri Masjid demolition, India going nuclear, Astrology, etc.
We would waste roughly about three hours talking about these things in the night and would go to bed after that. I don't know how we studied but eventually everybody in my gang got a good percentage in the finals. Of course nobody made it to the coveted IIT but the guise of IIT preparation helped to us to atleast get into one of the colleges without paying money.
In conclusion, i think the IIT mania (a.k.a) peer pressure should remain in India at all the levels. Be it in school or colleges. Now we don't have a lateral entry system to the IIT's. If we create a possibility of getting into IIT or transferring to an IIT in the middle of our college year, i bet it would prompt many students to chase the myth of the IIT and even if they are not able to make it, atleast it would improve their scores and the quality of the college education or whatever. One way or the other we would get enough reasons to do combined study. This time for a change may be with girls :-). Just Kidding.
About my gang who were watching night-movies with me , we spoke about many things in our life what we wanted to do and how india should and how education should be and after all that shit talking, all of us studied the same shit and became no-one or one in a bunch. Couple of us are software coolies in the US. Couple of them are chip designers. One is in Pharma research. One guy the last time i heard about him was hanging out in the SanDiego beach with a beer in his hand and a girl by his side. Hmm he says its his wife. Never know :-).
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