The unfortunate IITians

"If a drop of water falls on lake, it loses its identity. If it falls on a rose, it shines. If it falls on a shell, it becomes a pearl. The drop is the same but the company matters"
Why starting with such a quote when the title is kind of unrelated???
well this one of the usual yahoo messenger forwards which i found good.

hmmm every one of us is bound by duties and so am i...
I have chosen a title and have to write somethings about that.

How does one become IITian???
No single answer. But a few could be

• Dreams of parents.
• Your big B or a close relative bhaiya is in iit.
• Hunger of earning money.

The resons for which most of us havent become iitians

• Becoming great scientists or engineers.
• Because we were genuinely intersted.
• Because there was an inner voice inside me calling me to become an iitian.

There could be a lot many points added to both these ways but the jist of story is that many of us wouldnt have been iitians had we been given more lucritive choices in the fields of our interst. Badminton court has been like a dream to me. I would have loved to be a good baddy player given a choice, and i was elated to see that iit bombay has a baddy court when i saw the prospective of iitb.

But this is the gradual process of degenaration which many of my friends have gone through and some of them have been grim casualities of the same. The brand iit is of paramount importance when the career choices are decided for a child. The coaching starts in class 8th. And goes on and on.

This post has been inspired by nuke who was one of the more recent of the casualities and one of the guys who got genuinely trapped in this IIT system.
To become an iitian what you have to do is shut yourself from the world for 2 years in things which may or may not be intersting to you. But it becomes a troublesome situation if the same continues after you come to iit also.

IIT is not that gentle a place given the system Relative Grading. It is one of the better systems but it still makes life compititive but the argument is that it is much better than IIT jee. I dont know how can you compare two hells(Only regarding the grading system...iit otherwise is a great place to be) and say which one is better. So iit system also starts differentiating among people and this process goes one till we complete the degree. And the differences get starker as the time passes by. You get branded as a cracku, haggu, maggu, 9 pointer, chaggi wala, etc.
The differences are at highest level when we pass out. Some are MITins, Stanfians, some earning $80,000 or 65,000, some others only getting 2.5 lakhs. And do we crumble to such pressures. Most of us dont and wow to work even harder but this toll gradually rises with people giving up on their lives slowly and the best minds of the country dying because at the first palce they werent supposed to be here.

Can the situation improve. I dont think so. There are pros and cons of every good or bad thing. This is the darker side of The dream of JLN. It cant be helped. But lets hope that the iitians that come are better prepared and more intersted in what they do and get more opportunities to pursue their intersts.