The Purple Cow

My IIT-JEE rank was ok, I guess. The number had finally showed up on the computer screen around 9 am that morning – resolving itself pixel by painful pixel after many hours of getting the crummy dial up connection to work. A quick page refresh (to remove any lingering doubts of mysterious computer network errors showing fanciful numbers) and my parents were letting off entirely uncharacteristic whoops of joy. (I now suspect they would have whooped even if my rank had been a few thousands lower). Now that I think about it, I can’t seem to decide if I was excited or not. I guess I had vague expectations of something slightly better, but I also readily agreed that it could have been much worse. It was, like I said, ok.

With my decent-but-not-quite rank, I was scheduled to go in on the second day of counseling. I have faint recollections of landing up at the hall feeling remarkably light, happily gazing at random trees as we stood in line outside the gate. This was, of course, no time for clueless, light-hearted tree-gazing. By the time I left the building – I had been booked for four years in the newly-converted IIT at Roorkee without knowing the first damned thing about the place.

First impressions weren’t particularly encouraging either. Some of my old Roorkee readers would remember the unbelievably chaotic registration process back in 2002. Hostel rooms were first come first serve, so if you wanted a reasonable room with not so god-awful views and some decent distance from the toilets, you needed to start lining up at 6am, pick the registration slip and run to the hostel to stake claim – all this without as much as a samosa and chai break in Alpahar. The main building wasn’t yet the nice regal British Raj structure you could put up pictures of in Facebook- it was streaky yellow and flaky and the clock on the dome would show some random time. Besides, the profs were snarly, the quizzing was bad and the NCC boots bit. All a bit depressing, really.

In a month, I was back in Delhi for the weekend, meeting up with my friends from school. It would be a large group and someone would invariably just slip it in as a joke, ‘Roorkee is not really an IIT, you know’, in that terrible comic serious way I could never make out. I would laugh along, of course. Back in Roorkee, more doubt. Maybe Mechanical at IIT Delhi was better after all. Dammit, what was I thinking during counseling?

It was all a bit petty, as you would imagine – but at eighteen, the lack of suitably with-it coffee shops is enough to make you feel vaguely disenfranchised. Or for that matter, the annual India Today rankings, where Roorkee would almost invariably slot in neatly below all the other IITs- causing many weeks of heartburn to all concerned.

I would like to believe that I grew out of it over the course of the year, piece by piece – perhaps watching the Ganges flow by on one weekend, or finding the one professor who made sense during Signals class. But all I can remember is the one night I came hurtling down the hill on my bicycle after a particularly late cramming session – wind blowing through my hair, the moon shining between the trees – when it finally dawned on me.

The Roorkee-is-not-an-IIT taunts never really stopped. At IIMA they were a bit more civil, carefully putting adequate qualifiers but always meaning the same thing. I would put on the same limp smile, of course- I never quite worked out the right way to wiggle out of situations like that. But at least I was ok inside my head.