The locals of Kharagpur, a town in West Bengal, India, affectionately refer to it as “KGP.” KGP is the home of the first ever Indian Institute of Technology or IIT. After independence, the Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, wanted to set up world-class engineering universities modeled after premier institutions like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the hope that they would spearhead the nation’s technological progress. The neon sign above the main building of IIT KGP reads “Dedicated to the Service of the Nation.” In my time, many a wag would quip, “Which Nation?” referring to the exodus of IIT graduates to the US right after graduation. In time, securing admission to an IIT became the single-minded goal of Indian teenagers who wanted to become engineers. Competition to enter the IITs is fierce, requiring years of preparation for the joint entrance examination or JEE. Intellect, knowledge, years of practice, and a generous helping of luck during the actual JEE, all needed to align for a student to get a rank that would gain them admission. In the mid 1980s, with each of the five IITs admitting a couple of hundred students each, it meant coming within the top thousand or so from among the hundreds of thousands of aspirants.

JEEs were the route to IITs for Indian students at Indian high schools. Although students from outside India were not barred from taking the JEE, as a rule, they didn’t. There were two special channels for them. For Indian nationals residing abroad, usually children of expatriates in the Gulf states, there was a special INRA quota. For foreigners, there was a different Government of India quota or GOIN. Each had an allocation of about 20 seats. The criterion for selection was the grades in high school examination from the country where the applicant was from. The admission process simply treated the normalized scores from all the various different examinations as equivalent!

The GOIN quota seats usually went to students from neighboring South Asian countries, notably Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, people of Indian origin from places like Mauritius or East Africa, or Palestinian refugees scattered around the Arab world. At least in the two South Asian countries, top students preferred to go to the premier institutions in their own countries. Only those who couldn’t quite make it to the local top universities would join an Indian university. Even IITs were no exception.  Some of these students came with generous scholarships administered by organizations like the Colombo Plan or by the Indian embassies in their respective countries. But like with many other scholarship opportunities, these were not open, fair competitions but required candidates to have some sort of influence in order to be successful. In Sri Lanka, the term was “pull.” If you wanted to win a scholarship to a communist country like the USSR, or China, or Cuba, you should have some pull in the right communist party. If you wanted to get a scholarship to an Indian university, you needed to have pull either in the ministry of education or the Indian embassy.

All of this meant that the quota students at IIT usually did not perform anywhere near the norm of those who had the wherewithal to successfully get through JEE.

In 1984, this changed for Sri Lankan Tamil students. The anti-Tamil riots the year before, and the subsequent intensification of the civil war, drove hundreds of Tamil students in Sri Lankan universities to seek escape routes. Many of us who were engineering students applied to IITs. Some who had the means to go to India ahead of time, took the JEE itself. Others competed for the 20 spots in the GOIN quota or sought admission in other Indian engineering colleges. Remember that the admission process just took the normalized high-school exam scores regardless how the scores were distributed in each exam. In Sri Lanka, the national high-school exam was the GCE A/Levels. In my cohort, the two top students scored 90%. My own score was 78.3%. These were considered excellent scores (A score of 70% or so would be enough to secure admission to the engineering program in a Sri Lankan university). On the other hand, Indian high school exam scores are usually in the high nineties.

Computer Science and Engineering was the most coveted major for Indian students applying for admission to IITs. This meant that the regular seats in IIT CSE departments ran out by the time you got down to a JEE rank of 150 or 200. Fortunately for me, Sri Lankan students were not as enamored with CSE. The top Sri Lankan students wanted to get into Electronics Engineering. Next came traditional engineering disciplines like electrical, civil, and mechanical. Most Sri Lankan students did not even indicate CSE as an option. This was how I, who was probably at the bottom of the list of Sri Lankan applicants into IIT in 1984 managed to get admission to CSE in IIT KGP! My Sri Lankan classmate who had topped the A/L exam with a score of 90% (and was thus ranked below Sri Lankans living in India who applied with their Indian high-school exam scores!) managed to get into Electronics Engineering at the Institute of Technology at Benares Hindu University. When he arrived at IT-BHU and realized that it was not quite an IIT, he promptly went back to Sri Lanka!

So here I was, a first year CSE student at IIT KGP. The Indian students expected the quota students to do poorly in general. Those in the top departments, like I was, were expected to crash and burn. This attitude was evident already during the “ragging” period. Ragging lasts for about two weeks. Supposedly it was intended for senior students to rapidly acclimatize freshmen into the ways and traditions of university life. But it was also often an outlet to the sadistic tendencies of senior students. Ragging in IITs were tame compared to ragging in Sri Lankan universities. We were asked to memorize and belt out the Indian national anthem, clean the rooms of seniors, help them with their assignments, or grad school applications, and so on. Pretty much in every senior’s room that I was taken for ragging, I received some sympathy about the difficult time I was going to have in the CSE department among all the overachieving Indian students there.

But there was one thing that won us a little respect during ragging. University of Peradeniya, which I had attended for a little over a year before fleeing Sri Lanka, had a very traditional engineering program. The first two years consisted of a common curriculum for all engineering students. Specialization started only in the third year. But since more than half the students would end up as civil engineers, probably a third as mechanical engineers, and only small numbers in other departments (there was no computer science and engineering in Sri Lanka at the time), the courses during the first two years were heavily tilted towards civil and mechanical engineering. I had taken courses in surveying, structural design, and machine design, and had assignments in esoteric stuff like roof-truss design. At Kharagpur, second or third year civil and mechanical engineering students were studying stuff that we had covered in the first or second year in Sri Lanka. We could dazzle them with what we had already learned.

During the ragging period, we the freshmen were kept busy. We didn’t have time for things like missing the homeland we left behind. This hit us hard when the ragging period ended. Suddenly we realized that we were in a very different environment than the one we had grown up in, in terms of language, culture, and norms. In particular, the three of us Sri Lankan students, heard Tamil only when we spoke to each other. We had no access to Tamil magazines, books, movies, or even songs. In the entire hall of residence we were living in, among the hundred plus students, you could count the other Tamil students in your hands. Even the lone Sri Lankan “foreign” student from the year ahead of us was a Gujarati.

The hall of residence had a common room with a TV in it. The Indian TV station, Doordarshan, ran a program called Chitramālā featuring music videos of a collection of recent movie songs from various Indian languages. It was the multi-lingual variant of the better known Chitrahār that only featured Hindi songs. Three weeks into our stay, we learned that Chitramālā was going to feature a Tamil song. The three of us were in our seats long before the program began. The last song in the program was the Tamil song – a song called kāthal mayakkam from the movie pudhumaip peṇ. None of us had heard the song before because it was from a new movie. The sheer joy of hearing a Tamil song, after three weeks in a strange, distant land, was indescribable. It was a forgettable song, and over the years, the three of us indeed forgot it. But the memory it left behind was indelible, so that two of us in a WhatsApp conversation were able to put the clues together to locate the song within minutes! As time passed, we figured out where to get Tamil magazines, so that we had a little more access to Tamil. For the rest of our time in Kharagpur, every time we ran into a Tamil speaker, our faces never failed to light up!

First year Indian students had to enroll in National Cadet Corps or NCC. They spent an afternoon every week wearing khaki NCC uniforms and heavy military boots to show up for military training. We as foreigners were of course not permitted to join NCC. Instead, we were signed up for the National Service Scheme, NSS. In practice, this meant that once a week, we had to wake up early in the morning and go to the Institute stadium at 6 am so that our athletics instructor could make us jog around the tracks once or twice and make us do some physical exercises.

Life at IIT Kharagpur differed in many respects from the life at the University of Peradeniya, even though both were preeminent institutions in their respective countries. The first difference that comes to mind is technical. Peradeniya engineering was obsessed with engineering drawing. Trauma from engineering drawing was legend among the engineering students there. One heard stories about the terrible experiences even before setting foot in Peradeniya, prompting eager Tamil students in Jaffna to attend engineering drawing classes closer to home in the hope of mastering the subject. But little did they know that what made the experience awful is institutional sadism rather than some inherent difficulty in the subject – so any amount of advance technical mastery was not going to get them off the hook. One did all the drawings by hand – no one does this now, so all that intense training of generations of Sri Lankan engineering students was eventually unnecessary! One had to finish the assigned drawings during class. The slightest mistake could get you zero for the whole exercise. The drawings had to be impeccable. The folk wisdom in the university was that if you didn’t lose your mind doing engineering drawing during your first year, you will never go crazy in your life. At IIT, engineering drawing was just one among many subjects. To our utter surprise (and, frankly, relief), IIT instructors were not pedants about engineering drawing. Even our less-than-perfect drawings got full marks.

The second difference I remember is social. Right after independence, Sri Lanka instituted free education at all levels. In the fifties, the government introduced education in our mother tongues. Although this indirectly led to the brutal civil war, it also meant access to education for the poorest of the poor. In the seventies the government introduced “standardization” for the university entrance examination. This was an attempt at ensuring equity for the underprivileged. After the initial debacle of language-wise standardization which led to the alienation of the Tamil youth and thus to the civil war, the government quickly pivoted to district-wise standardization in the eighties. This meant that the cut-off marks for university entrance differed from district to district. Students from “backward” districts, places where access to facilities and teachers was limited, could enter the university with a lower score than from well-endowed districts like Colombo or Jaffna or Kandy or Galle. The government had also recently introduced a generous scholarship scheme called Mahapola. All of this meant that the university was more or less a true cross-section of the society at large. Many of my engineering classmates came from poor families. There were some who even sent money they saved from their Mahapola scholarships home, because their families lived in abject poverty. The student population was generally leftist. The strongest student political organizations were sympathetic to Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, JVP, which had attempted an armed leftist revolution just over a decade earlier.

IITs on the other hand were home to relatively affluent kids. Getting through JEE required years of preparation. Poor families could ill afford it. Consequently, my IIT classmates were typically from the middle or upper classes of society. This set up for an interesting town-vs-gown tension in KGP. The Indian state of West Bengal had a democratically elected communist party government at the time. The general populace and the intellectuals were generally sympathetic to leftist ideals. Trade union movements were strong. The communist party wielded political power. Within this milieu, the IIT existed as a bubble. The vast majority of its non-Bengali students (who accounted for roughly half the student population) were decidedly capitalistic. A common undercurrent during the ragging season was the indirect (and sometimes blatant) messaging that “commies are bad.”

Before we knew it, the first semester had come to a close. Our fellow students realized that the three Sri Lankans had done quite well in the first semester examinations, despite being “quota students” who were expected to struggle. Later we heard that this phenomenon repeated itself at the other four IITs, each of which had several Sri Lankan refugees. In my case, I got As in everything except mathematics. The top Indian students slipped up in English, robbing them of a perfect 10 GPA (the following year, my friend and junior, a woman, successfully scored a perfect 10 for the first time in several years, if not ever). I, on the other hand, managed to get an A for English to the surprise of my Indian classmates, who studied in English from kindergarten unlike in Sri Lanka. But this was my life story in a nutshell. I had a natural affinity to languages and humanities. I studied engineering only because that was my ticket to success in the society I came from, which held professions at great esteem. But I was never as good at mathematics to the same extent as many other Tamil engineering students. In my A/Ls, I got three As and a B. The B was for pure mathematics. This was unheard of! The standard pattern for Tamils who dream of becoming engineers is to do well in mathematics but slip up in physics or chemistry. Later, at Peradeniya, I got ‘A’s in all subjects, including the dreaded engineering drawing, except mathematics. Perhaps if I had been brought up in a western society, which were not obsessed with doctors and engineers, I might have become a writer or a historian, professions that excited me from childhood to this day.

As students started reserving their train berths to go home for the December vacation, the reality of the situation hit the Sri Lankan students again. We were going to have to spend our vacation in Kharagpur because going back home for a short holiday was not an option, both because the civil war made it unsafe, but also because we couldn’t afford the expenses. My friend Rajiv decided to adopt the three Sri Lankans and take them home to Calcutta for a few days. That was a kindness I could never forget. Fate dealt us tumultuous paths in life, but the unending acts of kindness from friends and strangers got us to where we are today.

This “vacation problem” persisted throughout the rest of our IIT career: every winter and summer, as our classmates disappear home for long vacations, we generally stayed put in our residence halls, improvising cooking arrangements, since the regular hostel mess closed down during semester breaks.

KGP was in the midst of a communist stronghold; so, semester breaks did not always happen on schedule. At the end of our first year, the teacher’s union decided to go on strike. The institute closed before the final examinations could be held and students went home. The exams were postponed until the strike was resolved. This happened regularly. The trade unions knew that going on strike during the exam period is a powerful tactic. First it was the teachers’ union, then it was the mess workers’ union on multiple occasions. The fact that the communist party ruled the roost in the areas around the IIT bubble meant that mess workers came from a population that had a strong communist influence and enjoyed the support of the communist party. So, mess strikes and exam postponements were common, until our final year when the new, strong-willed, director of the IIT’s Board of Governors decided to break the strike by bringing in armies of caterers into campus. He changed the catering landscape on campus so that mess strikes were no longer viable tactics for the unions.

Continuing this story chronologically would be boring. I could write about specific themes, like the colorful cohort of foreign students at IIT KGP during my time, or about the postman, Sukumarda, who was our gateway to the outside world, and who had the power to bring us happiness or disappointment, or about the summer trips to Madras, first because I had nowhere else to go to, and then because of a summer internship, or about the one-sided infatuations, or about the well-oiled factory-floor process of applying for US universities in the final year. Time will tell, as I wait for inspiration to strike.