Does early gender segregation make it worse for men and women, whether in small towns, and eventually, the workplace? I suspect so
Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal is among the alumni of IIT-Kharagpur. Pic/PTI
Practically everyone I met at IIT -Kharagpur, whether 5 or 9-pointers, was from small-town India, from states as diverse as AP/UP/MP, or towns as distant as Gwalior/Gonda/Bhusawal/Bhagalpur. These were, of course, young, bright, nerdy, boys (mostly) - much earlier versions of whom, I recognised, used to study in my own Delhi Public School, which was often called the “Factory” for the number of kids it would send out to IITs every year.
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Frankly, I admired those schoolmates of mine for their drive and focus. Except, I hadn’t seen any of them, but on front-page ads of Vidyalankar, FIIT-JEE or other Chate-type classes with their mug shots, school-name, and AIR (All-India Ranking), once JEE results came out. Most of them, also from small-towns, joined my school in Std XI. They lived under a rock - IIT being not the means, but an end in itself. Which is fair. It is still the most Nehruvian, meritocratic institution in India -the likes of which the founder’s own daughter Indira Gandhi couldn’t get her son Rajiv into. He had to settle for the Imperial College in London instead.
Kharagpur campus, the oldest IIT, while massive (at 1,800 acres) and buzzing with activity (there were at least 6 major events going on while I was there), and only 120 km from Kolkata, still looked to me like a life in exile. Perhaps lazy Bengalis hadn’t sensed obvious business potential in serving 1,200 plus college kids since 1951. There’s nothing for leisure around the IIT-KGP campus. Which isn’t true for the branches in Delhi or Bombay. The boys around me had basically seen every movie in the world - good, bad, fugly. That’s why I was there, to give a TEDx talk on why we watch bad movies - inspired by IIT-KGP’s fascination for a Mithun movie called Gunda, which is in verse, and worse, set in a world where rape is the national sport.
This complete lack of extraneous distraction, the boys told me, was the reason IIT-KGP produced champions in fields outside their syllabus. Arunabh Kumar, founder of YouTube’s comedy sensation, TVF, currently embroiled in a sex scandal, is one of them. As is Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s activist-CM. But that’s not who we were talking about as we drove down a good half hour to a dingy dhaba, sitting in khatias, surrounded by other IITians, with dope and cheap booze doing the rounds.
We were all men. We were talking about women, or their supreme non-existence on this campus that produced a culture so skewed against boys that the girls, or rather “non-males” as they called them, had all the fun. The girls would casually hold hands of guys they didn’t care about and get all their notes and homework delivered to their rooms.
The brighter ones didn’t fall for this shit, or so they told me, although they felt neutered by this unfair exchange rate in a wholly closed economy. I sensed their pain. Surely, it was still better than the towns they studied hard to escape from, where die-hard romantics, celebrated in literature, Majnu or Romeo, have turned into punishable pejoratives, and where pranking, being pesky, or persistence is often considered the preferred route to love.
I went to St. Stephen’s, a liberal arts college in Delhi, with a relatively high gender ratio. Was it any different there? Well, similar curfew hours applied, surely, with women getting locked up in their rooms at 10 pm. And, of course, no woman was allowed to step into your room. A student’s mother once did. “She may be your mother, but she’s not everybody’s mother,” the daft dean shockingly yelled at that guy. So, well. And we were all adults.
But these KGP boys had spent the best years of high school studying. And even the better years in college studying more, besides watching frat-boy Hollywood movies, or imagining spring breaks as their brethren in the West lived it up, and they were reduced to making silly jokes about Beauty X Brain = constant C, a rectangular hyperbola. Surely there was a world outside this vanvaas to make this worth it, if at all.
None of the boys I spoke to at IIT wanted to pursue engineering, which is strange. It’s like going to a med school and realising nobody wants to be a doctor. They had careers in consultancy in mind, some in investment banking. The one I spent most time with wanted to be a top honcho in a creative conglomerate. Some of these calls were natural outcomes of pay packets involved.
But there were dreams inspired by movies. My generation had Michael Douglas’s Gordon Gekko from Wall Street. Theirs was probably Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort from The Wolf Of Wall Street - designer suits, corner office, fancy car, swanky apartment, money, power, fame, the works. Women would evidently follow. Finally. No? Don’t know.
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture. He tweets @mayankw14. Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
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