Crucible Of Excellence

Aside from technical excellence, IIT Kharagpur offers students the chance to develop their extra-curricular interests

- Romita Datta

ON A 2.2 KM LONG road, fondly referred to as Scholar’s Avenue, images of many of the country’s biggest names stand shoulder to shoulder. Jawaharlal Nehru, Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose, Maulana Azad, Sardar Patel, Naidu and Rani Laxmi Bai are all there, each representing a hostel. So when Google’s chief executive officer Sundar Pichai visits his alma mater and shouts “Nehru ka tempo high hai”, he is greeted with a roar of applause as the students of his hostel make their approval known.

Welcome to one of the country’s premier engineering colleges—the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur (IIT-KGP). Spread over 2,100 acres of land, with lush greenery, lakes, broad lawns and huge trees in every direction, the university also boasts stadiums, tennis courts, hockey, football and cricket grounds, as well as a gym and a swimming pool. The architecture follows a simple principle—lots of air and light—and offers students a great deal of space.

Without any formal boundary, IIT-KGP has succeeded in walling off the distracting influences of the outside world. Be it Kanhaiya Kumar or the beef ban, nothing ruffles or unsettles them. Politics, or ‘poltu’ in IIT-KGP lingo, is the last thing on their minds—except, of course, around February each year, when students elect their vice president, the highest post available to them. In general, though, students are more concerned with ‘machao’/ ‘makhao’ (doing well/ flunking an exam) than they are with poltu.