Book review

The IITians: The Story of a Remarkable Indian Institution and How its Alumni Are Reshaping the World

IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) is India’s biggest and most powerful brand, and arguably the toughest and most influential engineering school in the world.

Since the first IIT was set up in the 1950s, thousands of initiates have walked out of the campus gates in Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai and elsewhere to become leaders in their chosen fields. In India they head many of the biggest and most admired professionally managed companies. Abroad, they lead giant corporations, and their feats figure in the folklore of Silicon Valley. The power that the alumni of this one bunch of undergraduate schools wields in business, academe and research is comparable to that of Cambridge and Oxford in the heyday of the British Empire.

Sandipan Deb, himself an IITian, delves into his own experience and those of scores of alumni to try and explain what makes IITians such outstanding achievers. In part it may be that they cannot be anything else: only one in every hundred applicants gets admitted. Harvard, in comparison, takes one in eight. The unique village-like campuses peopled only by the super-bright and the intensely competitive hone the IITians’ skills further. No wonder then that when they leave the campus, IITians look upon themselves as special people, capable of competing in their field with the best in the world. And, as their record shows, succeeding.

Hardback Format: Demy | 392 pages | Published : 1/1/2004



About the author Sandipan Deb is Managing Editor, Outlook magazine and editor of Outlook Money. He is an alumni of IIM, Calcutta.