IIT : Indian Institute of Technology

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Battle for Brand IIT

IT was a warm sunny day in the land of dreams. Young men and women were gathered under a tree to protest against the atrocities carried out by the State; men with blaring megaphones voicing instructions, women in jeans and designer sunglasses surging politely but determinedly towards visitors for signatures on a petition that beseeched the nation’s President to agree to their demands. This slightly surreal picture describes one protest rally peopled by NRIs in the richest part of the richest area of the richest country in the world. This was a Sunday afternoon in the Fair Oaks Park in Sunnyvale, Silicon Valley, California. An earshot away were the head offices of Yahoo, Google, Intel, Cisco and other corporate outfits that have fired the imagination of youth in 21st-century India. But the protest?

Protecting’ India

It was organised to protect India from the clutches of the OBCs. Young men and women NRIs, concerned about the reservations crisis gripping India, had come together under the shade of a Californian Oak grove, to show solidarity with their brethren sweating in the heat of Delhi and other parts of urban India. They were afraid. Clutching their algorithmic and metrical consciousness close to their hearts, they challenged the politically driven and vote bank motivated decision of the Congress regime. They collectively feared for the future state of education in India, if, God forbid, the OBC candidates infiltrated en masse into the hallowed corridors of the IITs and IIMs. They were aghast that it was their own sophisticated Manmohan Singh and not the dehati Laloo Prasad Yadav who had betrayed them.

They were not anxious about the future of their country, although they professed to be. They were concerned about their institutes. The NRIs of Silicon Valley were angry that the quality of their alma mater(s) was under threat. They feared that the intrusion of the more than 50 per cent of undeserving students riding the quota bandwagon would affect the sterling quality of the products of the IIT-IIM brand. Internal desi email groups at Stanford University, Cisco, Intel, and Google were crackling with activity to save the IIT-IIMs from the sure death of the Arjun Singh “inanity". From online petitions to pubic meetings, from solidarity campaigns to letters to the President, Silicon Valley “Indians for Equality” wanted to desperately make an impact on the politically fraught landscape of reservations. But unlike the Indian agitators, the fear lay somewhere else. It was neither their jobs nor their seats that were at stake. Unlike the medical students, they were not planning to compete for Masters or Ph.D. programmes in the constricted postgraduate medical school seats in India, neither were they going to apply for government jobs. And neither was this display on a Sunday morning in Silicon Valley, a mere solidarity meet, as the organisers contended. There was a real, palpable fear — of “brand dilution".

A different fear

They feared for brand IIT-IIM. “Let Arjun Singh do whatever he wants with any educational institute in India. But tell him to leave the IITs alone", fervently remarked a Silicon Valley engineer. He was a close friend, with a Ph.D. from Stanford University, working in one of the largest multinational pharmaceutical companies in the world. We had both come to Stanford as graduate students at the same time. “It is because of us that the West has recognised the worth of India,” he furthered elaborated on his point. “Remember,” peering deeply into my eyes, he emphasised, “brand India is brand IIT.” The NRI call to save the nation from reservations was a call to save the IITs. If dams were the temples of modern India (of Green revolution, Industrialisation, self sufficiency), then the IITs were their counterparts in neo-liberal India (for Infosys, BPOs and the multiple “Silicon Valleys"). It was to save this brand in the name of the nation that agitated Silicon Valley engineers organised the protest. Ironically, more than a grave protest, it looked like a picnic on a sunny Californian Sunday.

Like most consumers and producers of any brand, IIT alumni also believe in brand IIT as the absolute marker of a product’s quality. PR firms hawk the IIT brand in the market place of corporate America, to sell its products. Adulation of the mainstream media at home and the presence of IIT lore in American popular culture epitomised by the IIT geek in Dilbert, has transformed IITs from institutions that were the intellectual keystone to Nehru’s developmental paradigm, to a sophisticated icon of corporate India’s success in the Silicon Valley.

Just imagined constructs

The pervasiveness of the IIT brand and belief in its efficacy is not restricted to the outside world, “the consumer” so to speak, but is deeply ingrained in the products and the producers of the brand itself — the IIT alumni. It appears that they are unable to recognise that brands are imagined constructs with perceived rather than absolute value. The anti-reservation voices disturbing the opulent tranquillity of the NRI-infested Silicon Valley are motivated by a felt need to protect IIT brand equity rather than a need to address the education crisis in India, although it is the latter that is underscored in the posters, pamphlets and websites of anti-reservationists in the U.S.

If the anti-reservation protests in India were largely a result of self-indulgent middle classes screaming hoarse to protect their turf in elite educational establishments, then the resentment in the Silicon Valley was a result of a more affluent, but intrinsically identical middle class protecting its own corporate motivated interests spearheaded by the idea of IIT. A career in Silicon Valley epitomises the aspirations of the privileged middle class Indians who form a substantial percentage of the students entering IITs. A degree from Stanford and a job in the Bay Area are what an IIT topper’s dreams are made of. Brand IIT sells in the U.S., and any compromise on its product quality is detrimental to the brand and its saleability, affecting ultimately the aspirations of the IIT product.

A myth perpetuated

The average IIT product believes that the IIT graduates are the finest in India that can be offered to the world — the corporate world, essentially. It is in the U.S. that the myth that brand India is synonymous with brand IIT has been generated, perpetuated and consumed, replacing the earlier narrative of India as the land of elephants and snake charmers. It is important to note that both are imagined constructions and equally unreal, produced through identical sociological processes.

These anti-reservation voices in the Silicon Valley are not to be viewed as mere solidarity songs for the student movement in India, as contended by their organisers and the press. A more insidious subtext, driven by the desire to protect the brand at the cost of the nation, underlies these protests.

As we were admiring the surreality of the protest in the land of dreams, an activist upper caste friend, one of the few who had come to distribute pro-reservation pamphlets at the same meeting, nonchalantly remarked, “Woh IIT bachana chahate hai, hum desh bachna chahate hai.”

Ashish Chadha is a doctoral candidate in Cultural and Social Anthropology, Stanford University.

Source : http://www.hindu.com/

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