Essential reading for Dr Joshi

India Today is the same for journalists, since most of India's successful managers/journalists have cut their teeth at these institutions.

Yet, what makes these institutions the fertile breeding grounds for talent that they are, is impossible to quite put a finger on.

Insider stories designed to convey the mystique are, well, best appreciated only by insiders.

So, for instance, only those who've worked in India Today at a particular point in time will appreciate what Purie meant when he told a senior colleague that she was just a he-said-she-said kind of reporter, or figure out the message that, though the stories were simply told, an ideal IT reporter was supposed to understand every nuance of a story, backwards, forwards, inside out (never mind that readers often felt the story was reported backwards!).

So, in a sense, one can't really blame Outlook magazine's managing editor for not being able to fully capture the mystique of the IITs, why they're able to turn out such top class engineers that there's hardly a Fortune 500 firm that doesn't have IIT alumnus in senior management, why they own "half of Silicon Valley" as Bill Clinton once famously said, or why CBS should air a special segment on the 50th anniversary of the IIT system.

Deb suggests the freedom given to students (in his time, unlike now, cultural programmes didn't end at 10 pm and students were not fined Rs 500 for smoking), the bonding of people from different cultures, even the ragging (of the non-physical kind) have a lot to do with the innate IITian sense of being confident enough to tackle anything.

While bonding and freedom are important, surely there's more to the IITians than just getting high on pot and Pink Floyd or organising cultural events?

But, where Deb fails to crack the IIT-mystery, his canvas of IITians is so broad and compelling it more than makes up for any shortcomings in telling the story.

Besides, as any journalist will tell you, doing the story at the right time is 90 per cent of the job, doing it well is just an added bonus! At a time when HRD minister Murli Manohar Joshi's fight with the IIT/IIMs is at an all-time high, what better than a book on the IITians?

The book, to be fair, has a lot for both sides, those inside the IIT boundary wall as well as those who seek to raze it to the ground.

So, there's data, and statements from none other than N R Narayana Murthy, that it's easier to get into MIT than an IIT "" Murthy told CBS his son couldn't get into IIT (1 in 100 get in) and so went to Cornell instead!

There's a reference to how, at the time of Independence, there was a debate in Gandhian circles as to whether such elite universities were required, but the conclusion was that India had a tradition of elite educational institutions like the Buddhist university at Nalanda, where the idea was to pick the best people and train them "" Nalanda, by the way, had 2,000 teachers and 10,000 students, or the kind of student-teacher ratio Dr Joshi is upset the IIMs have!

But while extolling the prowess of the IITians, Deb's 14-month trail chasing IITians across the globe, shows there's enough unease within the IIT ecosystem.

One multinational manager shatters Deb's equipoise by telling him IITians lack enterprise or the desire to take risks.

Others argue that if students are giving the Joint Entrance Examination two to three times to get into IITs, this ensures they're so unidimensional, it's unlikely they'll be any great asset to society "" they can be good engineers, they'll never be innovators or entrepreneurs.

Prof Indiresan, former director of the IIT in Chennai and a member of the U R Rao Committee that Dr Joshi selectively quotes from to hit at the IIT/IIM system, in fact says he's in favour of abolishing the present examination system, but fears that, once this is abolished, and the government starts interfering in admissions, this will lead to disaster!

Even more frightening, a McKinsey report in 2000 pointed out the IIT system and Regional Engineering Colleges were looking at a 50 per cent shortfall in faculty members in a few years.

And while the IIT system has done well for the country, Deb acknowledges its research output is woefully short of global standards.

Between 1993 and 1998, a typical IIT professor could hope for just 2-3 citations in research papers, it was 45 for MIT and 52 for Stanford's engineering school.

In 1996-97, 102 patents were granted to MIT professors and students while the figure was between three and six for a typical IIT. Dr Joshi's methods may be questionable, but it's wake up time for the IITians in more ways than one.

THE IITIANS

Sandipan Deb
Penguin/Viking
Pages: 375
Price: Rs 425