“We did everything shown in the movie Three Idiots”, remarks Mr Lalit Mehra. “Except perhaps, deliver babies.”

“There used to be a lot of road laying equipment lying around in those days”, he continues. “So one day, we took a road roller for a joyride. It drove just fine. But after we had our fun, we couldn’t get it to switch off! We abandoned it, engine running and brakes on, on a steep incline. Then we all ran away.”

Typical college story, right? Difference is, it’s from 1961. Mr Mehra was one among 150 students, the first batch, which graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, or IIT Delhi. On Monday, Aug 16, they were back at college again. Fifty years after they first walked in, to start the journey of a lifetime.

Mr Ramakant Gupta was there with his charming wife. He’s president at a huge real estate and construction company today. But back in ’61, he was just a kid with stars in his eyes.

“Back then, the city used to end near Hauz Khas, the Mughal monuments. And our entire campus used to be surrounded by thick forests. One day, we walked barefoot, for some fifteen kilometers through the jungle. It was just a whim, a sudden desire to see planes take off at Palam Airport, on the other end of town”.

Today, the jungle he trudged through is infested with housing colonies and flyovers. The bell bottoms, the Sadhna fringe cuts, the LandMaster cars of his youth, are all gone. But as he and his old batch mates caught up, over steaming cups of tea, it didn’t seem very different from any average college “adda”.

“Add me on Facebook” harrumphed a gentleman loudly. He looked old enough to be my grandfather. “It’s the best way to keep in touch”, he told his slightly skeptical friend. Engineers!, I thought to myself. Always at ease with technology.

Upstairs, inside Dogra Hall, was something even more enchanting. Sprawled out on the seats were white haired, white bearded, spectacled folks, some already dozing off to sleep. On stage was Mrs Dogra, wife of IIT Delhi’s first principal.

Years back, she’d been both a mother and a terror to these students. Fifty years on, having them together in the same hall, watching her stooping protégées stand up and address her as “Mam”, was a sight to behold.

“I miss the roses we used to have in the gardens”, Mrs Dogra said, to laughter and applause from the audience. “When I was around, we’d get trophies by the basketful every year at flower shows. No one in the city could match the roses from IIT Delhi.”

Surprisingly, the nation’s capital wasn’t the first city to have an IIT. Kharagpur, Mumbai, Chennai and Kanpur are all older siblings. It wasn’t even called IIT in the beginning – It was the College of Engineering and Technology (CET).

It operated very briefly out of a building near Old Delhi’s Kashmere Gate, before being assigned 320 acres of rocky land, in what is today, among the poshest parts of the city. The foundation stone was laid in 1959 by England’s Prince Philip.

The first students walked in to start studies on August 16, 1961. It was only in 1963, that CET, Delhi, formally became IIT, Delhi – thanks to an act of Parliament. When the first batch graduated in 1966, President S Radhakrishnan himself attended the ceremony.

Today, IIT D offers 9 undergraduate and 38 post graduate programmes. It’s been hailed as India’s best engineering institute, ranked among Asia’s top 15 and the world’s top 200 institutes, at different points in time. On a lighter note, it’s annual college festival Rendevous, is among the most happening, in Delhi.

It counts as alumni people like Vinod Khosla, co-founder, Sun Microsystems (among the world’s most successful tech companies), Padmasree Warrior, Cisco, (once in the race to be President Obama’s Chief Technology Officer), M S Banga, former CEO, MasterCard (the credit card company), Rajendra Pawar, co-founder of NIIT, and Chetan Bhagat, the famous author of the book that helped shape the movie “Three Idiots”.

Am not sure if it’s thanks to the movie – but walking home last night, I got a call from the young President of the Literature Club at IIT Delhi. She mentioned there’s a huge interest in media studies at the institute, with students interning at top media houses in the capital, in an effort to learn journalism skills.

Did I mention there’s a full fledged Television production suite at IIT Delhi? Under the watchful eyes of the amazingly dynamic Professor Kushal Sen and the stewardship of extremely helpful people like V P Taneja, it churns out content for “Eklavvya”, a twenty four hour satellite television channel dedicated to technology, run by Doordarshan.

Post Script: Today, the country has 15 different IITs, in various stages of development. Germany, Australia and Japan want to nurture the eight new ones (Mandi, Patna, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, Ropar, Indore, Bhubaneshwar, Gandhinagar), just like England, West Germany, the Soviet Union, UNESCO and America helped set up the original five.

The University of Roorkee was made an IIT only in 2001, though it’s been offering engineering degrees since 1847 and is probably the oldest engineering college in Asia. IIT Guwahati was established in 1995.
[The article was originally printed on CNN IBN’s website – www.ibnlive.com.]
-JAIMON JOSEPH
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(More about Jaimon Joseph
I’ve always been scared around gadgets and software. And in awe of people who’re good with them. After three years of science and tech reporting though, I think I’m starting to get the hang of things. Before this, I covered automobiles, health, careers and business, for seven years. Nice thing about technology is, it lets me poach into all those fields once in a while. I love this job. But I’m not sure how I managed to land it. I did my BA in Advertising from Delhi College of Arts and Commerce and MA in Journalism from Madurai Kamaraj University. I wanted to be a cartoonist, a guitar player and a footballer but sucked in all those fields. I can play the flute and harmonica though. And I have an interest in machines that move – it was cars and bikes earlier but considering there’s nothing revolutionary happening there, it’s military stuff now. I’m the sort who drools over figures. Not the 36-24-36 types. But top speed, acceleration, fuel consumption, drag co-efficient. I drive an Alto though. And usually take the Metro to work.)