Chetan Bhagat’s bestseller “Five Point Someone” was a scathing commentary on the rigour and monotony of the academic work at the country’s premiere engineering institution, the IIT. Four friends, all engineering graduates, have embarked on a similar journey albeit with a difference. Adhitya Iyer, Darshan Ashar, Kapil Sharma and Suresh Bommisetti are working on a non-fiction, which promises to narrate the tale of engineering in India. “This is not about what is right or wrong or needs to be changed. It is just the story of a system that has global and international impact,” says Ashar. “We produce more engineers than any other country in the world,” says Iyer in justification of their project
The four engineers (or engineers to be) admit that their perspective of the whole landscape was limited till one of them started travelling for research and shared his experiences with the others. “One mistake was sitting in Mumbai and assuming things. The month long trip that I undertook changed everything,” says Iyer, who travelled to Kota, Kanpur, Delhi, Patna, Bangalore and Hyderabad for research.
Iyer talks about some of his shocking experiences. “In Delhi, there is a coaching class X, which prepares you to take admission in coaching class Y which in turn prepares you for IIT-JEE. It was unlike anything we had ever seen,” he says. The private coaching industry for engineering exams, he mentions, is valued at around 4 billion dollars, which is more than even the Bollywood.
While Iyer handles most of the writing work, the others contribute in terms of research and marketing. “When you visit a place, it is important to meet as many people as possible and utilize the time well. We make it a point to mingle informally with hostel students everywhere over coffee or dinner. That’s when the stories pour out,” says Bommisetti who plans these trips.
A popular topic for mainstream media, engineering always tends to get romanticized rather than be nuanced, says Iyer. “I thought ‘Three Idiots’ had a golden opportunity but it decided to drift away in the end. So instead of an outsider doing it, we thought we should ourselves narrate our own stories,” he adds.
While the boys knew that their idea was good enough, they were aware of the need to let people know about it and get their feedback. “Instead of waiting for the book to finish, we decided to inform the audience about the book through a website, video and social networks,” says Ashar. The response they got was tremendous. “People from all over the country and even Pakistan wanted to share their story with us. We got so many messages, many of them in broken English describing various experiences,” says Iyer.
One of the messages advised them to take their project to a crowd funding website. When they launched the project on the website, it became one of the top 10 staff picks. “Around 70 percent of the Indian engineers in the USA are from Andhra Pradesh. So if the funds come in, we want to expand our research to countries like USA, China and Israel to give a global context to our book,” says Iyer.
So when does this book see the light of day? “If our crowd funding project is successful, then the will be released mid-2015,” says Bommisetti. Since the research is still going on, the nature of the book is not cast in stone yet. However according to the four authors, it definitely will not be a sermon but the story of a system that has global and international impact.
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