IIT Bombay (93-97) was a very idyllic time for me. I haven't really thought about it at all since I left, but reflecting on my time there with the benefit of distance is interesting. I had fun writing this response. Puts many things in perspective for me personally.

I am going to write this using the present tense, under the assumption that the culture hasn't changed much in the last 15 years. This is specific to IIT Bombay, but I suspect the rest are similar.

Campus and Culture

The campus is on the edge of a small national park and between two lakes. It is full of stray dogs, herds of random wandering cows which sometimes sneak into hostels, and the occasional leopard (I personally never saw one, but campus security would occasionally post notices about leopards being spotted and to be careful... they preyed on the stray dogs). Long walks, sitting by the lakeside and late night snacking at the hostel canteen or the one on-campus concession were the highlights of life. It was a sort of collective Walden-Pond kind of isolation.

You can basically ignore the city of Bombay except for the occassional outing. It's like living in Central Park would be, for a New Yorker.

The "wing" (section+floor of a hostel) of 12-16 rooms is the main social unit. I was part of wing 4-2 in Hostel 5. Every wing thought it was the best/coolest, of course, based on self-perceived qualities. Each hostel also had its own overall personality, like the Hogwart's houses. Hostel 5 sort of prided itself on academic mediocrity and rowdiness. Within it, my wing prided itself on being the noisy, loud, combative wing, with an ongoing rivalry with wing 6-2, the other rowdy wing, right across from us. We'd shoot bottle rockets at each other on Diwali.

Wing 4-2 contained the older students who led the hazing activities. My freshman year, there was a somewhat ugly hazing incident that led to a couple of the students from my wing getting suspended for a year and the freshmen involved changing hostels. The wing contained some of the hard-drinking, gambling types. One of them, a complete slacker in other ways, went on to win the world bridge junior championship or something like that.

I'll note another random thing about Hostel 5, Wing 4-2. It was the epicenter of the the then-young Art of Living movement on campus, centered around the figure of Sri Ravishankar, a popular Guru du jour who was just getting popular at the time. The ringleader of this gang was a math graduate student (one of the few popular enough with the undergrads to be accepted into an undergrad wing), Khurshid "Bawa" Batliwala, now a very senior leader in the now mature movement. Bawa, a reformed undergrad layabout, turned into an earnest proselytizer for the movement (including several determined failed attempts to convert me).

Bawa was (and I assume, is), a very cool guy, talented musician and theater guy. He mentored me in my own theater experiences in between trying to persuade me to try sudarshan kriya, the meditative practice of the Art of Living movement (it is among the easiest meditative practices, in case you want to try it; far easier than transcendental, Zen or vipassana).

So wing 4-2 was at once a rowdy, noisy, hazing-oriented place, but also a wing weirdly full of dead-serious spiritual types who spent hours meditating. Some managed to be both at once.

Bawa and the several dozen people he converted during my time at IIT-B are mostly still serious Art of Living devotees. Many are senior leaders.

Slackerdom

IIT Bombay culture is very laid back, and being laid back defines the entire culture. The competition to get in (the Joint Entrance Exam, JEE) is the last serious competition for about two thirds of the students, who decide to slack off into pleasant mediocrity, knowing they can coast on a bare minimum effort for four years and still do reasonably well after, on the strength of the IIT brand alone.

I was in this two thirds. For this group, IIT is something of an extended 4-year vacation, a reward for clearing the exam to get in. Life and competition can restart afterwards.

The 1/3 overachievers are all similar, but each slacker slacks off in his own way. The culture is really lazy, compared to US universities. Extra-curricular activities aren't as energetically pursued as they are in America. There is a lot of friendly rivalry around inter-hostel (similar to intramural in the US) competitive events, but it's more about trash-talking than real competition.

For me it was a lot of swimming (won a couple of water polo medals, playing in the water-boy position), amateur theater (won a few intramural acting and directing prizes), a lot of reading unrelated to school, and a few good friendships that have lasted. I was mostly a recluse (hermit was one of my nicknames). Other slackers had very different lives.

Lukkhas, Nabdus and RGs

There was a term for the dominant slacker lifestyle: lukkhagiri. A lukkha is layabout. The opposite term is nabdu. From the English "nervous breakdown." The classic nabdu was (and I suppose, still is) someone who continues the anxious, serious attitude required to get in, even after they get in. It is rightly considered a recipe for turning yourself into a nervous wreck.

Related to the lukkha-nabdu dynamic is a sort of conspiracy of slackerdom (i.e lukkhagiri) where those who try to get ahead are made fun of or actively resented for making it harder for the rest.

The term for breaking the tacit agreement to slack off was RG-giri. RG stands for "relative grading" the term for grading on a curve as practiced by IIT-B professors. RG-giri means not cooperating in the conspiracy of deliberate least-effort mediocrity. It translates to (among other things) not sharing your notes, not letting others copy your homework and in general being the jerk who over-performs and pushes everybody else's grades down.

Being seriously RG could get you ostracized and hated. Most lukkhas have very patchy attendance. Some coast through four years barely ever making it to class, surviving entirely on copied homeworks and cramming for exams at the last minute using photocopied notes. Outright cheating was not very common (there was a curious sense of honor among at least a portion of the students; not as in code of honor, but as in taking pride in being smart), but besides that, most lukkhas chose the path of least resistance, cooperating extensively to make it through.

Outside of a few courses that interested me, I was mostly a complete slacker. My attendance was pretty average, but not abysmal like the dedicated slackers. I liked the structure of classes and the opportunity to walk to classes and back, even if I didn't actually pay attention.

Crackus and Huggoos

Part of what makes this conspiracy of mediocrity possible is a mixture of recognizing your limits/being humble and being complacent and arrogant at the same time.

The couple of dozen genuine geniuses on campus at any given time make everybody else (most of whom were at the top of their class in high school) realize that they'll never be that good. Genuis-good. Benchmarking is a bitch.

On the other hand, they assume they're smart enough to figure stuff out if they actually need to and/or are interested. So they figure they've got nothing left to prove. Annoyingly enough, they are mostly right.

The result is a curious thing: a slacker-but-intellectual-elitist culture.

And this brings up two other concepts that make for an interesting culture: cracku and huggoo (or hagaar). Cracku-s (from the English "crack" as in "crack this problem") are kinda like Ravenclaw smart. Huggoos are sort of like Hufflepuffs... they get modest results by working hard rather than smart. You get marked as a cracku or huggoo based on how you cleared the JEE.

If you took multiple attempts and/or made it through on the strength of a strong chemistry paper (the easiest of the three papers -- math, physics, chemistry -- and the one that can be most easily cleared through hard work), you'd be marked a huggoo. It's easy to tell the two apart based on both explicit and implicit signs.

The IITB 2x2 matrix and status dynamics

The interesting thing is that your social status is not based purely on whether you are a cracku or a huggoo. It depends on the combination of that trait and whether you are a lukkha or nabdu.

I. A cracku-nabdu is generally treated as an immature genius type; a special case that gets left alone, and out of the status hierarchy, based on the level of exhibited genius.

II. A cracku-lukkha is of course the best thing to be. They maintain status by not taking grades too seriously, but demonstrating brilliance in unorthodox ways, one-upping professors, etc.

III. A huggoo-lukkha is the next best. If you are smart enough to realize that you are no match for the geniuses, and rationally slack off, you retain your honor.

IV. And of course a huggoo-nabdu is at the bottom. Somebody who earnestly works hard and tries to do well but isn't particularly bright relative to the geniuses around, is an obvious target for jokes.

Types I and IV, by the way, are the ones to whom the RG label might apply if they don't share (somebody has to actually attend classes, take notes and do the homework... that's Is and IVs... and they make up for lack of social coolness by sharing their hard work... they're basically exploited by the lukkhas; it all works out). Types I and II contain the geniuses as their own top minority.

The result is intelligent, minimum-effort, collaborative slacking. I'll let you work out for yourself how the various types create the grade-performance hierarchy. The big difference compared to top American undergrad campuses is the far higher degree of collaboration in doing academic work, and the far higher level of slacking. The latter is largely because back then, the education was practically free and it was easy to undervalue it, whereas American undergrads typically incur huge loans for similar quality education.

The professors enable this curious slacker culture. Most of them (many IIT grads themselves) are also checked-out lukkhas who don't want to bother with challenging the students. There are exceptions in the faculty as well. An example is the math professor (dunno if he's still there), K. D. Joshi, who made it his life mission to knock the complacency out of any student who was unfortunate enough to end up in his math classes. He routinely failed half the students in his classes. I had him for two semesters unfortunately, and just scraped through with Ds.

Junior-Senior Year

The sixth and seventh semesters (end of junior year/beginning of senior) deserves special mention because the social system breaks down. It's like iterated prisoner's dilemma with large-scale cooperation suddenly turning into large-scale defection. Suddenly, competition looms -- for scholarships to American graduate programs, top-paid jobs and so forth.

At this point, most students develop a certain amount of nabdu and RG traits. They try to get a few As to push up their GPAs, try to differentiate via their senior thesis projects, get in some research experience, kiss-up to a few faculty members for recommendations and in general, start abandoning the lukkha culture to a greater or lesser degree. In this, things are not so different from American campuses. The biggest difference is probably in the extreme amount of cynical realpolitik in the thinking. Very few graduate as idealists. Most have a mercenary attitude about how best to exploit the advantages afforded by an IIT degree.

Cooperation still continues, but some tension starts creeping in when peers are competing for the same opportunities.

And then, it's the final summer and the last semester. The lukha camaraderie comes back in, since the critical competitive phase is over and it's mostly about waiting for outcomes.


Alumni Life

For many insecure young 18-year-olds, clearing the JEE is a boost in self-confidence they never recover from. Their IIT experience becomes the highlight of their lives, and they live within the memory of that experience for decades.

As real life hits, and you slowly learn that there are other smart people in the world, and that you're not as smart as you thought, most graduates move on, content to occasionally connect with old friends and pull together social events.

Some get increasingly thin-skinned and resentful as they hang on desperately to their IIT laurels and spiral downward into a life that never quite reaches the IIT peak. They resent their friends for moving on, but the idea that you're at least a D-list genius starts to wear thin and fall apart by your mid twenties, and if you can't handle it, you turn into a rather pathetic creature. A gollum, caressing your IIT degree, muttering, "My precious!!!" Most alums avoid these gollums like the plague. They are incredibly awkward and embarrassing to be around.

Oh yeah, LOTR is huge in IIT-B. I refused to read it simply because the "lit mafia" on campus was so obsessed with it. I only read it in grad school.

There are also those who come to a mature appreciation of the value of the global IIT alumni network. These people are at the heart of one of the strongest alumni networks in the world. It is nothing like (say) the WASPy idea of an old boy's network based on clubs in big cities and trust funds. Instead, it is something like a global, distributed P2P technocrat fraternity that shows up in all sorts of unexpected places and can open unexpected doors.

I am not active in this at all (partly because I am not a career technocrat, unlike most IITians), but I still hear updates occasionally when I meet friends who are.

I am 37 now, and rarely think about IIT anymore, unless I am answering a question like this. Relationships with old IIT friends have now evolved where they are no longer about IIT.

But still, there are times when I sit back and just marvel at how completely fundamental IIT has been in my life.