The Primates Of Iit

We, the IIT alumni, have been told time and again to consider ourselves fortunate to have the opportunity to share the space with the world’s (or at least our country’s) greatest minds. Guilty, as charged; especially when we think of some of our classmates 35 years ago. But a great mind is not a synonym for a straight mind. The general perception outside IIT has been that the students come to IIT campus with three things in mind – study, study, and more study. While it was true in most cases, but sometimes - when the lights were out, when nobody was watching, when we aced or completely bombed a test; when a money order from home arrived; when a professor’s teenage daughter smiled at us; when we were just too bored, too happy, or too angry; when we had nothing better to do - we closed our books and did things that we hoped our parents (and now our children) would never find out. ‘The Primates of IIT’ is a collection of those untold episodes that our batch mates had kept under wraps till now. While some of these episodes may negate the opening line of this paragraph (but who cares, most of us are past our primes anyway), they do reveal our wild sides, experiences, eccentricities, imperfections, rawness, childishness, simplicity, idiosyncrasies, immaturity, and most of all our stupidities. Moreover, these episodes provide a taste of how we amused ourselves in a time when there were no Blackberries, no iPhones, no iPads, no iPods, and not even www. We have come a long way but it all seems like yesterday.