IIT defined me as a person

Kanwal Rekhi reminisces about his days at IIT-Bombay.

My experience at IIT defined me as a person. My best friends, even today after 38 years, are my IIT buddies. I attribute all my success in my life to the years I spent at IIT.

I was a third of the eight children of an army officer. My father had received his emergency commission in 1947 at the time of Independence, when many people like him who had become JCO's during the war were promoted to fill the gaps in the army ranks because of the departing British officers.

Later my two elder brothers followed him in the Army through NDA and IMA. I was not a favourite of my father as I was a physical weakling and though rather bookish, also a mediocre student.

I had gotten second division in high school and intermediate of UP Board examinations. I also was socially awkward and had a speech impediment.

He thought I had no chance of getting through tough Army selection process. He despaired for me as he saw no good government job of any kind coming my way.

He was under whelmed when I was selected for IIT through JEE in 1963. IITs had not achieved the notoriety they have now. My father wondered why would any body go to IIT for four years and pay tuition and not have a guaranteed job for life, not to mention pension at the end.

But for me, getting into IIT was a dream come true. I elected to go to IIT-Bombay to do a degree in Metallurgy.

I arrived in Bombay in late summer of 1963. Having grown in Kanpur, going to Bombay was like going to a different world. IIT campus at Powai was big and brand new. It was built with Russian help under a UNESCO programme and still had Russians on site, both as faculty and technicians.

Director of IIT at the time was a retired army brigadier and registrar was a colonel. Almost all the faculty was foreign returned, a big thing back then. We felt very special in such an environment.

IIT had students from every nook and cranny of India and several African and Arab countries. For the first time in my life I was on my own at least 1,000 miles away from home, with brand new friends with whom I could only communicate in English.

I took to the IIT environment like a fish takes to water. Overnight, I went from being a socially awkward to being a very confident person and started to excel in studies, especially mathematics.

IIT life was carefree but the pace of studies was relentless. The environment was full of smart people, who were typically at the top of their class before coming to IIT but at IIT they were just average. There was a workshop or a lab every afternoon.

Coming from middle class families we were not used to working with our hands. One had to master carpentry, machining, molding, surveying, drafting to name a few things to keep up with class.

Hostel life was also very egalitarian; every body had a same size pigeon hole of a room and ate same crummy hostel food. Overall environment was a great equalizer.

I not only survived but came very near the top of my class in the first year of my class. I came back home as a changed person. I had become so confident that it bordered on arrogance. My mother was surprised to see how much I had grown in one year.

I was able to switch my major to Electrical Engineering from metallurgy in the second year. Electrical engineering is essentially all mathematics and a lot of abstract concepts. More difficult the concept, more easily I understood its fundamentals.

I picked up a sobriquet; Funda Singh. I was made for electrical engineering and electrical engineering was made for me.

My years at IIT were during the historically turbulent times. Language rights, Nehru's death, Lal Bahdur Shastri becoming the Prime Minister, famine, US Cutting off PL 480 Wheat, no cereals one day a week, India Pakistan war, Tashkent agreement, Lal Bahadur Shastri's death, Indira Gandhi becoming Prime Minister, India Gandhi taking on the Syndicate, Kriplani Vs Krshna Menon election from north Bombay are the events that come to mind.

Enough to numb ones mind! I don't have much memory of what happened at IIT in second through fourth year other than I excelled at every thing until my oldest brother, who had become a captain in the Army by that time, died of cancer in 1966 at the ripe old age of 24!

It was very hard to focus on studies after that. My last year at IIT was very tough as a result though I did manage to graduate.

I was very worried about making it in life. Choice was between becoming a management trainee at one of many private companies and leaving country. There were just no suitable technical jobs in India in 1967.

Like many other IITians, I left for US to do masters in electrical engineering at Michigan Tech in 1967. Rest is history.

I never looked back. I went on in life from success to success. I was the first Indo-American entrepreneur in Silicon Valley who took a company public on Nasdaq in 1987.

But I had lost touch with IIT and India. All my family had immigrated to US after the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.

I had no immediate family left in India. It was not until towards the end of my carrier that I came back to IIT in 1994. I was shocked to see the campus in disrepair and sprawl around it.

My memory was of brand new campus by the lake in the middle of no where. By 1994, Bombay's growth had caught up with Powai. But all my feelings about my days at IIT came rushing back. I made up my mind during that trip to re-engage with India and IIT.

After I retired from my business in 1995, IIT and India again became priority in my life. It has been exhilarating 10 years!

(Kanwal Rekhi is currently a Managing Director of Inventus Capital Partners, an early stage Venture Capital fund focused on Silicon Valley and Bangalore based companies. He is an IIT-Bombay 1967-69 batch graduate.)