I may, of course, be paranoid and imagining conspiracy theories.

The entire exercise may actually be driven by the noble intention of maximising the value of brand IIT. If we could get 2000 IIT-ians out and then expand it to 4000 IIT-ians, why can’t we have a hundred IITs with a thousand students each? In a country of a billion people, what’s wrong with 10000 IIT-ians passing out each year?

To begin with, it blows apart the core value of brand IIT: super brains.

An IIT-ian friend of mine once went out for an arranged date with an air hostess in Hong Kong. As the music changed gears, the air hostess kept asking him to dance with her and my friend kept declining with a polite, “I can’t do the twist/disco/cha-cha-cha.” Finally, the air hostess lost her cool and is reported to have demanded, “What? You can’t even do the Can-Can? What can you do?”

To which, the proud IIT-ian responded, “I can do second order partial differential equations; can you?”

Brand IIT is not about IITs; it’s about IIT-ians. And, mostly, it is about undergraduate IIT-ians at that. People who have done M-Tech from IITs always feel discriminated against. Since they never cracked the JEE, there’s no way they will be accepted into the tribe.

Brilliance is elitist. There is a difference between brilliance and above average. The IIT entrance exam, the JEE, was designed to shock and awe and separate the brilliant from the above average. There is a difference between JEE rank 500 and 50,000.

... contd.