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A temple visit before IIT coaching
The Temple Before Coaching
The coaches Ramayya and Krishnamurti prepared students for the IIT entrance, and they woke the kids at 4:00 AM in class 11 and 12. Getting in was a qualification in itself, so preparation to join Ramayya began in class 8, 9, or 10. Once a student got there, the first instruction was to go to Basar, the first Saraswati temple known in Andhra, then come back and start preparing.
Rank And Branches
Chetan Bhagat never got into either coaching class, and people thought he was good for nothing. His father gave up and told him to do whatever. In 12th grade he wrote the exam and got a rank of 1,700, which then meant branches like naval architecture or metallurgy. Today a metallurgy seat at a proper IIT would be a dream.
He prepared with Brilliance, and a friend took Agarwal's. They exchanged notes so he could study, and he enjoyed science a lot.
Why do students perform rituals before exams?
Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski observed in the early twentieth century that Trobriand Islanders used magic rituals for risky deep-sea fishing but not for safe lagoon fishing. His reading was that ritual rises with uncertainty about the outcome. A 2010 experiment by Lysann Damisch at the University of Cologne found that people performed better at a golf putting task when told their ball was lucky. The Basar temple on the Godavari River is known for the first-letters ceremony held there for young children.
How do seat ranks decide a student's branch?
Seats at the IITs are allotted by rank through a joint counseling process. A student with a better rank gets first choice among all branches at all campuses. Computer science fills with the best-ranked students first, so its closing rank is the lowest, and branches such as metallurgy and naval architecture close at weaker ranks. A rank that once secured a branch can fall short of it in a later year as applicant numbers grow.
Why did the IITs start as national institutes?
The first IIT was established at Kharagpur in 1951 in a former detention camp, and Parliament created the system with the Institutes of Technology Act in 1961. The early campuses were set up with help from countries including the Soviet Union, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Entry was through a joint exam that began in the early 1960s.
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