On 8th February we ate an early lunch and then got up on two buses to make a journey to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Madras, now called Chennai. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the educational institutions of India, IIT is the best institute in India to study engineering and technology. It has various campuses across India but IIT Madras is supposed to be the best in the country. So it was pretty exciting for us Indians to be able to go to the place that we have heard so much about.
The first thing that you would notice about IIT Madras would be that it’s huge. You would also notice immediately that deer and monkeys roam around freely there and are a part of the campus wildlife. After the ride from the main gate to the Taramani Guest House, we went for a tour of the campus. This tour was conducted by three students of the institute. They showed us the departments in the institute and the most important locations in campus. The campus was expands over such a large area that even after walking for around two hours we had still not seen all of the campus.
The second day we walked to what would be our classroom for the next two days. After a lecture by our professor Samrat Kumar on International Law and Human Rights, we had a guest lecture by Professor Sudarsan Padmanabhan on the concept of Swaraj. He tried to explain the concept as it was imagined by Gandhi and in addition to it, tried to link it to our contemporary times by presenting its potential as an ideal as well as a fully functioning tool in reality. Later on we had a movie screening of Paradise Now for which some students of IIT also joined us.
The next day we had two guest lectures after a lecture on Human Security. One was on the history of the saree. It discussed the saree along with discussing the formation of the idea of the modern Indian woman. The saree which was initially just a long piece of cloth went on to become a symbol during the nationalist movement and today contributes to the idea of the modern Indian woman. The lecture showed the various stages of development the saree went through and its diversity in all the regions of India. Consequently, it presented the importance of the saree in India not only as a form of clothing but also as the symbol of modernity that its current appearance has become.
The next lecture was a very brief overview of Indian economics. Professor Umakant Dash who is also the HOD of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT tried to give us a basic idea of the state of the Indian economy using theories of economics. He also discussed the problems that the Indian economy is facing and how they can be approached.
After lunch the buses took off to Pondicherry ending our trip to IIT Madras. The trip to IIT was enriching for us as it expanded our capacity to understand certain aspects of India and also exposed us to a top Indian institute and its workings. The beautiful campus was a welcome addition to the academic program there.
