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Comment by rushabh | Hacker News Reader

IITs are highly overhyped, mass education institutes. No wonder there is very little innovation coming out of IITs, compared to Stanford and MIT, given the high quality of students.

I recently attended the Ubuntu launch event at the Mumbai's IIT and Dr Phatak, who now heads India's cheap tablet project did a talk. To my surprise, there was not even one question from the audience of bright IIT students.

They also have poorly executed projects like "Spoken Tutorials" http://spoken-tutorial.org/ that were presented and it was all very depressing.

I would not expect good quality startups from IITs.

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IIT's admit students, who level down forests for papers to practice for entrance exams. Students who burn midnight oil, feverishly solving every math problem from from 5000 page text book. Students who go to coaching classes from 8th standard(8th grade), who chew half of their pencils and loose half of their hair pulling them out solving physics problems.

I didn't even give IIT JEE, just CET. And at end of the year I had something like several 10s of kgs of paper on which I had practiced math, physics and chemistry. I was forced to beat the exams into my submission.

Those kids go into IIT's to get good jobs, so that they end up like their parents doing small time jobs. To buy homes, cars, to 'become something in life'.

I dont logically see how your comment is either agreeing or disagreeing with the parent comment. Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

Folks can solve all the math problems they want.It has nothing to do with creating a good product and selling it.

IIT'ians or any Indian who generally runs through the grind of going through entrance exams is trained by default to work for long hours under pressure. The competition is generally intense and trains people for a lot of such challenges in the future. And I say this with personal experience. The amount of work I did then as a student helps me till date work under demanding conditions taking pressure for long periods.

And trust me such students make it big. Just because they work for start ups, it doesn't mean they don't make it big.

>>Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

I don't see what is wrong with it. Do you have a problem?

Having worked on a few startups now, I can assure you hard work != the key to success in startups.

It's a process of experimentation, constant observation, accumulating knowledge and forging ahead on your own with very little external encouragement.

If you told me IIT kids spent countless hours experimenting and tinkering with their own projects, then it'd be a different story.

But the test prep process for IIT JEE/AIEEE is a very pre-defined route, that EVERYONE is doing, with lots of encouragement from parents and a soul-killing process of cramming - for the singular goal of passing tests set up by a very bureaucratic establishment.

It sounds like the opposite of the preparation needed for risk aversion and creative endeavors.

Totally agree.Furthermore kids that age (17-18) are not supposed to be solving 5000 math problems for some stupid entrance exam.

Personally I flunked IIT Mains because with my ADHD I could not get myself to study more than a few hours every week.Also at the ripe age of 17-18 I did not have enough drive or ambition to stop doing the things kids love to do (chasing girls, watching movies, loafing around etc etc.) But then I am actually proud that I did not give in to the IIT bullshit and did whatever I wanted to do. You will never get that age back no matter how successful you are!

I never appeared for the JEE :)

But what I wanted to say was, traditionally Indian entrance exams have always been soul crushing. Take IAS or CA for example. You practically have to give your whole youth/teenage to make it happen.

Indian civil services are known to be one of the most grinding and testing exams in the world.

>>Seems like you went on your own sweet tangent.

Okay that might have sounded a little mean.Sorry having a pretty tiresome day :)

Maybe this is because "Ubuntu launch event" attendees can have all their questions answered with project wikis? I can't imagine what pressing questions google and wikipedia can't solve about the latest ubuntu.

Also, a Godel prize was won in this decade at IITK (for AKS) and (not sure about this) Niraj Kayal (the K in AKS) began working on this during his undergrad years.

I didn't graduate from an IIT (different continent) but my friends from there executed very well in their internships, theses, grad school applications, papers etc. Talent is not geographically bound and to a certain extent JEE performance correlates with good reasoning and math skills (universally transferable in engineering at least).

The talk was on the Aakash tablet, India's very ambitious and highly controversial and potentially disastrous low cost tablet project [1]. Dr Phatak is one of the top adivsors to the Indian government on e governance and the recently appointed head of the project. I can't believe there were no questions for that talk.

Confession: I did not ask one either, as I was not as well aware of the latest developments. I questioned the next presenter though who talked about the Spoken Tutorial. And it was the only question asked.

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/167/aakash-tablet-india-...

I am really not sure what can be asked whose answer won't be a rehash of the gov's PR. I can't expect why the average person in India would scream "Scandal!" at the project's failure - the government doesn't have a fantastic track record and doesn't have the resources to attract the kind of people that can make such stuff (i.e. the Aakash Tablet) happen. The average Indian isn't so concerned about their government screwing up because that is the norm.

Anyway that was offtopic. The IITs have a very high average IQ that manifests itself well in the form of publications and the accomplishments of the alumni/students/faculty - they are definitely not "education factories" and an engineering degree from there is very respected. Pitting them against institutions with endowments in excess of 8bn is unfair.

Sure they do, that is why there is not a single nobel prize won by an IITian when ten Indians have a nobel prize.

I assume a lot of IIT's top faculty and brightest kids major in engineering. That puts their nobel count at a disadvantage.

I agree with you. IITians are not good at fundamental science for which nobel is awarded, otherwise they would have gotten it by now.

Maybe, but I noticed the same thing in my experience working with a couple of Indian development teams.

There's a cultural divide in the US between large companies and startups; startup people tend to be more inquisitive, more self-directed, and more willing to challenge authority. The Indian teams I worked with struck me as being like a US large company team, but even more so. Nobody would ask questions or challenge assumptions, especially in group contexts.

I don't know why that was, but with US large-company teams it's because they're reluctant to risk looking dumb in front of people with power. Or worse, to make the people with power look dumb. They are more likely to value obedience over being correct or having a successful project. Basically, they are very focused on keeping their jobs.

Its the same everywhere. In large corporates only 'Cover your ass' strategies work, US or otherwise. And none one wants to annoy their boss, so whatever he says is right.

Besides when you do well no one appreciates, but when you do something wrong every one comes after you.

This is a problem with large teams in general and has nothing to with Indians or Americans in general.

Rushabh,

I did meet Prof. Phatak, asked him many questions and he answered my questions as well.

Please have a look at project E-Yantra as well. http://www.e-yantra.org/ and http://portal.e-yantra.org/

It is a good project.

I was not commenting on the ability of Dr (or is it Prof?) Phatak to answer, but the ability of students to ask questions. E-Yantra seems like a good project. Good luck.

I was a student and I asked questions. That was the point I was driving.

The only reason I took my questions offline was because they were pretty hard ones and I dint want to be painted as a troll.

You should not be judging them with very little exposure to them. There is a lot of innovation at IIT's which you just haven't come across. Stanford, MIT have a lots of funds at their disposal and they can innovate maybe much faster. Thats the only difference.

Some projects might not be that great as some startups aren't that great. Again, you should not be judging looking at a single project.

And IITians love to find the answer to their questions themselves :)

Another more fatalistic way of looking at it is that if IIT is the top of the game in the area, then even if their startup projects suck, that is the best that could be done in the area, and may be good enough to sell to the public. Now you could argue that this is not the case, because someone from S.F. in the U.S. could have a SAAS app that Indians use instead, but will that app be in Hindi? I think there is opportunity and applaud the OP's efforts.

Somehow I can't bring myself to have sympathy for a community that is heavily funded by the tax payers of a relatively poor country like India to further its own progress, and use the opportunity as a ticket to a migrate to rich countries for their own personal gain. That is the real reason why there is so little innovation at IIT.

I know people will cite remittances, but those are pittance compared to getting your hands dirty and building assets for your own society.

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