Life of a Girl at IIT Delhi

So, we are talking about IIT Delhi, one of the most prestigious engineering colleges in India, supposedly a home to the brightest and smartest minds of the country! When you read 'the brightest and smartest', I'm sure the image that flashed in your mind was that of a bunch of nerdish guys rattling their brains over some unsolvable problem. How many of you imagined a girl doing that? Very few indeed! Here I present experiences of Sanju Ahuja, a second year sole Mechanical Engineering girl at IIT Delhi:

'This is how a girl's life begins in IITD, being crammed in a classroom with boys about 10 times in number or more.

I am a Mechanical Engineering student at IIT Delhi and the lone girl in my batch; so basically, I am the extremity of poor sex ratios in IITs. Honestly, 70% of my time here, I never felt that was a bad thing. I made a couple of great friends, people I can count on. We have an awesome time during classes, labs and workshops. It's universally accepted that guys are less dramatic, more fun and yeah, a little easy going on studies! The rest 30% of the time comes when they all walk back together to their hostel and I don't. During exams, when I have to study alone, all my classmates study in one room. When I have to walk a mile to take notes or assignments, they walk to the next door. When I do all my homework alone without any discussion, help or the intermediate fun, they do all that stuff together. But I guess I have taken this in my stride. It has made me much more independent and reliable. This is a fact that I can't change so I have started enjoying it.

This was my classroom; hostel is an entirely different story. Living with people is very different from studying with them. You share a room, study tables, chairs, beds, tube lights, windows and every trivial thing. Someone likes the lights out early while someone is a night watchman. Someone likes the room cleaned every third day while someone doesn't mind the dirt for a month. And the bed placement can never be acceptable to all roommates together. That's where space gets created for argument. Arguments do happen, but then comes the understanding part, respecting the differences is what we all learn slowly.

Somehow, these become the girls you share your life stories with, the girls on whose shoulders you cry on, the ones you crack nerdy and dirty jokes with, the ones you take your frustration out on after a bad day, with whom you discuss your favorite guys with, from whom you take movies or TV shows. These are the people who will wake you up for class, eat with you, share stuff of daily use, shout on you and tease you. These are the people you have music and dance practices with, go out to play with, the ones you can sing horribly with. They get to see you at every point of the day, your best and your worst. And yeah, they don't judge you by how you look, how well you talk or dress up. They live through your stay here at IITD and so do you for them.

Going about the comparison with boys' hostels, one of the craziest parts I find here is that there is no culture of LAN gaming, poker or stuff like this. Instead, all birthday parties are lined up with dancing for hours. Some get wilder when we start beating the birthday girls and their roommates (just like in the boys' hostels)! What keeps us awake in odd hours is mostly movies and sometimes dress up parties. Girls confide a lot in each other, every little detail about friends, family, relationships is known to a set of close friends. I guess it's a well-known fact that we study a LOT more than boys here, but quite unexpectedly, we always flunk our last exam together just for the fun of it by having pizza parties, reading a novel or watching movies. All in all, there happens all the stuff that girls are negatively known for, noticing each other's clothes, footwear, make-up, some talk a lot, some are quite emotional. But as long as we know we're a lot more than just that, I believe there's no point in hiding who we really are. Not everyone fits in the above description, but whoever does has nothing to hide. We share a bond, a weird one, I haven't found out if it has a name, but it does complete all of us.

Writing this article, I actually began wondering, what difference does it make now? I have wandered on the line of thought a lot of times about how great it would have been to have just as many girls in my class as boys. But for what I have not experienced, I can't criticize the present. Summing up, I don't want to comment on the sex ratios of IITs, it is what it is. All of us here have found our place. Some fit in, some stand out. This place was our destiny and each of us is living it at his own pace.

-Sanju Ahuja
IIT Delhi