(This post was originally written after season 1 of the Netflix series Alma Matters dropped in May of 2021. The author is an alum of the subject of the first three episodes — IIT Kharagpur)
When I heard a Netflix show about my college was out, the first reaction was bafflement. Somebody made a whole show — for Netflix, no less — out of the montage of nothing that was our life back then?
I got talking to a friend who knew a thing or two about media, and a lot more besides media.
I asked:
“You mean one can construct a Netflix story about a man child barely out of snot and pimples who spent four years lying on a metal bed, staring at the ceiling, playing Counter-Strike, chatting on Yahoo! with handles of the nature of “FloydianBeast1981”, and clearing 208 credits in a haze and stupor not borne of intoxicants, but of a complete, nihilistic rejection of adulthood?”
“Yes”, he said.
I mean there were moments when the cicadas came out of the ground and frolicked for a few weeks, such as during the placement season. There was also college election time, which exhumed even the most dead cicada. But mostly it was one giant mothball of ennui. How does one create an arc out of this humdrum?
“You have it all wrong”, the friend said.
Then he invoked the ghost of John Maynard Keynes.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any Freudian influence of a repressed past, are usually the slaves of a chance happenstance in freshman year. Equanimous men of 40, who believe they are the paragon of rationality, are distilling their theory of the self from a persona played for the galleries during the college years.”
This gem (or gibberish, depending on your point of view) was delivered in a paroxysm of pointy-finger-on-the-chest anger.
“You mean…”
I dithered, trying to be sure I got his drift,
“Trump thought he was shilling an entirely DIY, muscular, not at all egg-headed idea of America first, but he was actually channelling the Hamiltonian idea of American self-sufficiency and protectionism?”
“Yes”, he said, stubbing out his cigarette. He, of eternal youth, was allowed a smoke at 40. I wasn’t.
“And, me — a plodder, one given to unsightly, routine industry, and supplication to mediocrity for the higher purpose of a paycheque, thinks he is an artful wastrel because that’s the role I was playing in college?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“But I have never, except for one occasion, volunteered where I went to college. That one time was at my son’s school admission interview. And, as we both know, I graduated 18 years ago.”
He lit up another cigarette. Not a crease on his forehead, no early signs of jowl, no crow’s feet around eyes that shone with the wholesome radiance of youth that somehow knew, and age that still could.
He said,
“Can you deny — hand on your heart — that you look at the world passing by and wonder why all those wonderful things that were supposed to happen did not happen? Sometimes the saner voice in your does remind you that in the noodly soup of chance occurrences that is life, the narrative arc cannot turn on the single event of an undergrad college admission.”
Time to fess up.
“Yes, that is true.”
“So much of the last two decades, the job switches, the city moves, the side hustles, the war of attrition against the world, was to justify the lonely years in your late teens, that period of immersive asceticism aimed at nothing but a seat at the hallowed IITs. You feel the universe owes you. For those years.”
“That too is true.”
He was now midway through his second cigarette in 10 minutes.
“And, when an acquaintance who used to live three doors away makes a ’40 under 40’ list, the explanation that is easiest to sell to yourself is that you are not the grinder, you are the flaneur; you are not the wizened old cynic on the swivel chair, you are the savant at the corner, quietly working your magic; your life is not the monomania of growth for growth’s sake, but is a complex, mosaicked, filigreed human aesthetic. You were the kid in college who did not chase grades. Your room had old issues of Rolling Stone magazine, each came after weeks of saving up and scored individually, like a bounty hunter would, from Free School Street, Calcutta.”
I own up.
“Yes.”
“Except that is not true. You are a plodder. It is just the persona you played in college. The baseline narrative of your life is the narrative of the elite university graduate, and your own personal narrative is that of the role you played in college, and works as an overlay on the baseline.”
He paused.
“And, that — my friend — is the entirety of your life.”
“Yes”, I owned up fully, without qualifiers.
Then, as Douglas Noel Adams would say, he vanished in a puff of pure self-awareness.
Like Hobbes or Tyler Durden, the friend becomes real when I am hit by something that dredges up the buried, basic axioms of my life. That happened last month when I binged through the new Netflix docuseries on IIT Kharagpur.
The Indian Institute of Technology (or IIT; Kharagpur is one among the original six) is the country’s equivalent of the Ivy League. One must add the qualifier that — befitting a nation that is still far from middle income status — the university is about the utilitarian goal of churning out high-income white-collar professionals, and not future heads of state or doyens of philosophy.
The show touches on the themes germane to the subject. There is the burden of expectations, the camaraderie, the misogyny, the horrors of placement season, and suicide. But there are no forced polemics. There is no neat denouement. Mercifully, there is no shrill background score that squeezes drama out of the rock of what is essentially a vanilla bildungsroman. To paraphrase what Roger Ebert had said about M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs”, the plot is not the lead guitar here or the vocals, it is the bass and the snare drum.
In the first hour, the camera fixates for a few delicious seconds on a graffiti of Jimi Hendrix. In the final episode, we see the boys in their senior year pet strays that live with them. To the occidental gaze, everything in that sequence will register as third-world dishevelment. There are clothes drying on lines. The wall paint is flaky. The doors are painted a ghastly green. And of course, there are strays everywhere. You see, an Indian Ivy League is not like Yale. The ambassador of Luxembourg does not swing by on a Thursday. The staff does not treat you like a future president. There are no regal, Gothic stone facades. There are strays roaming the dorm. Professors think you are dirt. Five students kill themselves every year. Amidst this disorder, you must still fashion a world beating career. Because…hey, the guy who lived in your room 20 years ago now runs Google. And yes, there is escape. There is a realm in your head and in cyberspace where you live like an enlightened, mongrel citizen of global nerd culture. You might have an online girlfriend in Montana who loves anime. You might be an amateur scholar of Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Charlie Kaufman, or Krautrock.
The Netflix show is billed as a first season. One hopes the team’s ambitions go beyond the IITs. Across theatres in technology, business, media, and politics, the sets of interlocutors squaring off are as much about the alumni of different elite institutes as they are about interest and ethnic groups. Much of the tech monopoly debate in the US is just Harvard/Yale versus Stanford. Benedict Anderson called nations imagined communities. Elite institutions form imagined tribes, perhaps even imagined clans of fourth and fifth cousins. So strong is the grip of the alma mater’s storyline on its alumni, and so strong is the grip of such alumni networks on the most consequential centres of power, that there needs to be a treatise on the subject. We don’t go into the world alone. Like there is an Irish heart, there is a Yale heart. If Alma Matters can capture the essence of these ballads told and retold by every minstrel wandering through the halls, each inheriting the grand saga at age 18 and spending the rest of their lives being circumscribed by a tired tale of conquest, it would have made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the world.
