No Wi-Fi, No Water, No Worries…

We recently were at IIT (India Institute of Technology) Roorkee in northern India for several days. This is the most prestigious engineering school in India, with branches in several different cities throughout the country, and is one of the best engineering institutions in the world. When you first enter through the gates of the IIT community, the difference from the rest of Roorkee is night and day. There is no trash on the streets, no beggars, no pigs, no street carts, no rickshaws. There are beautiful manicured and maintained gardens, vegetation, and palm trees. The campus is not only closed to the outside world, but it is a town within itself; containing shops, housing for faculty of all levels, all students, and pretty much anything else you might need as a student, professor, researcher or staff member of IIT.

However, to us there were several startling intrinsic discrepancies. Initially, Meagan and I were slightly distressed because the room we were assigned had ants scurrying along the floor everywhere, and thus had to instate a strict shoes ON policy while in our room. Next, when we went to the front desk to ask for another water bottle (as there was only one in the room, and we are definitely not allowed to drink anything except bottled water on this trip) we were told simply “No.” And, not wanting to wake up our professor, were forced to retire back to our rooms dreading the ensuing thirst that would hit us in the middle of the night. (Keep in mind we are public health students and drink a lot of water every day and also had been traveling by car on Indian roads getting car sick for the last 7 hours, so we really felt we needed a water bottle each!) Then, when we got back to the room and pulled out our laptops and realized there was no Wi-Fi, and were denied access to internet cables—we felt almost devastated.

We ended up going to dinner at the main cafeteria and were joined by almost 50 of IIT’s students at one point. I spoke with two students from Africa, one from Ethiopia focusing on mathematics and one from Zambia studying civil engineering. They told me how much they missed their food from home, how great it was to study at IIT academically, how difficult it is to understand some of the Indian teacher’s English, and how much they’d like to someday travel to Las Vegas, Nevada—among other things. Some of the other people in our group spoke with some of the girl students at IIT that night, and learned that there was a strict 10 p.m. curfew for the girls, absolutely no drinking allowed, no PDA’s (even hand holding) with their boyfriends in public, and that it wasn’t safe for them to leave the IIT compound after dark.

When Meagan and I returned to our room that evening we felt humbled from our conversations with the IIT students, and reflective on our whole experience in India thus far. As we laid down on our beds that were literally as hard as laying on a piece of plywood—one of us asked the other whether the kids we’d met in the Mewat villages earlier that week, would ever lay in a bed as comfortable as we were in right then. We realized that sharing our one water bottle that night might be more fresh water than many of those children might get for several days at a time, and that internet was a luxury that those children might never even experience once. Being in India has not only completely changed my world view, but it’s provided me with a perspective that I don’t think is possible to obtain without experiencing this incredible country first hand. The next morning, we were awoken by our doorbell and a Roorkee IIT staff member who was going door to door bringing delicious fresh chai to each room on the compound.

The pictures I’ve included are mostly of hydrologic models that we were shown during our tour of the Roorkee campus. I wish I could explain each one in detail, but that’s something I’d need to leave up to all the hydrology students in our group—who were in heaven getting to see these structures.