Reflections on MetaKGP, MetaIITGN and the future of IIT Gandhinagar.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.
IIT Gandhinagar is a place of unexpressed liminality. An old institution in its infancy, bricks and mortar given a destiny before they were masoned together. It is, by no exaggeration, a special place, a place of juxtapositions, golden waiting to become gold.
And of course, she buckles under the weight of expectation. It is unnatural not to, at her age – her walls tremble from the weight of stray paint these days, her councils are brought down by substance, her students know not when they can claim the name of the institution they believed they would come into.
It is visible in the pretty ivy that we seeded and yet pretend comes from neglect, in the whitewashed architecture that pretends to be postmodern but shies away into brutalism, in the gates that we build and yet refuse to open. An institute built from the same smoke and fire that it demonizes today.
IIT Gandhinagar is younger than those who inhabit it, and until the turn of this decade, her constitution, her principles were half as old as those who inherited them. Principles writ by the same people who lived them. Power pooled into the hands of the minority is the antithesis, the death, of democracy. A plutarchy that replaces wealth with unfounded experience is hardly different from a failing oligarchy – and it is dangerous for them to decide which side of the grass is greener, for it means that we are led by the blind into the dark.
\(MetaIITGandhinagar\) (short: \(Meta\), pronounced “My Gee-En”, if you care for that) is about taking back what is ours – the means to bring change. Vikrant Verma, the founder of \(MetaKGP\), which inspired in us the idea for this platform, and to which we pay homage to through our name, laid emphasis on the predilection of smart students for avoiding drudgery. That’s especially true, with the entire student community the size of individual programmes at IIT Kharagpur. That is also why we have historically relied on administrative machinery to get work done – a crutch that has predictably come to haunt us today. It is high time we take a pause, a deep breath, and reevaluate, reassess, and see why and how we can become self-dependent, as a student body.
It starts with three pillars – communication, information, and power.
Communication means that we have a way to disseminate information that isn’t controlled and monitored by the administration, that reaches across the student population. Emails that are sent across to the student body need to be moderated, of course – society descends into savagery otherwise, or becomes one big Instagram crowd. Both are undesirable. Moderation is necessary, but moderation must come from the students themselves, not from a disconnected entity in an office on a power-trip. That is why chat.metaiitgn.org exists – with both students and professors on the same distributed chat server, moderated by both, it is a way to maintain balance.
Information means that history is recorded. That problems in the past do not become ghosts of the problems in the present. That students do not become dissuaded by false reason and needless misinformation, spread by bad actors. wiki.metaiitgn.org aims to become a community-driven wellspring of information for everyone in the community – so people take decisions, and communicate, with the right priors.
The problem of Power is harder, and is solved through time. And for that, we invite you to \(Meta\), if you want to become part of the solution. A number of important people were involved in the construction of this idea, and we hope that it becomes the foundation of something that IIT Gandhinagar wanted to be, in its infancy. In admittedly dramatic terms, it is the battle for the soul of this institution. In less dramatic terms, it is a way for you to have a legacy. To leave something behind. To become part of a society of engineers and scientists who saw the gaping leak in our roof, and decided to fix it, because that is what we do.
God knows it has rained for long enough.