Why IIT men suck

A few years ago, Outlook did a cover story on the IITs and Sandipan Deb wrote a beautiful piece (registration required) .Among other things it said

"What was my IIT education all about? It was about IITians: 400 academically exceptional boys (and 12 girls) on a campus, which, in the case of Kharagpur, where I went, was far enough from civilisation to have very interesting effects on our coming of age"

I remembered this when I stumbled upon this article on the TOI website today which has the following quote from a student at IIT Bombay

"There are 34 girls and over 500 boys in our year," .

Sandipan Deb graudated in 1985 . When I graduated from KGP in 2003, there were 29 girls and 500 odd boys in the batch. In 2005 the story is the same. There are some things which never change. Note how the number of girls in all the quotes is exact and boys' number has been rounded off. It tells something about the state of affairs, rather the lack of them, at the IITs.

This skewed gender ratio deprives many male IITians of the 'normal' interactions with the females of their age group and leaves many of them (including yours truly) wanting in one of the basic social skills of dealing with the fairer sex. The response of various males to this situation ranges from apathy/indifference to hostility to fawning towards the girls.

Sandipan puts down the gender interaction in IITs in a succinct manner

"The vast majority of males were totally deprived of female company. The girls lived a strange life-on the one hand, they were hounded by dozens of would-be suitors; on the other, they faced the petulant hostility of the majority which saw them as undeserving of so much adulation and so many free lunches.".

So if a female at one of these institutions says

"IIT men suck—they can be pretty desperate,"

the only response can be: Huh?