The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : `Silicon Valley', a film on life and times at IIT

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Saturday, Apr 29, 2006

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

`Silicon Valley', a film on life and times at IIT

Susan Muthalaly

It is showing at Sathyam Cinemas

CHENNAI: Meet the four typical IIT types: Fruity - Getting into the institute is just a stepping stone to an international career. Very focussed on going abroad.

Shocker - Living out his parents' ambitions. Never mind what he wants, society says, "Go to IIT".

Bulby - Lower middle class boy who harboured dreams of being a physicist, but gave into parental pressure for a more conventional career.

Pakkiyah - The critic. Intelligent but doesn't believe life should be weighed down by trivialities of exams.

Out of the 2 lakh students that try for the IITs every year, only about 3,000 are admitted, says Rabi Kisku, director of `Silicon Valley', a film on life and times at IIT made by the institute's film club. It is this statistic that motivated him and a group of fortunate students from IIT Madras to reveal some of the myths and legends of IIT in the full-length feature film.

Kisku graduated last year, and thanks to the movie, he says he does not have a job, house or phenomenal bank balance, unlike most of his other classmates. He started working on the script two years ago, finished shooting the film last May and was caught up in postproduction for the rest of the time.

"The most challenging part", notes one of his team of 20 "was getting sponsorship." Try telling a company that a group of IIT boys were making a movie. "I didn't know they did that," said one of the 32 companies they approached. To reassure the sponsors about their money, the boys decided to drop the original idea of a documentary and make it a feature film, not just for IITians, but for the public too.

Kisku says that Chetan Bhagat's `Five Point Someone' represented only 20 per cent of life at IIT. His film captures about 30-40 per cent, but the rest, especially the shades of grey, are hard to capture.

The support from the alumni was encouraging.

The film premiered on Friday evening, is showing at Sathyam Cinemas, on Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m.

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