What is reputation of IIT outside India...

It is huge, I believe.

Recently I visited a conference in Berlin and since conferences are a good place to connect with better labs around the world, I was utilizing this opportunity to talk to as many professors as I can.

There was one professor from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who came to me for a light chat.

Prof.: Hey, I saw your presentation. It was good. You have come a long way to attend the conference. You fabricated the chip and characterized it in India.?

Me: Thanks. It is not that far though, just six hours journey. Government has opened two new cleanrooms in India and so we are now able to do chip level optics in our own labs itself. Also, we have full-fledged optics lab so all the characterizations were also performed by us.

Prof.: That’s fantastic. I visited IIT Delhi few years back and people there were complaining about the government for the lack of fund. They were very eager to start experimental work in photonics but were stuck due to funding issues.

Me (didn’t know what to say now): That’s not true anymore. You can see it from my work (had to boast!).

Prof.: Yeah, I think that’s very good that your labs are developing. I have had two students from IIT and they were really brilliant. I have heard that it is really difficult to get in these institutes given the population and competition in India.

Me (I am not from IIT and I didn’t know what else to say): Yeah.

Prof.: But one thing I never understood. How are you people able to eat and digest such spicy food. I went out from the IIT campus once and ate something. God! It was most spicy thing I ever ate. I didn’t eat anything else outside the campus after that.

And then we started talking about few other stuff. Later he told that one guy was from IIT Madras, and I forgot from where the other one was.

Same conference, different Professor from IMEC, Belgium (they host one of the best fab in the entire world and the best in field of integrated optics).

He also had the same kind of story to share. I think he never had any IITian student in his own lab but maybe he had seen them working in some other labs. He had a pretty high standard set for IIT too.

I think it says enough about IIT brand outside our country.