On identity, legitimacy, and the quiet rebellion against India’s cult of credentials.

I have a confession to make.

Before I was a student at IIT Madras, I hated it.

For years, the letters “I-I-T” were a trigger, a symbol of a world I wasn’t welcome in: a club with gates so high I couldn’t even pretend to scale them. It left a bitter taste in my mouth.

This wasn’t an abstract dislike; it was a deeply personal one, forged in the crucible of teenage grief and necessity.

My story isn’t the one you’ve seen in coaching center posters. I first learned to code in 2012, not to crack an exam, but out of raw curiosity, the kind that comes from discovery, not strategy.

That curiosity became a lifeline in 2016. I was 15 when my father passed away, and the predictable path my life was supposed to follow – school, college, career – shattered overnight. While my peers were losing themselves in the labyrinth of H.C. Verma and I.E. Irodov, I was juggling freelance coding projects, trying to help my family stay afloat.

From 2017 to 2020, irony became my daily companion.

I was a software developer at an EdTech company. A company that coached thousands of teenagers for the JEE.

I was, in a sense, a builder of the very dream I had failed to attain. I gave the exam a shot, of course. It felt like a rite of passage.

But my mind, occupied with work, grief, and the weight of adult responsibility, wasn’t wired for that brutal, all-or-nothing, three-hour performance. I failed, and I failed decisively.

The sting of that rejection was real.

It came not from failure itself, but from the quiet pity in relatives’ eyes and the invisible social judgment that comes from missing the one exam our society worships.

To cope, I built a fortress of cynicism. “The IITs are just factories for rote learners,” I’d tell anyone who’d listen. “They don’t value real-world skills.” It was a textbook case of sour grapes: a defense mechanism against a system that had deemed me unworthy.

Life moved on.

And then, I found a different door: the IIT Madras BS Degree in Data Science and Applications. It wasn’t a consolation prize. It was a pragmatic, modern reinvention of higher education. It was a way for people like me to rejoin the conversation.

I enrolled. I was proud.

And then, through Reddit threads, Discord servers, and WhatsApp groups, I learned that to a vocal group of on-campus students, I wasn’t a fellow IITian.

I was an imposter, a “brand diluter.”

This is my story, but it’s bigger than me. It’s about a deep cultural sickness, a phenomenon I call “JEE-ification.” And it’s one that’s beginning to have global consequences.

From “Cracking JEE” To Tarnishing “Made in India”

“JEE-ification” is more than an obsession with one exam. It’s a way of life: the belief that learning is a zero-sum conquest of filters, not a lifelong journey of discovery.

The goal isn’t knowledge; it’s rank. The reward isn’t mastery; it’s entry into an exclusive club. The entire prestige of that club derives not from what’s inside, but from how many people are kept out.

It’s worth acknowledging that the JEE once had real intellectual legitimacy. It was designed as a filter for rigor, to identify those who could reason abstractly under pressure, not to manufacture exclusion.

But over time, that rigor decayed into a fetish for gatekeeping. The metric replaced the mission.

And that mindset has metastasized.

You see it in the explosion of “bhaiya/didi” coding channels on YouTube. They don’t teach the beauty of algorithms or the architecture of systems; they teach “roadmaps.” They sell “crash courses” to “crack FAANG in six months.”

I watch these ‘roadmap’ videos with a sense of mourning.

They are selling a cheap forgery of the very thing that saved me: the joy of discovery. They’ve turned a boundless landscape of intellectual play into a grim, linear treadmill.

It feels like watching someone reduce a grand symphony to a list of notes to memorize for a test.

It’s a vocabulary of shortcuts.

The tragedy of the ‘roadmap coder’ isn’t that they’re “lazy”. It’s that they’ve been trained to see code as a ladder rather than a language.

They don’t ask, “what can I build?” but “what will this get me?”

The most visible symptoms of this culture were the Express.js and Hacktoberfest incidents.

During Hacktoberfest, a global event to encourage open-source contribution, a popular Indian YouTube channel, CodeWithHarry, in a now edited video, urged his followers to participate with the tagline “t-shirt loot lo” (Go loot the t-shirt).

The result was predictable: maintainers of projects worldwide were inundated with low-effort, spammy pull requests.

Shortly after, a similar channel unleashed thousands of followers on Express.js, one of the world’s most critical software projects.

The goal was again credit, not contribution, leading to a flood of pull requests editing README files just to add a name.

These students weren’t malicious; they were doing exactly what they’d been trained to do: optimize for a visible credential, be it a limited-edition t-shirt or a green square on their GitHub profile.

But the consequence was global embarrassment. It reinforced the stereotype of the “Indian developer” as someone who games systems rather than contributes meaningfully. The tragedy is that this reputation harms the countless Indian engineers who do build, innovate, and sustain open-source ecosystems with integrity.

This is the endgame of JEE-ification: a culture that values the badge over the building, and in the process, tarnishes both.

And when your sense of identity has been forged entirely in that fire, when your self-worth comes from having survived that one gate, any attempt to open new doors feels like an existential threat. It feels like a rug-pull.

The Purpose Of A JEE Is Who It Selects

In systems thinking, there’s a powerful principle known as POSIWID: The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.

It’s a simple but profound idea. You don’t judge a system by its stated goals or the intentions of its designers; you judge it by its actual, observable outcomes.

If we apply this lens to the Joint Entrance Examination, the conclusion is unsettling.

The stated purpose of the JEE is to identify the most promising scientific and engineering minds in the nation. But what does it actually do? Who does it consistently, year after year, select?

It selects for incredible resilience, pattern recognition, and the ability to perform under crushing, single-event pressure. These are not trivial skills. But it also overwhelmingly selects for a specific type of mind and, often, a specific life circumstance.

It selects for solvers of well-defined problems, not finders of ambiguous ones. It rewards optimizers of a known system, not builders of new ones. It filters for those who can afford the luxury of a multi-year, single-minded focus on exam preparation, a luxury my own life story shows is not available to everyone.

And by extension, who does it select against?

It selects against the curious tinkerer who spent their teens building open-source projects instead of memorizing reaction mechanisms. It selects against the early-career professional who discovered a passion for technology only after a family crisis forced them into the workforce. It selects against the brilliant student from a remote town who lacked access to the multi-lakh-rupee Kota ecosystem.

The JEE doesn’t just test for aptitude; it tests for a very specific, privileged, and linear life path.

When we deify the exam, we are implicitly devaluing all other paths to knowledge and competence. This isn’t a selection for broad excellence; it’s a selection for a narrow kind of conformity.

And that is the very engine of JEE-ification. It creates a cohort whose identity is forged by this one shared, exclusionary trial. When your entire sense of achievement is based on having survived that filter, anyone who arrives through a different door doesn’t just feel like a peer; they feel like a bug in the system.

In a developing nation where scarcity and signaling dominate opportunity, the exam became not just a filter for competence, but a proxy for self-worth and employability.

I have to acknowledge the irony in all this.

I’ve spent paragraphs critiquing credentialism, while pursuing one of the most recognizable credentials in India.

It’s fair to call that hypocrisy. But it’s also reality.

Because even when you see the gate for what it is, you still feel compelled to walk through it. The world keeps too many keys on the other side.

When I joined the IIT Madras BS program, it wasn’t just for curiosity or intellectual revival.

Part of me wanted legitimacy: to reclaim something I’d been denied.

To prove, if only to myself, that I could belong to the club whose doors once stayed shut.

That’s how deep the conditioning runs.

We don’t just internalize the exam; we internalize the need for permission. Even when we try to unlearn the system, its incentives shape our choices.

You can critique the hierarchy and still crave its approval.

Maybe that’s what growing up in a credential-obsessed culture does to you. Awareness doesn’t grant immunity; it only makes the infection visible.

But perhaps naming the hypocrisy is the first honest step toward escaping it.

Life As A “Brand Diluter”

If people think we’re on “easy mode,” they’re living in a fantasy. The IIT Madras BS degree is not a backdoor.

First, our program has its own brutal meritocracy.

It’s not a one-shot exam, but a continuous, multi-year test of endurance.

I’ve been a professional software engineer for almost a decade, and the foundational Maths 2 course still took me nearly a year (three terms) to clear.

The attrition rate is enormous. Many bright students never make it past the foundation level.

If this is “brand dilution,” it’s the most demanding kind imaginable.

Second, we don’t consume campus resources.

We exist in parallel: separate instructors, separate TAs, separate infrastructure.

Our placement cell operates independently from the on-campus placement ecosystem.

We are not your competition. The conflict exists more in memes and myths than in reality.

Third, our community is our strength.

Our WhatsApp groups are alive at 3 AM with students helping one another: a professional in Bangalore tutoring a teenager in Bihar on statistics.

It’s a microcosm of what democratized higher education can look like. We also know the system isn’t perfect.

But we persist. Because the idea is worth the friction.

The Psychology of Exclusivity

Sociologists would call it status scarcity: when prestige is finite, identity becomes a zero-sum game.

If the IIT brand once meant “I passed an impossible test,” then any alternative path, no matter how rigorous, threatens to dilute the currency of that identity.

The fear is existential, not rational. When the club grows, members mistake expansion for erosion.

But the truth is simpler: excellence is not a finite resource. Widening access doesn’t cheapen quality; it amplifies impact.

The brand of an IIT should come from what it builds, not who it excludes.

An IIT Is For Nation Building

If we’re not a threat, and our program is just as rigorous, why does the “brand dilution” myth persist?

Because somewhere along the way, we forgot what IITs were founded for.

Let’s revisit the source. The mission of IIT Madras commits to (emphasis mine):

• the advancement of knowledge through education and research, in both Pure and Applied Science, in Engineering, Social Science and Humanities;
• service to the community and nation (which are referred to as Extension activity) through the use of their resources both intellectual and material, particularly through Continuing Education for professionals working in Industry.

That’s not fine print. It’s the institution’s DNA. The BS degree is not an afterthought or a side hustle. It’s the 21st-century expression of that mission.

The IIT system itself was born as a postcolonial project of nation-building modeled on MIT and Soviet technical universities, meant to empower a newly independent India with technological self-sufficiency.

Its purpose was not elitism; it was capacity-building. To educate not the few, but the capable. The BS program extends that legacy into the digital era.

And leaders outside the campus bubble already recognize this. Senior IIT alumni, multinational executives, and civil servants I’ve spoken with don’t see “brand dilution.”

They see strategic national value: a model that discovers hidden talent in small towns, mid-career professionals, and working mothers whom the JEE system overlooks by design.

A Message To The Gatekeepers

To the skeptical on-campus student reading this: I understand you. I used to think like you.

My early cynicism toward IIT was born of exclusion; your defensiveness is born of exclusivity. They are mirror images of the same fear: fear that value must always be protected rather than created.

And here’s the uncomfortable symmetry: your fixation on preserving the “IIT tag” is not so different from the “roadmap coder” obsessed with a FAANG job.

Both see learning as a means to a credential, not a craft. Both conflate gates with greatness.

In fact, this obsession with the entry gate over the actual discipline is so pervasive that many on-campus students in core engineering fields spend their four years preparing for software roles, effectively devaluing their own “brand” and degree in pursuit of the same CS-centric credentialism.

The system has taught you that the entry point matters more than the field of study. This isn’t a failure of students; it’s a failure of the culture that “JEE-ification” has built.

My success does not diminish yours. But your gatekeeping diminishes what the IITs can become.

If we could bridge the gap. If on-campus students and BS learners collaborated on research, startups, and open-source projects, IIT Madras could become not just a symbol of excellence, but a prototype for scalable, inclusive education worldwide. A model where rigor meets reach.

Because the strength of the IIT brand in this century will not be measured by the height of its walls, but by the length of its reach.