Kota and its Indoor Adventures! :)

India's highest producer of IITans, a place in the state of Rajasthan called Kota. A place where students from different parts of the country come with a single aim, to crack one of  the country's toughest exam, the IIT-JEE(breaks my heart to learn that it no more).  Every year anxious parents bring their young kids to this city to ensure that their son/daughter has a good future. The kids come, some voluntarily and some with fear. Fear, because he is a  kid who has just passed his tenth class, being sent to a hostel with a pretext that he has to learn to live on his own! he is afraid but he cannot say no to his parents but neither does he want to go away from home!

I was also one of the many kids. I wasn't afraid for I knew this day had to come sooner or later. My parents had actually wanted to put me in a hostel in my ninth class!  somehow I managed to put it off till I finished tenth and now the time had arrived. Unlike the other cities I had been to, this city was comparatively small, with its entrance being through a bridge . At the first look it seems to be Fort  protected in the front by the river Chambal, looking at it one would immediately fall in love with the city.

Once entering Kota one may find it to be very peculiar, everything in the city is about education! All the different places in the city like the railway station, the bus station and the tempo stand's one would fine teeming with agents from the different educational institutions like Bansal, Resonance, Allen among many, each trying to woo the student to join their institute. In fact the entire real estate in the city is based on building hostels, effectively every house in the city is a hostel with a portion of the house rented to students preparing for JEE! Through my hostel I could see the Aravali ranges at a distance!

I joined the Narayna IIT Academy forsaking a seat at Resonace for the lone reason that the former had its own hostel. Years later I have learned of it to be a bad decision, because in a hostel it is very easy to make friends. Had i not joined a hostel, perhaps i would have had less friends and the situation would have been very different. By now it must be very clear that two years thence I was among the large group of students who didn't clear the IIT-JEE and believe me life is still very fun! :)

So, what is it in that city that makes students like me go wrong? a lot of things. For one surrounding each academy is a plethora of gaming centers. A student at Kota may not be good in studies but he's certainly good at counter strike! students would bunk their classes and spend hours playing games. For hostelers who had classes in the same building like i did bunking classes was an arduous affair. One had to jump the boundary wall when no one's looking, coming back in was even more difficult, the only easy entry point would be through the gate as no wants to be caught while coming back, if one gets caught while coming back the punishment was more severe than when going out as you had already bunked your classes, so no one took any chances! so far as I remember no one ever got caught. 


During that time it was normal for cities like Kota not to have a multiplex, but this place was an exception. It had a multiplex, Om ciniplex which was a year later bought by Inox. This place was among the most famous outing for the students for it was nicely situated.There was also this one very famous playstation gaming center near Talwandi circle( the hub center of Kota). They had a huge collection of movies which one could choose and they would play it on a big flat screen TV, they had around 30 TV sets for this sole purpose!. For the people they charged sixty bucks per movie and it used to be a very good way to kill time.

Almost every student in Kota sleeps during the day and works during the night, maybe it comes with the responsibility of being alone. Some studied during the night( the IITns) others had fun. The fun consisted of playing cards, watching movies (dont ask which ones!), somehow we would manage getting a small palm sized TV inside the hostel and watch the movies on them. I for one had become a champion at playing cards, though i have lost touch now. Early in the morning we would jump out the boundary wall to go  have some hot delicious Poha and Gilebi at the Talwandi circle. If ther's something that I still miss from Kota, it has to be the early morning Poha and Gilebi.

                                                                 The delicious Poha


Often we would have breakfast in the morning and then go off to sleep and believe me, this phenomena had no gender bias! Occasionally our director would come on rounds to check for the well being of the students and to his horror find all of them sleeping! while he is on his rounds there would be a  race inside the rooms among students (two per room) to get to the bathroom, one who came second would have to open the door and bear the brunt! The asshole room partner of mine would always get to it first( his bed being closer to the bathroom) and i would have to open the door and face my director's pathetic mixture of Hindi and English! The director once complained to my father "Sir, they eat like pigs and sleep like Buffalo's", my father jokes about it till date! 

The assumption that going to Kota will bring a seat at IIT is not true, out of the 1.5 lakh students who go there only a thousand make it to the elite institute, the rest like me are there only to increase the revenue of the academic institutions. Studying there is very costly and the students are just a market for the institutes whose revenue per year is in the range of 600cr! 

Though on the outset the life at cota seems very interesting its biggest shortcoming is that in that city no student ever goes to school. My school was in the adjacent District of Jhalawar some eighty km away and I had been to it  just 4 times in my two year stay there! Students lose out on a lot of the extra curricular activities of school and it hurts them a lot in the future. though there is surely a lot to learn from the life there, this learning comes with loosing two most precious years of ones life! I for one would suggest only the hard-core IIT dreamers to go there, the rest better stay home with their parents!!