Murthy’s own son, who wanted to do computer science at IIT, couldn’t get in. He went to Cornell, instead. Imagine a kid from India using an Ivy League university as a safety school. That's how smart these guys are. “I do know cases where students who couldn't get into computer science at IITs, they have gotten scholarship at MIT, at Princeton, at Caltech,” says Murthy.
“When I finished IIT Delhi and went to Carnegie Mellon for my master's, I thought I was cruising all the way through Carnegie Mellon
because it was so easy, relative to the education I had gotten at IIT Delhi,” says Khosla.
Students act like entrepreneurs the whole time they're at IIT. They run everything in the dorms, which might be mistaken for cell blocks if not for all the Pentium 4 PCs. They organize the sports themselves. They even hire the chefs and pick the food in the mess halls. And unlike so many other institutions in India, they all know they're here because they deserve to be here. “There is no corruption. It's a pure meritocracy,” says Murthy.
