I am not very impressed by these stories any more. While trying to give something back to educational institutions that nurture us is a good thing, there should be some balance. The taxpayer funds the IITs to an enormous extent, and the IIT's haven't really given enough back. For instance, they haven't gone out of their way (like Victor has) to impart technical education and training to professors and lecturers from local Universities, encouraged students to intermingle. Why,they don't even generally throw open their libraries and journal material to local university students. They don't organize seminars that encourage students who don't have access to their resources -that THEY pay for. Victor's individual gesture is alright, but would have been a lot more meaningful to people who are not benefitted by the IITs if it had gone towards, say, building a quality engineering library in some other city in Maharashtra that doesn't have Mumbai's level of access to technical material, or even in encouraging the IIT's to spread it around a little more instead of boasting about what they contribute to the Silicon valley and the 'global economy'.
