Ritu Anilkumar

“ I was three, and after being done with the whole preschool drama, was ready for big person school. So I was dropped off by my dad at the gate of the new school and told to go to the reception. However, my dad forgot, as dads often do, that it was a new school and that too, in a new state (we had recently shifted to Bangalore). I did not know the word reception because I was fucking 3. But with my little confidence by my side, I marched in and asked the first person I saw, where I could find this reception person. Due to a major language barrier, I tried all languages I thought I knew, but only left the other kid perplexed. Next thing I know, I’m being dragged by some random teacher into a classroom and interrogated about my name and other details. Sensing hostility, I made a run against it. But unfortunately, ended up caught and dragged back to the class to complete the day and the next and the one after that.

The first year at IIST was pretty liberating for me. After slugging away through years in a convent school, the “freedom” offered in the first year actually served as a breath of fresh air for me. I was enthusiastic about making the most of my college years with this newfound liberty, and along the way, I ended up meeting people who resembled my taste. If there’s one funny thing about our camaraderie that I can recall, it is that we were humans with copious amounts of patience — we once embarked upon a goofball venture of turning our hostel rooms into wineries! Quality grapes were bought from the city and diligently crushed, fermented, and preserved through the summer break or even in the midst of the semester. After waiting for four to five months, the drink qualified itself to be called a-kind-of-wine. So we capped our IIST journey by bottling around 2 liters of this self-made wine in multiple containers and time capsule-ing them at various spots throughout the campus, with tiny notes attached for the future explorers.

After all, it was a toast to the end of my classroom years — a journey that lasted for 18 long years involving multiple escape attempts since the first one by the little girl of three!”

— Ritu Anilkumar, Batch of 2013 Admissions.