Institute of Technical Education and Research is an engineering college based in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa. It is one of those colleges, which in popular communist theoretical discourse in Orissa, known to be ‘elitist’. Students pay from around Rs.1,10,000 to Rs.1,65,000 as their per annum tuition fees. Of course they are from an ‘elite background’. In a recent interaction with students they come up and say: “We want a job for a good living though we are not interested in technology. The most fertile labour-market welcomes B.Tech pass outs. We can pursue our interests after we are stable.” This, of course, is ‘consumerism’. One student says, “My father works in a bank and I have taken loans so that I can complete my B.Tech and take a job. I love literature but that, I can keep, as a hobby to be pursued later.” ‘Petty bourgeois tendency’ of course.
What would Marx say! Maybe this:
“The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.”[1]
And this he would, probably, say to the students and maybe 'staff.'
Notes:
1. Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Pp. 112, Progress Publishers, Moscow
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