My American provincialism used to assume that "IIT" was Illinois Institute of Technology...mostly famous for its Mies Van Der Rohe campus, I suppose. Then a few years ago something on HN referenced the famous IIT, and I came to understand my neighbor.<p>His father a professor and Rotarian in Travandrum, he came to the US to study and chose the world famous Tuskegee University [as did my neighbor on the other side but from Port Harcourt after living through the Biafran War]. Anyway, over time I realized that building universities is sort of orthogonal to the goals of colonization and that the history of higher education in India doesn't neatly map to that of the US or France or Mexico. India's educational past is much more recent and tangible and the idea of packing up and moving half way across the world to Alabama for a degree was a lot less the crazy option than it sounds. He is part of the first generation to have been born after independence, and that's an experience and point of view that I can't really ever get my head around.