CHENNAI :03/10/2017 : FOR METROPLUS : Tim,a German student at IIT.  This is for a column called On The Road to be used this Thursday.. Photo: K. Pichumani

CHENNAI :03/10/2017 : FOR METROPLUS : Tim,a German student at IIT. This is for a column called On The Road to be used this Thursday.. Photo: K. Pichumani

October 04, 2017 04:41 pm | Updated 04:42 pm IST

Memories for life

Tim Hohmann just cannot get himself to bid farewell to the verdant IIT-Madras campus and his friends

Tim Hohmann will leave for Bremen, a town in Germany, his home, next week to study. But, this student of the Indian Institute of Technology - Madras is a happy man.

Along with his certified course work and grades, he will also carry home many warm memories — of evenings huddling together with his close friends in the canteen, using the library in the institute late into the night and strolling through the green campus full of spotted deer and mischievous monkeys.

There is a sea of a difference in campus lives in Germany and India, he says. While there is a lot of freedom in the former, here, he feels, a student has to follow many rules and restrictions. “I felt I was treated like a child. In Germany, we are used to a lot of freedom. This was tough for me to adapt to in the beginning.” However, there are some good takeaways too. In Germany, the only way to celebrate among friends is to drink and smoke. “But, here I realised you can have a good time with your friends, just sipping tea and talking. That’s fun too. But, in Germany, people will find you strange if you call them over to your place and do not offer them drinks.”

The 28-year-old researcher joined IIT-M last July, as a Masters’ exchange student in the HSEE department to specialise in Urban Development. He finds the campus the closest to his heart of all the spots in Chennai.

But, that has not stopped him from exploring other areas. He loves the Marina and Besant Nagar beaches. He soaks in the sights and flavours when he is there, of the women selling corn cobs and sparks of fire flying in the air from their carts, of carousel rides on toy horses, of vendors selling crispy spring potatoes...

And, he cannot also forget his experience of watching Kabali , of seeing Rajinikanth on the big screen for the first time!

“I even bought a Kabali T-shirt. I watched the film at a multiplex theatre. The fans were going crazy. The mood was insane,” Hohmann recalls.

Being a politically aware student, Hohmann finds the debates around what constitutes nationalism quite disturbing. “If we are not careful, imposed nationalism can do what it did to Germany. We know how it affected us and led to the Holocaust,” he says.

Germany and IIT-M’s relationship harks back to the inception of the institution, says Hohmann. It all began in the 1950s, when Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, the then Prime Minister of India, made an official visit to West Germany and was offered assistance by the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany to set up a higher technological institute in India.

Currently, Hohmann is doing research at Indo German Centre for Sustainability (IGCS). He also takes a keen interest in making sense of Chennai’s development in the last few years: the population explosion and infrastructural issues. Asked whether he will come back to India and join IIT- Madras as a professor one day, Hohmann says with a reflective smile, “Maybe.”

In this series, we feature people who continue to work as they travel

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