None of your friends know where Iowa is, just as no one knows what exactly biomedical engineering entails. The plan is simple: study something that sounds cool. No, it’s even simpler – the urge to get out. The book you use to research colleges abroad mentions something about a top-ranking English department at Iowa, but nothing about the famed Writers’ Workshop, where many of America’s greatest have studied. You wonder what it would be like to take a course in literature, though studying anything remotely literary is not even an option. No chance. Boys like you are raised to become doctors or engineers, not writers or teachers.

Moreover, education outside the country is only a luxury for the very privileged, especially in a small town like Cuttack. The daughters of movie stars study abroad. We expect the rest to slug it out until they score a seat in one of the many engineering or medical colleges here – it doesn’t matter which one. But America is slowly beginning to creep into the collective consciousness; undergraduates in engineering colleges all over India plot and plan late into the night. Everyone wants to take the GRE, but leaving the country right after high...

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