The Indian Institute of Technology has found fame in an unlikely place: Scott Adam’s comic strip, Dilbert. On the morning of September 15, readers across America woke up to find Asok a character on Dilbert, talking about his IIT credentials. Soon the IIT networks started buzzing with the news and e-mails flew forwarding the strip to friends and colleagues. ‘It’s a recognition of how much ‘Brand IIT’ has penetrated the consciousness of America!’ the e-mails gushed, while others wrote that it was an 'insidious' American plot to portray Indians and IIT in a 'negative and condescending light'. Either way, Dilbert has put IIT in the limelight again.   According to the Dilbert web site, Asok  (pronounced ah-shook) was introduced to satisfy the hordes of interns who wrote to request their own character. ‘Asok is brilliant, but as an intern he is immensely naive about the cruelties and politics of the business world. His name is a common one in India (but usually spelled Ashok),’ says the site. Asok has now been turned into an IIT  graduate and will be on the strip all week long.

Over the last three years, IIT has gathered a huge amount of international media  coverage. Recently CBS 60 Minutes featured IITs in which anchor Leslie Stahl said, ‘Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of this school’.

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A BusinessWeek cover story about the IITs, headlined ‘Whiz Kids’, was one of the early branding events that began to build a popular perception of IIT-ians as super- stars. Over the years, a number of other articles appeared in the business press, including cover stories in Forbes on Vinod Khosia as the uber-VC, and ‘Technical Sutra’ in Salon magazine. The media attention was not restricted to the US; RAI, the Italian network, did a story in Italian about the IITs a few years ago.

“Today, the IIT brand stands for ‘excellence, innovation and leadership. The perception ception of people across the globe, whether in India, in the US or elsewhere, is that the IIT system produces highly talented professionals, who have both the ability and the self-confidence to reach for success,” says Ram Kelkar, an alumnus of IIT Bombay.

However, others are unwilling to be as gung-ho as Kelkar about the appearance of IIT on the cartoon strip.  They say the cartoon strip reinforces the stereotype of IIT-ians as nerds who work  too much and have too little fun. For instance, m the first strip, when asked if he is tired after doing all the work himself Asok deadpans, ‘I am trained to sleep only on national holidays.’

“IIT has got quite a bit of recognition outside. Still the way it is being portrayed in the strip is wrong. We are not super  humans. We are not weird people. We study hard and have lots of fun too," saysGaurav Porwal, Secretary (Cultural Affairs) at IIT Bombay.

The appearance of Asok as an IIT graduate m the strip is being seen as coinciding with the wave of anti-outsourcing sentiment that a section of America is currently in the grip of.

Recently, a number of bills demanding that the federal government not outsource IT projects and also put a cap on the number of visas issued to foreign technology workers have been proposed.

“American workers are scared of losing their  Jobs  to  people  from India. Considering the mileage that IIT has got in recent times, it is clear that through the strip they are trying to make fun of Indians,” says a professor from IIT Bombay who did not want to be identified.

Few other Indian institutes have captured popular imagination in the US like the IITs.  Part of the credit goes to IIT-ians who have worked hard to build their institution  in a global brand. For instance, the IIT Bombay Heritage Fund, along with others, has a committee that looks into brand building.

“It has surely helped that some of our most prominent alumni, including Victor Menezes who is the Co-Chair of our Board, encouraged us from very early on to focus our efforts on branding, drawing inspiration from the way they built their own global brands like Citibank," says Kelkar.

And for this set, being on the Dilbert strip is not such a negative thing after all.

“The IIT brand has surely arrived. We are featured on Dilbert and even if it is in a satirical tone, it still says a lot about how much Brand IIT has penetrated the consciousness of America,” says Kelkar.