Aibaan, Beauki, Chimair, Duven, Emiet, and Firpeal.

These are not just a bunch of alien words. You may not find them in a dictionary, but they hold an important meaning to some people these days. These are names of hostel buildings in an engineering institute and shall act as torchbearers for someone to locate them in an online world. In a couple of months, if you search these words online, IIT Gandhinagar will turn up as one of the top search results.

The student hostels at IITGn have been given these unique names; words that most likely have no meaning in any language. The idea was to invent names that would eventually get identified by online search engines and associated with IITGn. IITGn students told PaGaLGuY that words which may sound weird today will at some point be solely attributed to their institute. “In fact, if you search for ‘Aibaan’, IITGn appears on the first page of results,” says Ajinkya Jain, a final year student. This idea to invent words and work towards its association with the institute online was the brainchild of several IITGn professors and students and was eventually approved by the Director, Prof S.K. Jain.

“The hostel names were created by randomly putting together syllables from the English language and if the resulting words sounded good or different, they were marked off as a name,” said the Dean of Students Affairs, Prof Jaison Manjaly, who is also a Philosophy professor. In his view, these names are not meaningless. The purpose is to inspire imagination and not restrict students to identifying solely with names of objects and their characteristics.

The IITGn hostel buildings have been designed so as to eliminate any factor of isolation or rigid structure. There is no main gate to the hostel area and no specific front or rear to the buildings. Thus, students can enter and exit a building from any side of the hostel area. According to Prof Manjaly, “We wanted to allow free movement of students without limiting them to a single pathway. In fact, the hostel names add value to these designs.”

When students were describing their hostels, I had to ask them to repeat the hostel names twice. When I asked them what these words meant, they said, “Why do you look for a meaning to the names. It’s their ambiguity that makes them attractive and unique.”

In my experience with quite a few engineering institutes, IITGn was the first to express and implement such ambiguity.