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“Software professional Parul Mittal loves her job. But what she likes most is writing. She has more than 1,000 followers on her Facebook fan club page. All her fans admire Parul as an author and have commented on her first book — Heartbreaks and Dreams! the girls @ IIT — which got published last year." ... read more
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“After having read so many IIT & MBA based books I had decided to stay away from them when one fine day a mail landed in my mail box urging me to check this book out. I visited the author’s blog and there was something about the book (besides the price) that urged me to buy it" ... read more
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“This balance is something that 36-year-old Parul Mittal has already perfected. Not only did she work as a manager, engineering with Nextang, an e-commerce company, but also wrote a book, Heartbreak and Dreams, The Girls @ IIT describing her experiences at IIT, Delhi, and is a doting mother to Muskan, six, and Smiti, eight. ……” read more
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“Those were the days, my friend. We thought they would never end….. We would live the lives we choose……For we were young and sure to have our way ……”
As I read Parul Mittal’s Heartbreaks and Dreams on her college days at IIT, I can hear the words of this song, fill up the corridors of my mind, bringing with them the heady fragrance of yesterday.
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IT professionals finding a way with words is no longer breaking news but a girl's voice from IIT is. As the admission season begins, newspapers are full of pictures of girls in latest outfits queuing up for admission but we seldom find a picture of a band of boys rushing to enrol. Nobody tries to figure out why girls are still in minority in the premier institutes of the country and what happens to those who make the cut in the male bastion. Now, Parul Mittal has given the so-called nerdy girls a novel life through “Heartbreaks & Dreams – The Girls @ IIT”, brought out by Srishti. “When I was at IIT the ratio was really skewed in favour of the boys. Now I have heard things are changing,” says Parul who passed out from IIT Delhi in 1995. “Still, I always found it strange that the girl's point of view never found its way in the novels that were weaved around the IITs.” ... read more
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Bhagat’s Five Point Someone sketches an IIT campus where there are no women students. But Parul has set that right. She takes us through four years on IIT Delhi campus spent by the protagonist Tanu and her batch-mates. This time, however, the view is from the other side of campus—from Kailash, the oldest women’s hostel in IIT Delhi. ... read more
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A middle-class girl is pitted against her male counterparts in a battle that is dominated by brain rather than brawn. And it gets even worse as the skewed sex ratio in IIT, makes life difficult from the very first step she takes. In her journey she befriends Puja, Divya and Charu and goes through all the possible highs and lows —romantic liaison, heartbreaks, friendships, a tryst with the education system. ... read more
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Pigtails are a thing of the 1980s. Even Rekha, the Bollywood actor who popularised this tad middle class-bubbly-prospective-romantic-girl stereotype in films, settled for more easy-on-the-eye hairstyles for her survival. In the 1990s, a woman wearing pigtails (at least in north India) would mean a protective, authoritative mother back home, who would use the overtly long, oiled strings of hair as a ward off charm for the men folk around.
So if you come across ex-IITian Parul A Mittal’s debut novel, Heart Breaks and Dreams, The Girls @IIT – with a woman in pigtails sharing a bench with a man on the cover, you would be curious to know whether Tanu, the protagonist in Mittal’s novel, manages to get an offer for a ride on a batch mate’s motor bike, or a movie date at least — a few pages down. ... read more
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Books, Dreams & More - In Conversation With Parul Mittal on Infibeam.com
My four years of stay at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was the inspiration behind this book. IITs as many may already know have very few girls. The sex ratio was a dismal 4% back in 90s when I went there. The girl's hostel was at one extreme end of the campus, few kilometers away from the boys' hostels, flanked by faculty houses on all sides. I had only one other girl in my department and only one senior girl in the three batches above me. I still remember the first exam results. I had scored 1 on 20 in Math. After having scored 100% in 12th board in Math - this was a rather confidence shattering experience. ... read more
