NEW DELHI: When Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg interacts with students and faculty at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in a town hall on October 28, most students will be sitting out.
Almost everyone of the over 8,000-strong student community at the IIT wants to meet and, if possible, ask a question to Zuckerberg, a role model for many of them. But the venue where the tech entrepreneur is holding the town hall is too small to accommodate all of them.
Only one in nine students will get an entry to the hall and they have been selected through a lottery. The hall has a seating capacity for 1,100, but only 900 of the seats are reserved for students.
The entire session is being handled by a Facebook team. It started the process last Thursday and the response so far has been huge.
When an invite was posted on the IIT website, 1,300 students filled up the application form in the first two hours. Facebook discontinued the link after it got 3,500 applications.
"Town hall has always been popular, but not like this one," said a faculty at IIT Delhi. "Mark is a role model for most of the students as he is easy to identify with. Also as the focus of both the institute and students is moving towards entrepreneurship and innovation, his visit has created a lot of enthusiasm."
Zuckerberg is expected to speak for 15 minutes and spend the next hour answering questions from the audience.
Arshad Nasser, one of the lucky students selected to participate in the town hall, said there would be no direct questioning, though most town hall meetings allow that. "I wonder whether my question would be read out on."
Nasser, who is in his final year of Master's in Design, said he was not sure whether it was the question he had put in the application form for Zuckerberg or the lottery that got him through. His question was: "Will FB extend itself as a physical product so that it can interact with devices at home and also connect with social circle?"
Jyoti Meena, a final year B-Tech student, said many of her friends who could not make it to the list were upset. Still, she said the Facebook chief 's visit itself has created excitement on the campus.
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