Every engineer knows jugaad like the back of his hand. And when you are a student at a prestigious IIT, you are a master of jugaad and quick-thinking. If you've seen Vidhu Vinod Chopra's '3 Idiots', you'd know what we are talking about. 

Karttikeya Mangalam is a final year student of electrical engineering at IIT-Kanpur. The young man recently pulled off a real-life '3 Idiots' when he saved the life of a co-passenger using the basic engineering skills he had been taught in his first year. 

Karttikeya mentioned this incident view in IIT-Kanpur's in-house magazine, which was then tweeted by IIT-Kanpur's official Twitter page. 

Karttikeya Mangalam, a final year electrical engineering BTech student, saves life of a 30-year-old Dutch national using his basic engineering acumen. #IITK feels proud to share his story in his own words.https://t.co/SmHjYFUI2n pic.twitter.com/ybnRp19K3f

Karttikeya was travelling from Geneva to New Delhi, when a man sitting two rows behind him fell grievously sick. The 30-year-old man named Thomas suffered from Type 1 diabetes and had forgotten his insulin device back at the airport after security check. Thomas had insulin cartridges with him but no device. His blood sugar levels were shooting up to alarming levels and he needed immediate medical help. 

© Facebook/Karttikeya Mangalam

Luckily, there was a doctor onboard the flight and he offered to help. The doctor himself was a diabetes patient and had an insulin pen with which insulin is injected into the body. But there was one problem. The sizes of Thomas' insulin cartridges and the doctor's insulin pen did not match. The cartridges were much smaller than what the pen could hold. 

Thomas' condition deteriorated and the crew decided to make an emergency landing in the Afghanistan-Kazakhistan region after Thomas fell unconscious and began foaming at the mouth. 

That is where Karttikeya stepped in. Taking hold the doctor's insulin pen, he dismantled it to understand how it worked. Requesting Wi-Fi access from the air hostess, he looked up the diagram of an insulin pen. He came to the conclusion that all the pen needed was a spring. 

© Vinod Chopra Films

He asked for pens from the passengers and soon reassembled the pen using the spring. The doctor could then easily fit Thomas' smaller insulin cartridges in the pen and inject it into this body. The plane did not have to make the emergency landing and Thomas regained consciousness in some time. He was later transferred to Medanta hospital in Gurgaon. 

Karttikeya wrote: “On the stretcher in the ambulance, he thanked me a lot and told me to come visit him in Amsterdam where he owns his own restaurant and brewery and where I supposedly would receive as much free food and beer as I want when I come!”

The IIT-Kanpur student had applied skills he had learned as part of engineering drawing in his first year at IIT. “This incident has made me realise the importance of the basic engineering skills we are taught in our freshman year here. I think saving a man's life is more than what anyone could ever imagine to achieve from the basic engineering knowledge endowed in that year. I am grateful to IITK for making me this capable to actually matter in such a critical situation.”

© Vinod Chopra Films

The real test of a person's education is when that knowledge is applied in a real-life situation. This is why it is important to learn not to pass exams, but to gain knowledge. As they say in the movie '3 Idiots': “Kaabil bano, kamyabi…jhak maarke peeche bhagegi.” What greater success there is than to save another man's life.