Houston, we have a solution

The United States National Academy of Engineering (NAE) has put out the top 14 engineering challenges for the 21st century.

http://www.engineeringchallenges.org/

Close to two weeks back, Dr. Charles Vest, President Emeritus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was speaking at the Faculty Hall of the main building at IISc, Bangalore. He is currently the President of the NAE. The topic of the lecture was ‘Engineering Education in the 21st century'. What caught all of us by surprise at the very outset of his talk was the statement that he made, which said “the world is actually getting better.” This was a refreshing change from the common handout that the world has taken a nightmare pill. The world is actually getting better.

Part of this talk covered the 14 greatest challenges you saw above, and how solving them could render a great impact to tens of millions of lives around the world. However, a cursory glance at the list will tell you that there are many other challenges that are equally important if not more, but haven’t made it to the list. For example, the issues of recycling the world’s waste or space exploration don’t feature on that list. But the 14 we have here are big enough to keep our heads and hands occupied for the next 100 years.

I’ve been spending time over the last few weeks meeting with people in academia, government and industries trying to gleam an understanding of where technology, especially enabling ones like nanotech (which I hold rather dear to me) are moving us towards. Invariably in each of these discussions, the topic gets derailed from the technology per se, to the fact that the world is beating inroads to the Indo-China region; and how everybody wants to be a part of the growth story. In my discussion earlier today with Ms. Indira Samarasekara, President of the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada, it became abundantly clear that policy makers and influencers of tomorrow will need to root themselves in one particular 'center of gravity' of a technology/science/engineering issue, and bring forth an economical or societal or legal understanding of the same problem.

This points out to two steps the Indian government ought to consider. Firstly, the issue of Brain Drain that so famously filled debate topics during the 90’s is now not on the radar. And as Dr. Vest pointed out in his talk too, we’re now on our way to Brain Circulation from Brain Drain. This is but a passing phase where we should in all eventuality end up talking about Brain Integration. I can’t get a grip on the third phrase yet. However, brain circulation seems like a logical extension of a globalized world. I can now grow, harvest and sell my ideas to the world while living in my own country, thanks to so many other enabling technologies that could require an entirely new post to talk about.

Secondly, we’re looking at integrating the micro-technologies of info, bio and nano and bridge the gap on to the macro systems like energy, healthcare, defense and so on. India has a huge slice of this pie, and we’re only getting started. That will call on technocrats to draw on multi-disciplinary skills. We need more programmes at the masters level at Indian science and engineering institutes to implement this.

There’s never really been a better time to live and grow in this country. Houston, we have a solution!

Read this if you're engaged. What the heck! Read it even if you aren't

I don’t usually think of such stuff (I mean, I do, but not aloud), but today we’re going to swing it (forgive the pun) and see where this goes. This one is about love. Any moron like me who can write so much as two sentences that makes the slightest sense hopes to write on the topic of love some day. Chetan Bhagat too vouched for this in an interview when Two States was released. And you thought I was lying about the moron part?

At my previous work place, I was one of the youngest people in the team. Most of my team mates were in their mid and late twenties. To us lads who were fresh out of college, we didn’t really connect with the old-timers. Every once in a while an engagement or a wedding invite would land up on my desk. Sometimes, it would be an e-mail invite. To know what that meant, read this post that I wrote to let the world know how exactly I felt about e-mail invites (that aren’t at least followed up with a phone call). If you happen to be one of them who sent me an e-mail invite at anytime, don’t feel embarrassed about it. I wasn’t referring to you. I’m only taking it out on the others who send such stuff.

So, further to a somewhat lengthy title and introduction, here’s what appeared to be happening to people once they got engaged. They fell in love. Only recently, my friend and I were having a talk about this: the whole premise of falling in love after being engaged. (It’s funny how guys can have very chickish conversations and live in complete denial about it.) Love-after-engagement must be a different experience compared to getting engaged after falling in love. In the second scenario, when two people fall in love (in the traditional sense), the situation is still vulnerable. It is love that is based on the assumption that things might work out as planned, but with a relatively less degree of surety. You and she are still rowing a boat with an oar that may go one direction now and another direction later. You may or may not make it to the shore. Things may or may not work out. In the love-after-engagement situation, two people (who in most cases haven’t met before) are thrust into a ferry with an engine. Their chances of making it to the shore are far greater than the people in the boat with the oar.

Any couple that is engaged has a vision of what their married life would look like. They’re thinking beyond planning the next sneak-away trip to the sea-shore or the hills that their parents won't know about. As time rolls by, this vision crystallizes and strengthens to a point where the two partners overlook any immediate flaws in the other that might potentially lead to any kind of a disruptive misunderstanding at that stage. (I borrow this concept from Dr. Scott M. Peck’s legendary book The Road Less Traveled. The second chapter on Love is probably the best 100 pages anyone has written about on this topic.)

To wrap it all up, falling in love the way we know it is certainly an adventure in its own end: a story with several opening ends where anything could happen, or anything could go wrong as Murphians like to say it. One of these endings could be getting engaged. But from what I see, the story of love that develops after getting engaged is bound to be more mature and softer simply because it grows between two people who know they can’t turn any which way from here.

My apologies for the analytical and serious undertone this write-up contains. I wish I could have given a Wodehousian touch of humor to this theme. But that would mean I’ll have to be in love with a girl to do so. Only then can you make fun of it, right? See, they weren’t entirely wrong when they said that a person is like a tea-bag; his true color comes out only when he’s put in hot water.

Love being analogous to the hot water, in case you didn’t catch up to that joke.

Appealing to a higher cause

We got free passes through a friend to attend yesterday’s Parikrama and Saif Ali Khan’s concert at Palace Grounds. Once we reached and the opening band got playing, only then did it dawn on us that this wasn’t actually a concert for a concert’s sake. This was a concert for the launch of a car brand. We did see Chevy’s name splashed all over the place. They must be the principal sponsors, I guessed. But soon enough, the host for the evening (with questionable compeering skills) kept raving on about the ‘heart beat, sexy beat and smart beat’ of the Chevy Beat. Not until the show troupe of dancers and jugglers were on stage did it become apparent that the star of the show was not really Parikrama or Saif; but it was the Beat. They had the corporate triangles (meaning the top guys) of Chevrolet come to say ‘a few words’ to a stoned audience.

To say the least, it showcased some poor PR work by the company. One of the triangles went to the extent of saying “Please endorse our product.” You never say please to a potential customer. You’d like them to buy your stuff, but not to the extent where you say ‘please’. Saif’s stage presence was average. But the applause rained for Parikrama from the open skies above them. Good job, fellas!

Advertisements today need to appeal to a higher cause of the buyer. At least if not directly, every customer on a sub-conscious level needs to feel like he is associated with a brand that has a cause beyond selling products and straightening its bottom line. Vulgar marketing of this age will mean telling the world what your product is through a celeb and jingle and blatantly asking for the crowds to endorse it. Like what Chevy did at the concert. The smart advertiser of today is the one who can take a product and sell it to the world by embedding it as part of a bigger cause.

Let me quote two instances here.

Funnily, both of these examples come from the telecom world. Idea Cellular’s ad sells the idea of conserving forests and reducing the use of paper by using more phones instead. Similarly, Aircel’s ad features Baichung Bhutia saying that he’s now a part of the Tiger Conservation project in India. In both these cases, the celebrities employed to endorse the brand end up speaking about the larger community issue of forest conservation and tiger conservation respectively; and the brand name slipstreams into the ad towards the end as a matter-of-fact. To an average customer like me, who is fairly concerned about both the social problems, I now perceive that my involvement with the brand could potentially help solve the larger issue. Again at a subconscious level, I’m now buying a role in saving a tiger’s life and not just buying a sim card.

This approach has a better chance to pay off for companies adopting them rather than the direct approach of tell-and-sell, for at a logical level it’s a win-win situation: higher profits, more awareness and marketing mileage for the company’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) matters.

The daring young man on the flying trapeze

I told Grandpa that I’d be stepping out of the house for ten minutes to grab a copy of the Saturday issue of The Mint yesterday morning. It was 9:20 a.m. Given that the newspaper vendor isn’t too far off from home, I should have expected myself to return home by 9:30 at max. But things turned out a bit different.

I returned at 9:30 p.m instead, and had my folks worried stiff in the meantime. I could have used a mobile phone, but never mind.

I won’t go into the details of why the delay happened, but I will tell you that as I stepped out of the gate, Navneet came and we went to CTR to grab breakfast. Later, we headed off to Palace Grounds to catch the 1 o’clock show of Gemini Circus. The Matinee Show – that’s what it said on the ticket.

The only other time that I probably had such a mixed bag of emotions was when I finished watching Forrest Gump. The other occasion happened yesterday when I walked out of that tent before the show ended. You’ve probably been to a circus before. It was certainly my first time yesterday. The trapeze artists started off the show, and were quite an amazing bunch of artists; reminded me of Popeye’s tune “The daring young man on the flying trapeze”. The crowd was mostly school children in their Saturday uniforms led by the teachers, some with whistles. There were the moms and dads scattered in some seats feeding their tots curd rice out of a tiffin box. Most of these kids wanted popcorn and cotton candy anyways.

Without boring you about the string of performers and what they were up to, I’ll get down to what I really felt strongly about. It was the clowns. There was this brief 10 minutes in the 2 and half hour show where this big clown and this other midget clown had a dual act. Here I was, 23 years old, and not finding any of the clowns’ jokes funny. Two rows behind me were some 60 odd seven and eight year olds that were ROFLTAO (…Their Arses Off). How come the two of us were so far apart on the same thing? Many years back, I would have most certainly ROFLMAO at the clowns’ slapstick humor. But not today. I’ve watched way too many sitcoms and comedy flicks, and mastered complex sarcasm so well, that now; a simple and straightforward joke made by a clown that a child can get seems to shoot off tangentially to my thick skull. I was per-occupied in analyzing the costume of the jokers, and how it could have been done better.

As we stepped out of the tent, we saw the 4 elephants and 2 camels that were part of the show chained to nearby posts. Not too far from them was a traffic cop conversing with the organizers of the circus. Navneet still believes that the cop was there to write out a No Parking ticket for the misplaced elephants and camels. I think he was trying to get his way in without having to pay for the ticket. You know how these cops can be, right?

Most of us didn’t do much for New Year's

Before the scent of New Year’s fades into the stench of the rest of 2010, let’s take a look at what most of us almost did for this New Year’s.

I can only speak for the self in here. How does one have that perfect New Year’s celebration? I completely subscribe to the view that the night of Dec 31^st should be a special one. The reason behind this is more attitudinal (by now you do realize that the word attitude keeps popping up in this blog for more reasons than I can see).  Anytime there’s anything special about anyday, I just have a different attitude about it. Dec 21^st, for example is a special day in my calendar. So every 21/12 serves one purpose: what was a I doing last 21/12? Where will I be next 21/12? In several ways, that in itself is a good check to keep one’s goals and purposes on track.

And on the same grounds, I believe that New Year’s should be spent doing something special that you wouldn’t have otherwise done. That need not include getting wasted.In high school, New Year’s was spent strolling down the well lit but packed M G Road and Brigade road at 9 in the night. Until some drunken buffoon decided to get adventurous with an unsuspecting lady and the cops intervened to disperse the crowds. We went home and watched television. In college, New Year’s meant gathering around a camp fire with beer and boiled potatoes, and prophesying the fact that girls’ hostels in years to come will not have curfews atleast on New Year’s. What a pity!

Back in the new city, we started making plans for Dec 31^st in the end of November.  We decided to head off to Goa for the new years: every person’s dream budget-new years! But alas, they told us we’d have to choose between sleeping in postboxes, or paying an arm and a leg for a room in Goa. Neither of it happened. We tried getting to Gokharna, a tourist town in coastal Karnataka. They told us to try our luck in 2011; all the rooms were booked. We also thought of Pondicherry. But the mayor of Pondy himself came down to my home, showed me the finger and told me to shove it up and left. I’m not going back there in a while.

That feeling of self pity loomed large over us. We weren’t going to do anything for new years. With that submission, I woke up the following morning to make the ceremonial phone calls. Turned out that most people I knew hadn’t done much either the previous night.

As partners in guilt, things will hopefully be different in twelve months time. But if you do have a party, call me.  

A Brief History of Bad Breath

That’s right; bad breath. That’ll be the theme for this post.

When was the first time in human history that man first started brushing his teeth? Why did he start this at the first place? Did he do it necessarily to keep up oral hygiene, or did he get started on it because early woman demanded it of him?

I don’t know why they started it, but I’m sure glad that one day someone was wandering in the woods. The guy probably broke off a twig and stuck it in his mouth and lo and behold, the dental care market was born. We’ve heard tales from Jataka where neem twigs were used in the early days of dental care. In fact, it is still used widely in several parts of rural India. People then (and even now) used mud to clean their teeth. How then did we evolve from twigs and mud to Sorbitol, Sodium Silicate and 0.04% Methanol in mouthwash?

The answer to this complex question lies at the intersection of a historical time line and biological evolution. In the early days, humans were sparsely populated across a geographical stretch. Just like all animals, humans too have a personal space (or bubble) around them. As dogs go around the block leaving their excretions to demarcate their territorial space, so do humans. Public urination is proof enough.

So when humans were fewer in number, they had relatively bigger personal spaces. As we got good at mating, the per head availability of space reduced, and consequently the size of each of our bubbles shrunk. This was about the time when early woman refused to sleep with early man any longer unless he started his day by biting away at the neem twigs. As more and more people came inside a given territorial boundary, they started interacting at closer quarters and began heavily encroaching each others’ personal spaces. By this stage, even early woman was sucked into biting away at twigs and sediments. Very soon everyone was at it. The common denominator of society was set at brushing when you woke up.

Unlike other evolving social trends, oral hygiene demands a person to stay a cut above the rest in order to smell ‘better’. If I have good breath and you have good breath, then we both don’t realize that the other has good breath because both of us now operate at the same level. But if one of us has good breath and the other has bad breath, now you can tell the difference. This perfect imbalance spawned the market for the tooth paste and then the tooth brush. (Truly speaking, the story of the tooth brush and the tooth paste is a chicken-and-egg problem. So we won’t go into that one.) Now the whole world started using a toothbrush and toothpaste in the morning. To get ahead of competition, some guy started brushing twice a day.

You see, the story could have ended there. But in order to stay ahead of the rest of the pack, I have filled my toilet shelf with the latest battery operated toothbrush, a tongue cleaner developed by NASA for its astronauts, a 5-in-1 toothpaste that squeezes out of both ends of the tube, a set of dental floss so fine it can pass though the two syllables of ‘Hello’, a bottle of mouthwash with a higher percentage of alcohol than absinthe and a self invented, patent-pending mouth spray so strong that even a whiff in your eyes can cause permanent blindness.


Good luck to the rest of the world!

The underground constipation versus the overhead overflow

One of the pluses of growing up in a city is that you become adept at English. In most cases, kids in school and through college end up picking on at least one other language besides English and their own mother tongue. The educated section of the western world usually holds the Asian population in regard since most Asians can speak at least 2 languages fluently. Many Asians might speak up to 4 languages. As you know, we don’t think it’s a big deal to bump into someone who can handle four languages in India. But to the rest of the world it’s a colossal mark of mass intelligence of a certain geographical pocket; almost like Russians are good at physics, or Koreans are good at math or any of that. It was out of such a train of thought that several jokes emerged, the least of which being: “What do you call a person who speaks many languages? Answer: Multi-linguist. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Answer: Bi-linguist. And what do you call a person who speaks one language? Answer: American.(well, British and Australian too!)”

Besides the blip-on-the-radar jokes about the English language, there’s no getting away from the fact that English is really what makes life, business, politics, restaurant menus, instructions on condom packets and everything else in between easier to fathom. Yet, in some strange way, there is a big portion of the Indian population that seems to think that it can somehow remain divorced from the Victorian Language. Now we both understand that trying to change someone who isn’t willing to change is like dancing with someone who isn’t willing to dance. It’s called wrestling.

I haven’t tried the English lessons on Tata Sky, but I can say from here that probably the easiest way to get good at English is to first start by being bad at it. That is, I’m assuming, you haven’t been used to speaking it from the days of your kindergarten. Common self-help techniques to learn English that people resort to can be put in two boxes:

The underground constipation: Don’t let the word constipation mislead you into thinking that somehow this one method is bad. This technique usually encompasses reading lots of books and working away at Wrens, Martins and Norman Lewis. It is very important, but this method entails learning the language in isolation. While this might help you say words like ‘incorrigible’ and ‘preposterous’, there is no way you’ll be able to marry the knowledge with the comprehension and its use in day-to-day speech. English really isn’t about saying big words.

The overhead overflow: This is the playground where the real learning happens, and yet most English speaking aspirants never step into it. It is that space where you communicate and talk and exchange information with people who speak better English than we do. The law of physics never falters and a certain degree of osmosis happens between the people exchanging ideas. Over a period of time, hanging around with the eagles actually helps us soar higher than we could have if we continued pecking with the hens.

I write this not as a master of the language, but certainly as a long term student. The words lucid and pragmatic have been giving me a tough time off late. So, if we can somehow find that balance between the underground constipation and the overhead overflow, our ability to communicate in English would be up several notches.