The Nepal Engineers’ Association marks the day of its registration as the Engineer’s Day.
The date is so impersonal that it fails to ignite reflection or inspire rectification. [break]
Hence, what engineers do on the founding day of their organization is follow the established Nepali tradition: They celebrate it like any other festival. The Engineer’s Day falls on Saun 3 of the Nepali calendar, but discreet suggestions have begun to float around to keep the evening free for possible revelries.
The Engineer’s Day in India honors the memory of Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya, Bharat Ratna.
Sir MV was born on September 15, 1860 in Muddenahalli in the Kingdom of Mysore and lived a full and fulfilling life of a great educator, engineer, statesman and conscientious citizen for 101 years before passing away on April 14, 1962.
It is said that when the Maharaja of Mysore requested him to become the Dewan of the Kingdom, a post similar to that of a prime minister, he invited his near and dear ones to dinner and told them that he would accept the offer only if all of them promised never to ask for any favor.
Sir MV transformed the Brahmin-ruled conservative kingdom into a forward-looking state, and laid the foundation upon which the modernity of the Silicon Plateau of Bangalore is based.
He helped establish one of the first engineering colleges in India, and was instrumental in the operation of various other institutions of higher learning. However, what set him apart from his counterparts of other princely states was the emphasis he placed upon primary education.
Recently, Amartya Sen rued that Jawaharlal Nehru’s approach towards primary education had been lamentable.
Sir MV had been a successful engineer and knew that literacy was necessary to widen the base for infrastructure and industry.
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It is possible to write separate treatises on the different facets of Sir MV’s life, but next Friday is Guru Purnima, and the purpose of this column is to remember a teacher who had a painting of the college’s founder behind his desk.
Sir MV had used all his benefits from the Bhadravati Iron Works to establish an engineering school in Bangalore, and his name was considered sacred in the labs and classrooms of Sri Jayachamrajendra Polytechnic.
The simple life
Until the mid-seventies, Bangalore was still very much a sleepy city with a population of about half-a-million where lights never went out, water flowed out of the tap most of the time, and it was quite alright to order “one-by-two” coffee—one coffee with an extra cup for a friend to share—at most eateries.
The state had recently changed its name from Mysore to Karnataka, and those who knew Hindi would joke that political theatrics (Kar-Nataka) had been imported from neighboring Tamilnadu.
It was never so hot in the city that you needed to throw your Nehru jacket off nor ever so cold that an overcoat would be necessary.
The location had been a “no-fan” station for the British Indian Army, and Indians continued to call it the “Air-conditioned City” the “Garden City,” and even a “Pensioners’ Paradise.” Our college campus had the Cubbon Park, the Vidhan Soudha legislature building, and a large expanse of stony wilderness attached to it.
The great Public Library was within five minutes’ walk, and some of the best theaters of the time were within strolling distance.
Mr Janardan was the Head of Civil Engineering Department and he drove to college on his Bajaj scooter every morning.
Apart from the service staff, he would usually be the first one to reach the college. Those were the days when teaching was considered a vocation rather than a profession, and the Head—everyone reverentially referred to him as that—would check classrooms and labs before students started arriving.
He knew most students of his department by name, and would often enquire of outstation pupils whether they had written back to their parents or heard from them recently. He was partial to formal wear—he never wore anything but dark suits at work—and frowned upon casuals.
He had learnt to tolerate jeans, but would sternly ask students to go back and change into something sober, especially when the legend on the back of a t-shirt declared: I want no education.
In the manner of a true-blue patriarch, the Head would make rounds of his department several times a day. Whenever there was a teacher absent of whichever subject, he would always be ready to fill in. Let alone students, even teachers would often be envious of the way the Head tackled any topic.
He was a polymath by choice; a Head usually has the authority to allocate other faculty members when the assigned teacher is absent.
Undergraduate classes require some felicity with theorems and formulas; he seemed to know quite a lot of them by heart but never hesitated to be corrected by students on rare occasions when he floundered. He was at home at the lectern of any class in the civil engineering department.
On a rain-soaked day of 1970s in Bangalore, the assigned lecturer for Engineering Management had failed to arrive in time.
Boys being boys—there were no girls in the class—we were caricaturing different teachers when the Head arrived.
There was no reprimand; it was perhaps saved for the missing teacher.
He went to the washbasin in the corner, washed a glass, filled it, drank half of the water and placed it on the table. In those days, Indians did not have to go to Singapore to drink water straight from the tap—part of which is actually treated and purified sewage—as municipal supply in cities like Bangalore was of dependable quality. And then began Mr. Janardan’s expositions on foundations of professionalism.
The virtuous life
Reminiscences are reconstructed with every retelling, and it is possible that important details have been missed out, or explanations have been added to make the memory more purposeful.
The fish in the story of angling expedition keeps getting bigger every time such experiences are recounted, and the overturning of the boat on the pond is invariably someone else’s fault.
The authenticity of what transpired in the class is open to question, but its main lesson remains valid: It is impossible to be a professional without first learning to be a virtuous person.
Mr. Janardan began the class with a question: Define Engineering. Most students stuck to the established definition of the profession and responded that it was practical science concerned with the design, construction, use, maintenance, repair and upkeep of engines, machines, and structures.
The guru then synthesized his pupils’ responses. Engineering is the art and science of using knowledge and material resources to solve the problems of life, which required establishing efficient processes that produced appropriate output from a given input.
His next enquiry was about the definition of management.
Frontbenchers parroted the lines from the first page of the textbook: Management is the act of getting people together to accomplish the desired goals and objectives by using available resources efficiently and effectively.
It was agreed that there was no contradiction in the definitions of those two professions. A good engineer had to be a good manager, and engineering education was the best possible foundation for a career in management.
At this stage, it was natural to remember Sir MV, the founder of the school.
The guru then lifted his students to a higher plane of discussion and enquired whether any of them had heard the name of one Immanuel Kant. Someone responded that he was a German philosopher. Mr. Janardan then admitted half in jest that he, too, was no fan of Kant’s complex writing but thought one of his quotes most relevant for the practice of engineering profession: “Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life.” An engineer needs to “know” and then attempt to “attain” in order to become a better person.
The society would then begin to sustain professional life like the sap that rises upwards from the root to help a tree grow.
The attention of the class was then drawn towards the glass of water on the table. A bright student repeated the cliché popular on most engineering campuses, “To the optimist, the glass is half full. To the pessimist, the glass is half empty. To the engineer, the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.”
Mr. Janardan was not amused. “If you cannot even think about something as useful as a glass of water in a creative way, how would you be able to innovate anything that will help solve the problems of life?”
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I have been singularly fortunate in having been taught by some of the most probing educators of South Asia.
Headmaster Sabhapati Das, and Science Teacher Ramsevak Sah of LCM School in Jaleshwar, Prof Haroon and Prof RD Gupta of Aligarh Muslim University, and Prof Sudarshan Raj Tiwari of Tribhuvan University are the names that immediately come to mind among those of many others.
After they had shared everything that we wanted to know, they would always tell us never to stop questioning because all extant answers were transitory.
Progress is made when an established theory is questioned by a new hypothesis, which then may become the next paradigm waiting to be ousted by yet another.
Let alone theorems, even values, beliefs and principles needed to be examined incessantly to maintain their relevance and vitality.
The problem with professions in developing countries like Nepal is that we have lost the courage to question and the spirit to innovate.
The “input-process-output” is a method that requires ceaseless improvisation in order to be useful. The assembly line of engineering education has begun to produce standardized professionals who require appropriate working conditions to be able to be effective rather than using their effectiveness for creating desirable environment for doing what they want to do.
No wonder, migration is the first option that comes to the mind of many promising professionals.
Most engineers of Nepal have gone to some of the best engineering schools of South Asia and graduated mostly at the top of the class. Yet the status of the profession is at best comparable to that of a half-full glass.
Thus, memories of teachers and reflecting upon their lessons would perhaps be a better way of marking this year’s Engineer’s Day than gloating over the achievements of some successful professionals.