Technobrat: Culture in a cybernetic classroom

Culture i n a Cybernetic Classroom

Rukmini Bhaya Nair with

Ramnik Bajaj & Ankur Meattle, lITians

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YT HarperCollins Publishers India

flarperCollins P1iEl1sllrrs I I I ~ I J P\ t Ltd

in t h e fiftieth year of

7/16 Ansari lioad, Daryaganl, New D e l h ~110 002

India 's frc.edom F ~ r s tpublished in paperback by

for

HarperCollins P~rbl~shtlrs Indl'i, 1997

all m y st~~clclnts O Rukmini Bhaya hrair 1997

n-it11 humility :~nclnit11 h o p e for t h e future

:~ncl for

ISBN 81-7223-2'15-0 171)'

C)\VII

],rats, Vijayanka ancl Viraj Sli;lnkar

Rukn~iniBhaya Nair asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

a present for t h e present

Typeset In Garamond by FOLIO G-68, Connaught Circus, New Delhi 110 001

Printed In lndia by Gopsons Papers Ltd A-28, Sector I X Noida 201 301

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klarperCollins Plilllisllrrs I11di~iPvt Ltd 7/16 Ansari lioad, Daryaganj, New Delhi 110 002

in t h e fiftieth year of

India's frc.edom First published in paperback by HarperCollins P~rblidlt~rs India, 1997

for a11 nly st~~clclnts

(0Rukmini Bhaya h'air 1997 ISBN 81-7223-2'15-0

n-it11 11~1mility:~ncln ~ i t h]lope for t h e future

a n d for

m). o w n ],rats, Vijayi~nka a n d Viraj Sli;~nk:~r Rukn~iniBhaya Nair asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Typeset in Garamond by FOLIO G-68, Connaught Circus, New Delhi 110 001

Printed In lndia by Gopsons Papers Ltd A-28, Sector I X Noida 201 301

All rights reserved.

No part of this publicatic~n may be reproducc~i, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, m e c h n i ~ ~ i lphotocopying, , r r c o r d ~ n g o r othercvise, without the prior permission of the publishers, ,~cknot.\.ledgc,n~ent, copyright etc.

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a present for t h e present

Table of Contents Chapter 1

TECHNOLOGY AS FABULA: T h e Making of a n Engineer

Chapter 2

SELF PEFINITION: T h e Lexicon of t h e Technologist

Chapter 3

GANDHIANISM, COLONIZATION Sr INDUSTRY: T h e Moral Status of Machinery in the Third World

43

79

Chapter 4

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION: T h e Vocabulary of Technological Desire

107

Chapter 5

ACROSS THE DIASPORIC WORLD: T h e Art of Measuring t h e Mind

133

Chapter 6

COMPUTERS, DREAMS, BOREDOM AND THE SOUL: T h e Angst of t h e Engineer

165

Chapter 7

TOOL-USER'S TRICKS: T h e Cultural C o d e s O p e r a t e d by t h e Engineer

199

Chapter 8

EXAMINING ELDORADO: T h e Technologist a s Proldem Solver

239

Chapter 9

TAKING A'ITENDANCE: T h e Present T e n s e of t h e Y o u n g Technologist

265

Chapter 1 0

M A H D E V I SPEAKS O U T O F THE PAST T O THE FUTURE: 0 Engineer of the World, I've Run Till Y o u Cried Halt.. .

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287

Technology as Fabula: T h e Making of an Engineer

Tvashtri: In the Rigveda this god ...is the Vulcan of the Indian pantheon, the divine artisan, the most skilful of workmen, well versed in all wonderful and admirable contrivance. He sharpens the iron axe of Brahmanaspati, and forges the thunderbolts of Indra, which are described as golden, with a thousand points or edges. He is styled the beautiful o r skilful-handed, t h e skilful w o r k e r , t h e omniform...He imparts generative power...he has given to heaven and earth and to all things their form ...He puts speed into the legs of a horse. He is skilled in all the Sama texts ...fie is master of the universe, a first-born protector and leader. He is a companion of the Angirases and knows the region of the gods... He possesses abundant wealth. Tvashtri is ...connected with the Ribhus, who, like him, are celebrated as skilled workmen, and are called his pupils. ..

4

fi'cbllohrrrt

High anti legc;nclary, the \\-:~lls ( ~ ) f the Il'l\ cont:~in ;I c ~ ~ l t ~ l r c tl1;1t is v i ~ ' w e dwit11 c3n\y, tlvsire :inel 17r1cIe17)' 111:111).in 111cIi:l. Encloseci \\lithin them is the l ~ n l ~ i t aof t :I new. I>i-c.c.ci o f 'Tv:ishtris. 1-ike the avsonym hll'l' in another nlytllical l:lncl, IIT is :I name to conjure with, :I 1nantr:l. A l t h c ) ~ i thrse ~ I ~ inc3nt~1to1y letters st:lnd for notll~ng ~ n o s c elcctrihing th;ln the ataid '1ncli:ln Institute of T'scllnology', they srlnlnlon L I P :In cntire i ~ l y t h of modesnit).. 7'11~). signal :I locu.; n ~ h c ~ rtile c '.I'hi~-d \Vorlcl' has tl-:~nsfor~i~ecl itsclf into n h a t thy RI<~I'C'L/II n.o~llcI czll a \ ~ o n c l r o ~' f~osr ~ n 'of the 1-11-xt. As n p ~ r i p a t ~ t in.3nderer c in ;~c:~clclncancl a pel-pctr~al lnvaser arc~tlncin.itll \vorcl,\, 1 II:I\.V I ~ c e nkl\vinatt.cl f'or most o f my life 1)). t l ~ c~nysteriesof langtl:~gc., it.\ :lm:~zing:~ncl intricate fr~rms.Therefore, \\-lien 1 cll.iftccl into the sacred psecinctx of IYT, Delhi. five ):e:tr\ agn :Inel clisco\~creclt l u t the 'Tv:~slltris there s p o k e in just ~ l c . h:in i~rikno\vlltongue, I \\.;IS hookecl. 'This book is a record of my :ittcmpts to lenrn :1l3or1t the culttlre of tlic c o n t e m p o r a y 11-ilxsof T\.;~shtrisancl k l ) h r ~ sin Incli:~.In i t a r e rrac.ked those ~n:igic.:il Im~lnd:~ries that give the prime makers o f tli:~t cult~,re-the elite engineering c~ospsof the IITs-their positiorls of po\\.er a n d pl-ivilrge ;~ncl~llrim:ltel~ llinke them, in the Rig\-eclic. phrase no\v glorlfiecl e\.t.~)-n.here by comic-strips, ' ~ n a s t r r sof the ~ ~ n i \ - e r s e ' . Prinle ~ n a k e r s ,energetic actors, the T\,:ishtris of the llTs are epitomes o t the tool-using nl:imni:il. 'I'llry virtu;~lly1n:tkc their world. 7i.cb1~ohrutis not :~licjut Uct.\) Blue clefe;lti~lg Kzisparov, o r al3o~lt hom~illfo-\v:~r~-iix-h-oin Incli:~ c:ln i1~1ck their w:ty into internatiollal clct'cnc.e f i l e It is, ratl~er,:lI>o~~t the n~clltcility o f the tc.clinc IIO:I\~. nrllo 111igIlt I~egiri1 ite ;IS :t hatchling in a n 1ncll:ln II'I', I ~ u t\\.Iloxc nlings span the u-orlcl. li;lch ch:~pter of Tccbirohrrit offvrs :I r o ~ ~ gguicle h ro tllc range o f cillt~ir:ll territory \i.e w:~llderctl o\.c.s as \vv cJl:~\ccl the shadomy self o f tllc 'Intiinn' vnginccr t l l r o ~ ~ gcyljcrpact.. h 'Phis first ancl most unc3vvll chaptel I-rtlcct5rllc I~cginningho f any journey, I x i n g f ~ l l l of nlistinlings ,tncl getting-to-knon:-

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each-other f.Jl,se starts. I t opens tllc f i h t of ten cloor.\ into Tvashtri 1n:Ize. It's tile second chapter that' rcally tllc first. A clu~te possil,lc. move is to skip these i n ~ r ~ pages al ancl I ~ ~ g seacling in Tc.chnoi,~nffrom there, :I chapter \vllich c : ~ i ~ l l ~ hin tlie first weeks of cl;lss, struggling with tile t:~skof self-clefinition. LVho is 3 're(-hnologist'j Does h e jmt :~ppl)-thc n ~ l c sof acience to t i l t . world of things? (Jr is the engineel. the true carrier o l tllc g e n e of modernit)r--uur nloclc.1 for tnent)i-first centuqfl 'I'he third chapter, '(;nnclhi:~rusn~,(;olonialism :lnd Illclr~stly', goes o n to present a ct~lturc-spcc.ihcsending of the iclc,ology of m a c h i n e ~ y ;while the fourth. 'Conspicuous (.;onsu~nption', derives from the concerns (11' the third. It cont:~ins T\.asIitri reflections o n the nature of hum:ln clesires. thcir p r e s e n t ~ ~ t i o n in the ~neclia a n d their proliferation in tlie mal-kets (of the world. 'Technology as myth ancl f:il7i1la, technologieh :ia utod'jstopi:~n tr);outs, technologic~s;15 cxtcnhions of the 'selF' :inel technologies as silent I-elninclcrs o f orl1- c r l l t ~ ~ r apzlsts, l thesc are sonlt: of the m:~jorthenles in Techtzohml. Entitlccl 'Across the Diasporic World', tlic fifth ct13pter i n t e r c o n n ~ c t s these themes 1 , ~eliscussing tlle r>ilg~neer's self-conat~nctio~i in telms of his taates in the arts: : ~ n dthe journeys h e unclcrtakes In pursuit of his holy-grail visions. Like ~ t sprecleccssor, the next cll:~pter, t o o , has a selfexplanatol-).. title; it [ > crlllecl 'Conlputers. t)l.t.c~lns,I3orrtlom a n d the S o ~ l l 'So . loose-knit 1s thv p:itter-1-1o f r l ~ t \ i s t h ch:~pter that it can ironic,llly h c w e n as t h r centle i ) t a Jmok tllat h ; ~ s the stnlcture o f a m:ize. a. 1n:Izc t l ~ : ~itself t h:15 n o centre. &Ioclcrn technologic:~l i n \ c r l r t \ . ~ . ~ l c .,, I w e k n ~ ~ n .ia, hauntycl 171. rho~ights of ;~poc:ll!.ljtic. c.nclillp. 'l'hc sevcnth cll:lptcr-, .Tool I:st~r'aTricks' spllal> 13;it k\\.:~r-cls:rncl torw:ircl,\ in time :IS it se:rrcllvs fol- clues t o :I p ~ . i n ~ o ~ ccl u~l;t~~l~ l -ofe : ~ s s i ~ - : ~ l - k i (t :.o n n c c t ~ n g o u r prilll:~l making-tools \leginnings to orlr rlnccrtain ftrtt~re, \\,e :tnal\.ze liere tllc

6

Tecbnobrrrt

engineer's sense of angst at the world of nominal kinds of which he has been chief creator-and destroyer. In reaction, so to speak, the eight chapter goes into reverse gear. It shows the Tvashtri in linear action-pulling out all the stops to get an A-Grade. 'Examining Eldorado', presents part of the archive of answer scripts I collected over the course of HU484. It reveals the Tvashtri in his role as an indomitable problem solver. In a tough world, the Tvashtri is clearly destined for competitive success, wherever he travels. 'Taking Attendance' is then givon over to my co-authors, Ankur the Idealist and Ramnik the Philosopher. Speaking in tandem, they hold the mike on-stage all through the ninth and penultimate chapter. I'm wonderfully absent. I return in the final chapter 'hiahadevi Speaks Out of the Past to the Future ...' only briefly. Much of this last section intercuts my narrative with glimpses into a forbidden areathe hostel. The hostel, living space of the Tvashtris and Ribhus, demarcates the boundaries of the classroom. It represents a limit. Teachers cannot wander in here. It is insider territory. I've heard dark rumours that the hostels are places where annual bonfires are made of books and 'classnotes' hut I admit it's only hearsay. I f this first chapter, 'Technology as Fabula' initiates an entry into the maze, the last chapter closes off the possibility of entry, even as it indicates that there are regions Ixyond. All we are left holding is Technohrat, a peculiar object rcmlnding us that it was no dream. We did journey some distance at least into the fantasia of Tvashtriland ... Speaking of fantasia, Technohint is niore ta1ism:ln than book. Books are still the most potent ~netaphorsof wisdom In India's hoarily literate culture. In this respect, : ~ tany rate, India is in line with the obsessive collimitment to literacy that marks sites of power-websites included-in contemporary civilization. T e create a book out of classroom activity is to make a sacred object that compels ritilal obedience to the

Tecbnolofiy us Fuhulu

7

dicta laid out in it. ~ ~ p e c i a l liny a technological university the very idea of a book is apt to create a form of 'stress', in which a monolithic text, full of informational 'load', is passed on intact from teacher to student. How would the self-confident Tvashtris, a cyl,org generation, assess the fragile structure of a book where no knowledge held steady? Not just the context of the classroom but the larger contexts of institution and country continually weighed in upon us, both shaping Technohrat, and simultaneously distoAing.it, so that it seemed an 'omniform' hybrid, pace the Rigveda. All too obviously, the rorm of Technohrat is determined by the unstable temporality of context-examinations, deadlines, tutorials. For this reason, the book has a kind of serial ordering resistant to its ever being read as a finished product.,'That such a variety of other texts are implicated in it-scholarly articles, magazine cuttings, examination answerscripts, stories, poems-adds to the ~lnsettlingeffect, Yet this interleaving, or interweaving, of multiple texts is not entirely casual; the many 'gaps' created by its method of incorporating polyphonic voices is meant to invite a stepping into the book's space. Except for this clumsy begimling, tripping over itself to explain origins, there is, it is tnle, a narrative strain to the work, since each chapter presents an account of where the class was g e t t i n g 4 1 not getting-to! My aim, though, was always modest. It was not so much to round off a story a5 to Start up a conversation ...

First D o o r I n t o The Maze: Learning a N e w Language Nothing is easy in a strange land. I was to discover that the Ribhus and Tvashtris did not waste ,words. Starting up casual conversations certainly did not figure on their list of preferred

8

Tech~iologycis Fubr~h

Technobrut

activities. Confronted by the silence of the engineers, I founcl myself helpless. Long ago, Robert Pirsig had described in his cult classic, Zen and the Art o f Motorcycle Maintenance, how 'conversation always breaks and freezes when the subject [of technology] comes up ...Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but they speak an inhuman language when describing the things they do.' Now 1. found myself a victim of that familiar alienation. The engineer/techologist is a strange centaur-like creature, half human, half-machine. A cybernetic being. He could be considered the lynch-pin of contemporary global society, and yet his achievement goes relatively uncelebrated, though not unrewarded. An engineer may earn a lot and rate highly in the marriage market, but pan of his social appeal seems to lie in the fact that he is reliably faceless. Unlike the 'pure' scientist, inyths of troubleso~lle and heroic discoveries seldom attach to the engineer. How many technologists, whatever their contributions, have the towering intellectual reputation that attaches to an Einstein, a Raman, or a Hawking? So what is that quality in engineers that resists mythification and leaves them, as it were, out of history? Rut I was mistaken if I'd imagined that raising naive queries about the hidden cultural status of engineers would allow me easy entry into the classical domains of philosophical enquiry! Before the Tvashtris permitted me any insights into the relationship between selves and work; between history and myth; between progress and violence; between science and technology, between the beautifill and the good; between nominal and natural kinds; between fact and value; between silence, speech and writing, I knew I'cl first have to gauge the connotations of the word 'new' in their language, the language of cyberspace. Technology itself is a power word in the glol>al economy. It has coine to suggest innovation, iinprove~nent,wonclro'us changes in th; quality of life. However clrab the image of

9

engineers as people, the products of technological skill have an enormous seductive appeal. This is apparent everyday from advertisements in newspapers, magazines and on domineering hoardings where all goods from scooters and watches to buildings and cosnletics are sold on the basis of their technological up-to-dateness. Prodrrcts, not simply productivity as an abstract noun, drive engineering teleology. Briefly, then, it is tempting to argue that engineers deal in innovation. While something called 'the market' creates a constant demand for novel products, it is for the technologists to come up with the variations that will feed this hungry market. If engineers are qualified to speak o n any subject at all, 'newness' certainly possesses a claiin to being that subject. ~ l t h o u g hit was conlmon wisdonl that what's new in an engineering se se is often old hat to the 'pure' scientist, I conjectured hat the engineer's version of newness was at least likely to 'be different from the social scientist's. For, the Tvashtris with whom I shared a classroom space seemed to be encumbered with only the most nidiinentary knowledge of, or respect for, 'history'. It followed that the engineer's notions of novelty might themselves be quite novel. One of the tasks I set myself, grimly, in the early days of my sojourn with them, was to get my students to draw for me a partial self-portrait. Tell me what's new, I said-but, at first, I heard the walls of the IIT echo with the sound of my own voice alone... Part of the problem, of course, was that I was new-and marginal. I was a 'Humanities person' in a technological university, quite ignorant of the classroo~nlabour which goes into the making of an engineer in his 'core courses'. Ironically, these activities were shrouded in freemasonic secrecy, not least because there is simply too ~ n ~ i cinformation h to he crammed into the short space of a 'sixteen-week semester. Time for reflection-nil. The Humanities courses, on the

(P

contrary, are ones in which students could, as they charmingly put it, 'relax'. Yet it's precisely in these relaxed courses that it hecomes possible, at last, to catch a glimpse of that rare creature always dashing off into the recesses of yet another lab. The IIT Humanities courses, I gradually came to see, were like lenses, perspex glasses. Through then], one could view the y o u n g technologist in the making-his competitiveness, his anxieties, his inanities, his pleasures and his always intensive Ribhu-like exertions. These courses were thus a window of time; they offered a space for self-reflection as well as observation. In this I>ook, I have done my best to map the parameters of this space, I3ut such a cartogmphic exercise was not without its pitfalls. I stood o n a curious thresl~old-the dangerous threshold of the anthropological impulse. The institution in which I taught was more 'mine' than 'theirs', for when they left, the assumption was that I would remain to teach other classes. The class, too, was my class, but the do~nainas a whole was theirs. In this situation, I felt myself mesmerized by the classic sociological notion of 'otherness', except that my 'fieldwork' had to be conducted in the totally familiar environment of the classroom. What suddenly defamiliarised that classroommade it part of a Freudian unheimlicb- was that it seemed to be inhabited hy denizens whose mental culture required strenuous efforts at translation on my part. Here was a 'me versus them' which I had to turn into a 'we'. It was my first challenge on the HU484N 'Technology & Culture' course. How does one turn an alien 'them' into a 'we'? Secrets grew about me-small, dark clumps of bushes that lined the neat track of my walk to the lecture theatre. Sometimes, without warning, I stumbled into walls or cul de sacs when the cool concrete masonry of the IIT buildings fooled me of_a sudden. 'They' were on the other side of the maze and I had only the unrelial>le thread of language to

Tee-h?zology us Fuhrrlu

11

guide me through to the labyrinths of the Tvashtri-language that often betrayed me, swiftly eroding any rights I i~nagined I had to a 'we1. It was language no self-respecting engineer would ever use, my sentences long and winding; ~ n ywords judged needlessly polysyllabic I>y the Tvashtris. But technology, always a mysterious ally, came to my rescue. With my student interlocutors, two of whom later became my co-authors, I saw I shared the silent luminescence of screens. We were connected by the idiom of work on virtually identical machines. This enabled us to merge, rewrite and comment on each other's words. A cross-over of identitiesthat, I thought, gave me some rights to a 'we'. The actual shape of Technobrat, of which I spoke a little earlier, turned out to be radically affected by this technology of wordprocessing, since it allowed for constant changes in the text, as if it was a living, growing organism. And I felt sensitized again to the forgotten Latin etyinology of the word 'culture' (cultura, growth), lurking sonlewhere in the murky depth of my memory.

The Second Door: Who Were We? With my class, I began by sharing deep, unapprehended, confusions. For instance, I walked into class confident on my first day that 'culture' was something I knew a little about, had written al,out, but soon discovered that my ideas on the constitution of culture were terribly at oclds with those of my students. something was not gelling. The early excitements in our class derived from the need to search for the sources of these conflicts. That common purpose gave us an uneasy 'we'. Then again, 'technology' was something I imagined I knew very little about. Here, I actually expected to learn from my class, I>ut again I found that my students surprised me. They were as lost as 1 was w h m it came to a general understanding of technology. In fact, they were slightly worse off than I was, becausc so many o f them were resistant to the

12

Technobrat

idea of producing definitions of, and arguments about, the nature of technology. It was an area of silence. But this situation, I believe, changed. for the better. One of my 'proofs' of this alleged improvement is that, towards the middle of the semester, my Tvashtris gave up three hours of precious free time every evening, Monday to Thursday, for three weeks, so that they could attend each others' presentations and comment on them. To my mind, these voluntary extra hours spent o n sorting out the esoteric connections between 'technology' and 'culture' almost amounted to a miracle. A belief reiterated throughout Technobrat is that it is in the realm of the ,fabulous that technojogy and culture meet most amicably. About the time we held our conversations, the world and country were agog at the miracle of idols of Lord Ganesha consuming milk in endless quantities. The BBC showed IIT engineers busily expounding on the nature of the miracle. Equally fantastic, equally incredible, was for me to witness the miracle within the walls of IIT. My Tvashtris were investing in an enterprise which offered few practical returns. Yet, it remains a fact that they gave up their evenings, sometimes missing dinner-time in the hostels in order to argue with each other. This enthusiasm, I claim, confers on me some rights to a 'we'. Finally, I have to admit to coinnlon curiosity. The enclosed IITian world of the Ribhus and Tvashtris intrigued me hecause of its differences from the ideals and attitudes familiar to me. My students and I seemed to inhabit different 'life-worlds. Apart from their youth, they were hot on being what they called 'realistic'; conversely, I operated almost entirely in the irrealis mode. Where they dealt in the practicalities of use, I discerned problems of meaning. Bluntly, my realm was, I fondly supposed with the self-regarding zeal of the academic, theoria, theirs praxis. So my serendipitous stop at the gates of IIT, Delhi, afforded me an opportunity to explore the tenets

Techrzolol~yas Fahuh

13

of cultural relativism on what was, for the time being, lny

own doorstep. Central to the configuration of Techtzobrat is a kinetics of interchange between powerful institutional structures and students and teachers as individual human agents. In the process, the teachers' voice has been divested of its divine authority and the recording of the 'silent' voices of students, not to mention the murmur of laboratory instruments, prioritized. The scenario is an unusual one. Here, it is the teacher who takes notes while the students speak, not they who busily inscribe the teacher's speech. A process of reversal, which Aristotle once argued brought about dramatic new insights into the human condition, is thus set in motion. Or perhaps one could say that the guru-shishya parampara, SO much a part of cultural menlory that it has become an inalienable part of popular Indian idiom, is retooled in this book. A view the Tvashtris and I explored in the first days of our conversations together was the accessible one that technologies may be seen as extensions of the 'self. In scrutinizing our use and invention of, and dependence on technologies, we were therefore actually studying ourselves. From the engineering perspective, history itself can be thought of as being reconstructed through the remnants of technologies left behind by cultures. Old technologies could constitute, I announced to my bewildered class, the visible, material, traces through which we can track our pasts. When cultures draw moral and psychological boundaries or lakshmana rekhas, they d o so as much via their mundane day-to-day technologies for ensuring food, security and shelter, as through the 'high' cultural productions manifested in literature, music or painting. I was going to have to get used to h a t look of mutinous incomprehension. Artistic materials such as a Tagore poem, a

14

Technobrut

Hussain painting or a Ray film, I carried o n doggedly, are necessarily self-reflexive. They are designed to draw attention to themselves as cultural eml~lems.In contrast, the extreme h~nctionalityof engineering products such as hridges, I>uilclings, factories and machine tools renders them alnlost invisi1,le. Few think of such objects as possesing any cultural significance whatsoever. However, it could be argued that technologies of all sorts, despite their low cultural profiles, have been important determinants of social thought on fundamental matters of rights, responsibilities and values. Many brave new worlds-the utopias and dystopias of our dreams-have been, and continue to be, inspi~ecl I,y technological try-outs. In this sense, technology can be secn as the most extremeA>ecause most material-fornl that human capacities for fictionalization and F~ntasy-that is, 'art'-have taken. Do you agree, I asked. No response. I had hoped desperately that this emphasis of mine on technology as fabula would lure my class into lookins into the narcissus mirror of self-appraisal. Mirror, mirror o n the wall . . .hut even if the Tvashtris did think of themselves, heavenly technological beings, as the 'fairest of them all', they were clearly not prepared to confide in me yet.

The Third Gateway: A Phantasmagoria of East and West My aim, I thought, was transparent. It was to mark a departi~re from the tired old methods of technology-hashing that characterize 'alternative' critiques of techno lo^^, Any l,rash statement a1,out the 'fabulous' powers of engineers coulc! easily I3e constn~eclas consen~ativeand misguided ('Dicl you really expect IIT engineers to be 'revolutiona~y' in thcir thinking?')_Yet a self-regarding critique, if any such could he extracted from the Tvashtris, seemed to me preferable to an

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Techrlology as Fahuh

15

other-regarding one. By which I suppose I meant that allnost all indigenous criticisms of 'modern technology' I'd read-and heyhad been persuasive-appear to have been made with one eye firmly fixed o n the evil demon of 'the West'. The violence unleashed on the world by technology was attributed wholly to the pathological obsession in the Western world with writing itself into history, not only in the colonial period but now again in the age of the transnationals. Tvashtri-land, an enclave of glittering First world aspirations in the grim surrounds of the Third, however, offered us a conundrum. In my conversations with the Tvashtris and in our shared cultural preferences, I saw very little that differentiated us morally, or indeed in terms of taste, from our peers in the West. Our dreams and desires, our anxieties and, not least, our advertisements, retlected the same ideas ahout the constituents of 'a good life'-so much so that we ended up inventing a new word-epithymetics, from the Greek, meaning 'pertaining to desire1-to describe our contemporary consumerist fevers. In short, I wanted those uncertain 'we's' and 'our's,mnat I shared with the IIT engineers to ,function as a basis for self-criticism. For the IIT engineer-who embodies in himself the acme of middle-class achievement-the good life is still, by and large, the imported life. This is evident, I continued, from the rush each year of IIT graduates to acquire 'green cards'. It would be dishonest to deny this. 'They' don't have cloven hoofs; 'we' don't wear coruscating haloes. If they are pathological, then we might well share that pathological mentality. By buying into the assets of the tecllnological state, 'we' are as terribly implicated in the powerplay of technologies as any 'Westerner'. The only difference w e could clainl lay in the tattered remnants of our 'Indian' nationality-a . . identity that could not quite he shaken off. circumstantial Living in India, that is, seemed to force even a wellheeled and invincible group such as the engineers of IIT to

accept a closer link betalcen the languagc of sun~ivalneeds (water, food, shelter) and the language of scintillating desires (cars, watches, designer clothes and of course money, and more money). Bill Gates, hills arzd gales, hills, hills! hills crrzd gates ... The childish incantation reminded me again of how heroes and language came together in a time when a myth is welded. Tvashtri culture was especially susceptible to this particular myth. He is a companion of' the Angirmes and knows the region qf the gods ...He possesses abundarzt tuealth. I was to hear from them again and again during the course of HU484N how 'professionals' like thrnlselves lived in a world without boundaries. Every gate in the world swung open before a Tvashtri. Limited though our cormnunication was, my students managed soon to convey to me this sense of their innate superiority. They could go anywhere they pleased, serve any master. India was not especially 'their'. country. And I saw then that the Tvashtris were not without vanity-it was to be a chink , in their armour I would exploit repeatedly. Even so, I argued with them, no place, and consequently no person, in India can remain completely insulated from an immediate context of degrading impoverishment This is a truism. Speaking in the 'we' voice of the Tvashtris, I contended that it is not so much that 'our' aspirations and desires can he truthfully said to be fewer or more circumscribed than anywhere else in the world. Only the simple contingent fact of being born Indians forces on us certain special problems. It is the nature of these difficulties, which by virtue of being trained as 'problem-solvers' and treated as privileged citizens the Tvashtris are expected to resolve, that might I>e thought of as characteristically Indian. That is, the common 'Indianness' shared between me and the unlikely Tvashtris could perhaps be defined in terms of the problems we though we had in cpmmon. Would this wash? In Technobrat, we've tried to give substance to the vague

idea of Indianness fronl this point of view. In my conversations the Tvashtris I've asked: are 'our' horizons, aspirations really affected hy the conlplex variable of and rndianness? Or are 'we' unprohlematically a part, as you maintain, of the new global elite who know no national boundaries? Perhaps the first ulaystatio?zen route to becoming a 'technocratJis to become a 'technobrat'.

Gate Four: Computers and the Internet Self

'

I saw myself engaged in an odd search-the ancient-modern seaich for the 'internet mentality'. Mine was an exploration of the roving psychology of the technobrat. Do technobrats share a world-language of their own-technol~al>ble? And how new is this Esperailto-ish tongue? During the course of HU484N the Tvashtris and I circled back into history, even pre-history, to ask how different cultures might have spoken different technological languages while tackling the same basic problems of measuring time and space, and of ensuring food, security and shelter in the increasingly conlplex struggle for survival. But to attelllpt thus to confine the infinite tangles of cultural matter* within the grid of the technological-well, this impulse could be new, but it did not seem an attractive sort of newness. Indeed, it might not even be that new. Rather, it may havr I ~ e e nthis sort of inflexible paradigm of 'progress' towards some mecca of modernity that Gandhi rejected with such force as early as the turn of the century. NOW, towards the close of the same century, the Tvashtris and I reconsidered Ganclhi's arguments against the mechanization of India. Was it possihle for a post-lil,eralization generation to understand the speech of the pre-independence generation? Can GandhCspeak translate into Computerese? And what role would the engineers who exist as experts at this particular interface of languages play in the process of translation between two unknown tongues-one which

belongs, allegedly, to our past and one which belongs, apparently, to our 'liberalized' future? The notion of expertise connotes hidden reaches of knowledge, territories forbidden to the layman. I wanted in my communication with the IITians to understand the social significance of this cordon of technical expertise that 'modern' cultures throw around their scientists and engineers. What freedoms d o such cordons confer, and what activities do they restrict? Consider computers, I said to my class. Within the encordoned context in w h c h we have produced Technohrat, and in which technobrats are produced-namely, the 'IIT system1---computers are not just an example. They are the example of a technological product so prestigious that mere enrollment on courses pertaining to computers elicits respect from peers among the fraternity of technobrats. And the reasons seem obvious. What one might call computer plumbing-hard and softcan currently be understood anly by experts called 'computer scientists'. At the same time, the use of conlputers is already so widespread that they have become, mistakenly perha&, but also undoubtedly, the new global metaphor for the human mind. Computer 'nets' which 'can put a girdle round the earth' in far less than Shakespeare's 'forty minutes', symbolize human communication at its most nlidsummernight magical. How are we to fathom the consequences of a technology at once so familiar and so obscure in its workings? One of the arguments I put to the Tvashtris and Ribhus was that it is this peculiar combination of availability in practice 'with unimaginable intellectual possibilities in potentia which confers on computers their huge allure. Just as literacy, and subsequently literacy combined with printing technologies, once sparked off mental revolutions all over t;,e globe, so computers may be poised to d o today. Yet w e must be mindful of histoly, 1 found lllyself portentously reminding my class. Five thousand years after

the first written signs evolved, living in India make5 us poignantl~aware that literacy is still not a technology shared by evevone, Therefore gung-ho prognostications al70oot the potential of the new computer and biotechnologies to 'liberate' cultures should make us wary. Those often reiterated 'benefits of technology1 arguments have to h e sul7jected to especlal s c ~ t i n yby us in HU484, l~ecnuse~t is a particular obligation for JJTians to examine that long nloral penumbra that a technology casts. Even more intriguing to me than technological genies such as compi~tersare their crentonthose shadowy experts who have contained these genies in manageable bottles and enabled 'the common man' to command and use them. Not for nothing is the word 'command' s o ubiquitous in the terminology which conlputer experts have given us. It is now up to us to articulate the difficulties which this apparent mechanization of the lawguage o f conzmand might lead to. To what extent will technocrats be in charge of future oligarchies of the intellect? And how do technobrats prepare themselves for the takeover of power, the investiture ceremonies? Who fonns the constituency of the technobrats, who their audience?

The Fifth Door: Quests, Questions and Examinations Few matters troubled me more throughout the period that I was engaged with the industrious Tvashtris in putting together this book than the vexed question of audience. Who in the name of all the bridge-builders of the world would read our book? Academics? Bureaucrats? Unregenerate technologists? Those who recalled their student years in I1T with nostalgia and those who aspire to enter its hallowed portals-the nostalgiaspirants? Technohrat might appeal to the sense of humour in many among these groups of readers, if not to

Tech~zohrut their search for wisdom. For it is a book of I?lunders, of classroom rough and tumble. If it means anything, then it can only be for this inappropriate reason. Those who expect wellhoned 'solutions' to problems from Technobrat are-let me be honest-almost certain to be disappointed. Questions, not answers, make up the texture of the book. In this, if in nothing else, it can aspire to be a worthy descendent of that classic anlong the traditional texts of India, the Milindapanha or 'Questions of Milinda'. I have no quarrel with the critic who avers that, at best, the conversations written up in these pages can only be described as the discourse of interested ignorance. Indeed, even this so-called 'deep interest' may strike some readers not as deep at all but shallow as a puddle, but I will continue to hold that it is one of the book's redeenling features. Above all, Technohrat is for the bridge-huilders. It is for those who not only do not mind crossing over but who actually build the contrivances that allow such crossings. Any truly vibrant culture has to be supported by legions of such builder* some of ramshackle ropeways, others of magnificent intellectual cantilevers. To these, not always certified, 'experts' at crossovers-readers with a taste for oddities, for eavesdropping, for arguments and for a d d e w e entrust our book. Neither the Tvashtris nor I woulcl deny for a moment that we have bitten off more than we can byte. There is, inevitably, much thrashing around in unfamiliar waters and endless routines of repetition. While I've edited some of this out, much has been deliberately left in, because I did not want to pretty up my classroom too much hefore letting the reader in. In any case, when issues are as inessy as the ones in this book, it is my conviction that the gropings of inexperienced nineteen-year olds are as likely to be shot through with sudden insights as those of venerable nonagenarians'. All I can plead in self defence here is a fomi of verity. This is the way it w a s ~ r o u g h l y . 20

Technology us Fubulu

21

I have mentioned the disconcerting silence of the 'Iirashtris. I began by countering that silence with paper. In every other lecture class I distributed material which summarized the points I'd made and also attempted to pick up on the murmurings of the Tvashtris. -A student obligingly wrote on his course assessment form: 'Handouts were so effective and in large quantity that there was no need of a (text-) book.' In effect, my taking on of the responsibility of note-taking freed nly class to take that first, essential step in any conversational interchange. It enabled them to listen and built in some incentive for them to grumble a little more loudly, more clearly. Simultaneously, the method forced on me the need to respond flexibly to those cries and whispers that got bolder by the day and change the direction of the course accordingly. All of which made HU484 that idamous vehicle-a 'student-driven' course. Was my methodology unproblematic? I'm afraid not. For one thing, I faced that internal inquisitor familiar to all teachers who demanded: Did such methods not amount to spoonfeeding? Was 1 not short-changing my class by offering them the easy option of discussion and ready-made notes instead of hard information? To such not unjustified doul?ts, my answer is simply that teachers, like any other guild, have pet theories about an ideal work-space. Mine was of a class as a moveahle feast. I helieve that the frequent co~nplaintsthat the intellectual fare that we in India dish out in our classrooms is either too bland or reheated great thoughts from someone else's kitchen, are not without merit. Therefore, even an undergraduate class has to he conceptualized as a place whcre we aim for more than a dash of original thinking. It's true tlia~ the broth served up in Technohrat is often spoilt because there are too many cooksstudents, teacher, intertexts and whqnot. Sometimes the fare is plain inedible. Despite these culinary disasters, however, I

7i~~111zoI~r~~t maint:lin th:~t c ~ l l t ~ ~ rappetites, ;ll likc. cll:~rity, I I I L I ~I >~C > ~ I I I at I Iolne. 1 l e ~ l c c72c.htiohtnt. [.css ~nrt:~plloric;llly.1 took three or four ol)\.io~~s III~;I~LISC'S. To I~egin n.ith, I paicl 3 lot of :~ttcntion to yx:lmin:ition I-luestic~ns. -since these :Ire stnndardly cited :IS the ~iininreason why i t is 'not possible' to encourage inno\.ative thinking i l l :I c-lassroom. So I played al-ound with the examination fornxlt, n.hile-anel this is the cruci:ll po~nt-keeping within the strict ~-ul>ricof the examin:ltion procedure 1:licl d o n r n in the regimented 'II'I' systenl'. What 1 wantecl =.:Is to give the Tvashtris and Wl~hussome nutl~orityover thc. usually s~lcrosanct question-setting process, s o thitt w e coulcl ' k e e p the convers;ltion going' even In thy es:~ll~in:~tlon sc:ison. when everyone is just \va~ting to c.ut and run. Techt~ohmt was, ~~nl,e!ieval>ly,put together o\.er one long, Ilot, sullllller. In short, my talks with the 'I'vashtrls fornied a sort of intellectual l a s s t r a l t h o u g h my throxv was wldolll :lc.cur:lre. Anticipating that the English 1:rng~lagcposed a I>arrier for many Tvashtris, for example, I allon,ed present:ltions ancl comments in Hindi, although English is the official meclium of c l was ~nisjuclged. instruction ;lt IIT. But this I:~titude,it t ~ ~ r n eout. In the end, i t rn~ldethe P~llestinir~ns and South Induns in my class feel Iett o ~ ~and t , only one stuclent among the others actu:llly took nle up rile up o n my offirs-:lnotlle~- refection of the posail~lelack of ling~~istic self-confidence In our classl-c>o~ns, even o n e popc~l:~tecll>y tile inheritors (if our times, the shining T~ashtl-is. 'L'he Iwst I coulcl clo uncles the circumst:lncc..; w:ls to m ~ r k c:~v:~ilal,lc.~ ~ p p r o p ~ . i ~.c:~cling atc materials ancl g o over nrgulncnts if 111)' st~1c1c.nt-saskeel lor 11c.lp. 'f'lley ~lccepted tllc Ilell, c:~v;ll~crlyancl read thc I~oolis grudgingly-lx~t t11c.y clitl reacl :mcl I s~1pl3osuclt l ~ W:IS t n.I~at ~natteredin the encl. Someti~nesthey ~ ~ l ~ ~ g i a r lIzxe~ttlI'\.c Ict their contril,~~tionsstancl I)L'C'~LISC it \vill 11ot CIO tc) lliclc tile fxct that such 1:lziness is t).pic;ll c.lasroo~ll tlal~lt 111 0 ~ 1 1 . ~nstitiltions--&en tllc \'c.ly I)c.st. Laail),, 1 ~nll.ocl~~c c.L[. ; ~ l o n f i i ~ I e 22

7>~!1l70/0,<1'rrs Frrhi~lrr

23

e:ich set of Ic.ctures, :l number of 'key' ;lncl 'sulxexts' When w e fell exhaustc.dly silent, thesc tests continued to speak. They are o n e of the main re:lsons why I n o ~ l l ddeny that HI148.i offered any sort optio~ls. h,ly class, ~1su:llly:lt oclcls, \verc unaninlous o n o n c point. t texts. \\,here nothing It was good to have a class \ v i t h o ~ ~any was taught-this fro111 a class \\.I10 llacl grapplecl \\,it11 texts to K:~ncly!I cluote from :ln ranging from I-Ieideggcr to G:~ndt~i assess~nentform: 1 really lovccl the course. I)ec:~irsc of the klct that there w a s n o conscious :Ittempt to ' t e a c h ' anything-after all, isn't wisdo~llincc~rn~n~~nical,le? But s p e a k i n g beriously, this re:~ll). w a s a n intellectt~allysatlsfying expel-ience for ~xe-f confess I had never thought of culture as something s o interesting and studyahle. I t should I>e olwious by the end of Tcchlzohmt that the credit for this irnpression t11:it 'culture' m-:ls 'studyahle' \xrithout Iwing 'taught' does not g o to me. I t goes to the tnle teachers o n this course-those Derridean :~l,sent presences =rho wrote our key ancl suhtexts. They achievecl the ;~lnlostinll,ossil,le cffect of giving our class the impression that \xTecould actu:~lly hear abyss of each other speak across an otherwise ~~nbriclgeahle silence. The net of Tech~zohrrztcatches a text forrned within the pedagogic context of an 1 1 1 clnss~.oolnin the act of trying to leave that protected environment 1,ehincl. Such rites-of-passage, hildungsronzalzs, ;Ire selclom withot~ttheir comic side. Even a s they laugh, however, these nutvs m:ly prove of some use to other teachers. For m y x l f . I h;l\.c. one tcxcher especially in mincl. She is Amulya Kh~lran:~, who deviseel the 'Tecl~nology and (;ulture' course last ye;lr 13)- a (41~rkof f ~ l t e - ~ r n u l p was o n sal~l~atical-I endc.cl LIP te;~chingthe course instead-for

24

Techriohrut

the first time it was ever taught, but at the very last minute. HU484N turned out to l>e part of a basket of courses which include HU370N 'Science, Technology and Society'; HU481N 'Science and Humanism: Towards a Unified World View' and HU482N 'Perspectives on Science, Technology ancl Human Development'. IITians will recognize in the numbering of these courses that passion for serialization that characterizes the true Tvashtri. Every Tvashtri is equipped with an 'Entry ~uinl>er'(92313, 94186 etc.). The number makes hiill an insider; it announces the year he enters IIT. Anyhow, here is the course description: HU484N Technology and Cz~lturv:4 Credits (3-1-0)

The ol3jective of this course is to impart knowledge on the historical and contemporary ideas of the nature of technology. The basic knowledge and understanding of technology and its inlpact on culture will help students towards a more sensible application of technology to benefit society. The significant ideas and concepts relating to technology as a phenomenon in society. Historical background of technology and major technological periods in man's history. The study of technological knowledge from an internal and social historical perspective. The impact of technology on society and culture. Cross-cultural analysis of technological context

i%e objective of the course is to impart ktzou~ledgeon historicrrl and contemporary ideas of the tzntlrre of technology. Well, I am not sure where I stand on historical knowledge ancl the business of imparting it, but contemporary ideas on technology surely included the ideas of lily pl.iine subjects, the technobrats themselves.

Technology as Fahula

25

Gate Six: Brattishness Consider the little matter of the brattishness of the technobrat. O n the face of it, the IIT undergraduate is no 'brat'. He is not sassy, he is in control, he is well-mannered and polite. Why, then, d o I call him a brat? Because, under that suave surface, I suspect other qualities. These include a ruthless competitiveness, emotional attrition, a focussed but extremely narrow vision of social goals, relentlessly instrumentalist attitudes and an annoying complacency-the complacency of already 'having arrived' at nineteen. O n first acquaintance, the Tvashtris also appear supremely indifferent to politics, but this is a misconception. It is not that they are a-political; rather, to them, politics primarily means strategy (a MachiavellianIChanakyan wily planning for power) and never ideology (Gandhianism, Marxism or even Thatcherism). Power is simply visualized in terms of personal gains. To b e brutal, I'd not only assert that the IIT undergraduate-the technobrat-has a distinct tendency to be selfish but that he sees such selfishness as essential to success. The estimate is harsh, I know, hut criticism, and especially any tract whlch aims loftily at self-criticism, is always better off being hard-hitting than nainby paml>y. Cross-cultural analysis of technological context, said the course content. Well, I can only report that I have heard engineers from other technoloiical institutes all over the country complain/publicly about the assu~llptions of privilege that surround IIT engineers-and I think they have a point. In Techrzohrat, I have tried to persuade the Tvashtris in my charge to open the doors of IIT just a crack to admit such resentments because in a country like India, where social justice is so inequitably distributed, the 'meritocratic' route to priv~legehas to he as Problematic as any other. Speaking of criticism, if my judgem&nt o n the mentality of 'the IIT boys' appears acerbic, their response tc HU484,

Technology as Fuhula

26

Technobrat

thankfully, wasn't all sweetness and light either. One student felt that the 'whole course has passed me by without lily learning anything', another two that my language was needlessly complicated. Four inemhers of the class thought the course was too human-centred and unfocuss'ed; it should have considqred animal communication and environmental issues more thoroughly and it should have had specific goals. I take this discontent seriously. In the unlikely event that I were to teach the HU484 class. again, I would hegin with a review of these comments. To be fair, I should add that my class was generous with praise too. Most said that the course was 'great', 'a pleasure', tenjoyable', 'thought-provoking', 'very wonderful, interesting and well-planned', 'the best course I've attended' etc. It goes without saying I'm not one bit responsihle for these euphoric endorsements. As I've said earlier, ours was, a 'studentdriven'-no, that should not be student-drivel!-course. Occasionally, an assessment did hand a bouquet directly to me. One of my favourites is the following: 'The course was very exciting. It was very logical. Why not, when a Inan like RBN was there?'. A true compliment, which graciously admitted me, despite my natural handicap, into the charmed half of the human species. I had, it appears, managed to cross a major boundary. And of course the comment hrings me straight to the issue of gender. Our class had forty-two male and three female students. So it's no surprise that the contentious theme of male chauvinism ran right through the course. In general, I think the class felt my lectures were coloured hy, as one student delicately put it 'a slight tint of feminism. Principle of equality of the sexes would he more welcome'. Precisely. The trouble was that the principle of equality was elusive. Most of my class seemed perfectly comfortable with the proposition that some--especially themselves-were more equal than others, and rightly so. I was not so sure. We returned to the problematic of social justice over and over on

27

~ ~ 4 8 4 - - - t h eMandal Commission, reservations, ragging. How were power and control distributed in a culture? Could technology be considered intrinsically levelling? Would mechanical devices in kitchens, say, release women's t i ~ n e and labour so that they had leisure to pursue traditionally 'male' occupations? Or was this far too naive a view to take of the relationship hetween mechanization and equal opportunities? What was 'equality'? What counted as success? But my intuition, alas, is that much was left unsaid in H u 484 in this crucial area.

The Seventh Door: High Stress Zone

.

Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came ...Each year young Tvashtris jumped off the bell-tower, the tallest point in the Delhi IIT, symbolic both of soaring ambition and the fall into black oblivion. But if I quizzed nly class o n the fact that the IITs were characterized as a 'high stress zone' by psychiatrists, where fear of failure led to extreme manifestations of distress such as suicide, they were airily dismissive. The whole thing, they insisted, was 'cooked up'; it was a result of 'media hype'. Denial symptoms? I d o not know. What I d o know is that, when the IIT's were set u p in the fifties and sixties, they symbolized India's most optimistic projections for a technocratic future. They were created hy an Act of Parliament- which is quite a hit like an Act of God-and declared among our 'Institutes of National Importance'. As Jawaharlal Nehru put it at the time, the IITs were intended: 'to provide scientists and technologists of the highest calibre who would engage in research, design and development to help build the nation towards self.reliance in her technological needs.' Almost thirty years later, when Nehru's grandson, Rajiv Gandhi, announced India's take-off into a computer simulated twenty-first dawn, he was able to s p e d with such confidence partly because the IITs had in the interim lived up to the

28

Technobrat

Nehmvian hope. They did produce technologists who were ahle -. .. to hold their own anywhere in the world. The irony lay in the fact that their world, by the very virtues of their education, was no longer confined to India. 'National selfreliance' lneant less and less to them; individual self-relia~ce more and more. It is in this sense that the IITs can be said to he victims of their own success. Today they house students who find it hard to admit that they can fail in any sort of way whichsoever-and indeed for the nlost part, according to their own definition of failure, they d o not fail. As individuals they are designed, even destined, for success. But in a larger sense, there may be something to the perception that they have failed that original nationalist dreanl of Nehnl's even while embodying it. What happens next? Predictive powers are needed to answer this question: Luckily for us a prediction is just what came our way. In 1995, almost all the Indian newspapers carried a relevant item. An extract: For the first time, the governlnent is jointly preparing with i n d ~ ~ s t r ay series of reports to forecast the country's technological requirements in the year 2020 in 10 key sectors of the econonly. A.large portion of the work has been completed by specific task forces, each jointly headed hy a technocrat and an industry leader. While the first 10 colllmittees discuss individual technology segments, the last panel will investiete and identif;j the environment in which Indian technology operates. At a brain-storming session, some of the questions raised were: How can the country tackle the problem of developed countries not releasing full infor~llation on the latest technologies? Or sho;ld the country be satisfied with i~llporting

Technology us Fcihzrla whatever technology is available? Also, whether production should be in Indian hands or with transnational companies. ..

29

i%e last panel ruill inz)estigate and i d e n t ? ' the e?zviro?zment in which Indim technology operates. This was terrain in which the Tvashtris and I had skim~ished.Battle-ktrdened, we could reveal the most inlportant aspect of that f r a u ~ h t -. environment-namely, the h u m a n e n v i r o n m e n t . For -. Technobrat, fragmented and dippy as it is, provides gli~llpses into the minds of the future technocrats who are almost certain to take over the technologies projected in the 'Vision 2020' forecast. For they are Tvashtris rehorn, progenitors of the cybernetic gene in the culture of 'modern India'. Most of the HU484 class will graduate into johs in 1996 or 1997, that is, in the initial phase of the forecasts. By the year 2020, they will be in their mid-forties-just the age for captains of industq to come into their own. Since it is widely accepted that IIT engineers tend to think of their future orientation as manager-ial rather that mere(y mecharzicnlwhether in the corporate sector or in government-this could be a well exogenous factor contril?uting to the interest of our document. Technobrat as a talisman against amnesia. Here is the IlT Tvashtri in his for~nativeyears when the possibility still exists that he nlipht respond flexibly to the pressures of change and the charms of ideology Always an optinlist, my hope is that some traces of these conversations o n Indian culture and its ambiguous relationship with 'technological progress' will remain in the memories of my class in that symbolic year 2020 when they are definitely the ones in charge. At that time, it nlay be worth reassessing the shape that the nationalist legacy--once articulated by Gandhi and Nehru-has taken in the hands of the IIT technocrat. Buteven in the worst-case Scenario, where let's say all the HU484 class suffer from total -~

30

T~?chnobrut

and multiple aphasias about the way they were, Technobrat stands as a record. It constitutes a reminder that they had once tried to grapple, howsoever inexpertly, with the problems of their cornplex nation. ,

Gate Eight: The Roster of Actors in t h e Drama of Tecbnobrat Returning to our inchoate present, it is notorious tlwt big eroum like the HU484 class tend to o\>lirerate details of individual personality. Referring to the 1IT engineers as a tribe of mythic Tvashtris further defamiliarizes them-places them 'in a class apart'. As a rule, real flesh-and-blood people are considenbly less articulate than their counterparts in fiction; and this observation may be even truer of engineers, who, as I've suggested earlier, are not given to verbal pyrotechnics. Yet, in the sixteen-week period that we spent together, a cast of characters did seem to me to emerge out of the always slightly theatrical arena of the classroom. I began to associate particular points of view or traiw of character with individual Tvashtris. Whether they will retain these persona twenty years from now, or even whether they did so outside our class, is an intriguing question. For the record, though, here are some one-liners that 'I identify with the players in WU484: 0.-

.

T c c h ? z o l o r4s ~ Fuhlrr

31

~ m i B, t the Debater (he picks up prizes at debates every day) okay, assuming you are right, the're are still a myriad other sides to every question ... Ahout TECHNOBRAT: A great idea. Lots of issues to argue a l m ~ ~ t .

~ n k u the r Idealist (co-author of Technobra8 We must change the way people think the world over. If w e don't manage to agree on global solutions to the prohlems of conspicuous consumption, we may end up devouring ourselves. About TECHNOBRAT: 1 hope it helps the cause.

Anurag the Vedic Sage We've forgotten the wisdom of our classics. That's why w e mess up so badly these days. N o one thinks of the soul. About TECHNOBRAT: No need for this hook. The best hooks have already been written thousands of years ago.

Aseem the Traditionalist but also Rock Enthusiast We owe our ancestors and our children-and hence the rock. Hence also TECHNOBRAT.

also ourselves,

Himangshu and Sachin The Modest IITians CAST OF CHARACTERS:

We're not all that smart. Give us a break! TECHNOBRAT might prove too difficult a book for people to enjoy.

The Tvashtris: Protagonists Mandeep the Computer Buff Akhil the Pragmatist Ultimately, everyone wants money and a good life, and does whatever's needed to get these. That is culture. Al>out TECHNOBRAT: It could be popular if it helps with interviews and group discussions in the job market.

The intelligence of computers is not to Ile scoffed at. They will one day surpass humans not only at playing chess hut in most other intelligent activity. Imagine-TECHNOBRAT written not on, but hy a computer. Our niinds would whir in perfect Sync. Marvellous!

Trchnolo~yus F u h ~ ~ l u 32

Tcchrlohmt

Mayank The Zen Master What's the point of all this talk? We're far too self-obsessed as' a species. Clapping with both hands is deafening. About TECHNOBRAT: This one time is fine, but don't let's ever ernhark on such a venture again.

Neeraj The Family Man To study the place of technology in a culture, we need to study the systems that hind societies in the first place, such as the institutions af fa~nilyand kinship. The key question is: what effect does technology have on these natural systems? Insofar as TECHNOBRAT addresses this question, it is important.

Pankaj the Musician (he wins prizes at a11 the music contests) Who said engineers hacl tenuous links with culture? I feel technology contrihi tes stupendously to the growth of the arts. Look at the work of A.R. Rtlunan, the Techno-Pop King, or come to that, consicler me! Ahout TECHNOBRAT: Music to my ears!

Ramnik the Philosopher (co-author of Technobrat) Where's the philosophical finesse? We need to analyze the foundations of technology and understand the contril>utions of earlier thinkers in more depth. Ahout TECHNOBRAT: It is a worthwhile venture to the extent that it does not compromise and truly clarifies perspectives relating to the place of technology within cultures.

Sonu the Feminist Women g e ~a raw cleal, especially in the sciences TECHNOBRAT interests me because gender (lid get foregrounded on this course, despite the opposition!

33

Sushi1 the Silent One The course seemed satisfactory, so why waste any words on critique? On TECHNOBRAT: Silence.

Vikas the Champion of Male Rights There's a division of labour Ixtween the sexes Iwcause natllre decreed it that way. It's silly for women to demand the saille rights as men. Why don't they begin by giving u p their reserved seats on buses? About TECHNOBRAT: It's a goocl brand name; also, it's controversial. It sllould Ile very marketable. I speak as a man of my times!

Vishwarupe and Raj The Gandhians If not Gandhi, then at least Schumacher, hut certainly not the multinational companies, although speaking for ourselves, paradoxically we'd rather work for an MNC than the Government because the work ethic in our country is now so decidedly non-Gandhian! Al>out TECHNOBRAT: Definitely important for the pilrposes of consciousness raising.

Vivek the Environmentalist Progress can't be achieved at the cost of the destniction of human and natural resources. About TECI-INOBKA?': You go ahead, I'm too busy with less academic activism. And most important of all:

The Ribhus: Choric Characters Amit, Amit V., Bhupendra, Nalli, Sancleep a n d Sreedhar The 'Intiianists'. Oirrs is a great integrationist culture, which colonization wounded terribly We must seek t'o recover our nntionnl

34

Technobrut

pride, especially in our past technological achievements. We support TECHNOBRAT Ixcause we think it contributes to the project of revisioning Indian history.

Ashish, Dhiraj, Kanupriya, Pooja, Radheyshyam, Sanjeev, Manoj, Yogesh S., Vishal 'The Commentators' Group I: Those who changed the shape of our conversations in class through their alert and workmanlike commentaries

Abhay, Devendra, Gyanesh, Ibrahim, Ismail, Raghuvendra, Rakesh, Rehan, Sunil, Uttam, Vijay, Yogesh B. 'The Listeners' Group 11: Those who chose to play the role of listeners, so characteristic of the Tvashtris and Ribhus

Aditya and Shalabh: Sceptic and Super-sceptic 'The Shadow Players' Every play, every text has a pair of gentlemen who wait in the wings, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They turn up only fleetingly at the end but without them the text would remain incomplete.. . Of the huge cast above (impossible to leave anyone out), two representative players are my coauthors: Ra~nnikand Ankur. It is because of them that Technobrat exists at all. Ramnik (Maths and Computer Applications) was an ace student, philosophically attuned. Not least because he was often a little frustrated by the way in which HU 484 got lost in bylanes and banalities, and by the way the class tended to completely take over from me at times, Ramnik seemed to me an ideal Tvashtri to induct into a self-critical conversation. A cooler, more competent and more engaging coauthor would be hard to iknagine.

Ankur (Chemical Engineering) was a very good student too, but in ternls of temperament I saw him and Ramnik as poles apart. Unlike Rarnnik, Ankur's approach to issues was intuitive, less governed by intellectual excitements. Where Ramnik's style was brisk and incisive, Ankur's was discursive and metaphorical. In Ankur, I guessed at a vulnerability, a sensitivity, that is seldom allowed to surface in a context like the IIT. Ankur was almost an anti-Tvashtri in the heart of Tvashtriland-a quality which made him invaluable as a coauthor. Ankur's enthusiasm was a major factor in getting us started o n Technobrat and his enterprise and charin crucial in getting us through to the end. Together, Ankur, ~novedby issues, and Ramnik, motivated by ideas, coped admirably with my absent-minded muddleheadedness. In spite of my reservations regarding the culture of the engineers, I feel somewhat reassured when I think of circa 2020 in the hands of 'rvashtris like Ramnik, Ankur-the most skiljitl of zuorkmen, toell uersed in all wonderftll a n d admirable contrivance. Yet, the future is hy definition inaccessible It needs no emphasizing that those who 'forge the thunderl>olts of Vishnu' can serve many masters, not all of t h a n benign. To have observed~the Tvashtris at their best, however, is to retain a tenuous faith that they will somehow not wreak thcir worst when the power to do so is finally entrusted to them.

Gate Nine: Kybernetes The word 'cybernetic' derives from the Greek kybernetes, meaning 'steersman'. Although it has now come to signify a crossover between the human and the mechanical, it is to the original sense of the word that I return in acknowledging the many hands who have helped steer the unwieldy craft of Technobrat. I realize, too, that it is ,usual practice to express the gratitude one feels to others in a Preface outside the inain

36

Technobrat

structure of the text. Given the inclusive strategies adopted in this book, however, everyone comes aboard. For good or ill, mechanisms for triage are abjured within it. Towards the beginning of this introductory chapter, I jocularly suggested that readers of Technobrat were invited to step into its space. Those who contributed to the making of the book have less choice. As our kybernetes, we cannot d o without them. Dhruv Raina and Bruno Latour contributed disciplinary rigour to our classroom tussles; Noam Chomsky encouraged me wonderfully in a conversation about the humanities in MIT; Ashis Nandy read through the mammoth first draft of the book with remarkable intellectual generosity; Ramchandra Gandhi brought' to the interpretation of Hind Su~araj an insight a n d imagination which were crucial to my understanding; Ashish Ganju and A.G. Krishna Menon help me grasp the implications of IIT architecture; R. Sudarshan and Shobhna Sonepar showed a keen early interest and Primila Lewis commented on the finished product with wonderful perspicacity; Kai Friese gave the venture much needed gloss by publishing an extract with photographs, no less, in the India Magazine. Manish Chopra, my student, continually demonstrated his faith in our project although he was never formally a student on HU484; V. Sanil assisted with his knowledge of the temperament of laser printers and Shalu and Mani with engineering drawings; Alok Rai's friendship within and without the Humanities Department of the IIT was important; A~nit Bhaya, old IITian and President's Gold Medal winner, expressed sibling soliciariry and suggested changes on e-mail, while Jackie Bhaya's on-the-spot scepticisll~illade me atteillpt the inlpossihle and cut the book to half its pachydeml length of 600 archival pages. Then there is my debt to late Bihhuti Bhushan Sengupto, first Director of IIT, Madras and Shanti Sengupto, my aunt, who kt me wander as a chld all through the sacred groces of Tvashtriland in the innocent era of

Tecbnolo,qy us Fubuh

37

~~hruvianisnl-a debt which is without parallel. Arun Kumar in far California, and Parnlesh Ratnakar in local Dilli were both enthusiastic and supportive; Simran, Sudha, HB helped us out with endless routines of sorting, and retyping; Shiva Srinivasan's last minute editorial intervention was absolutely crucial. Brinda Datta designed the 'look of the book' in sucll a fashion that its authors, at least, feel that they wouldn't mind Techtzohrat being judged I>y its cover; and RN provided the foundation, for this, as for all my other foolhardy enterprises. I'd also like to thank the many nameless engineerswhose labour designed the famous 'IIT system' in a way that made it possible to conceive of, and carry out, as chaotic a study on the nature of technology as ours within its sharply-ordered co-ordinates. The metaphor of gates and doorways I've used throughout this chapter may call up an airport scenario in which passengers repair to numbered gates to fly off to different destinations, but I have another iinage to suggest as well. It is that of the Bara Imambara in Lucknow, built I>y the Nawab of Avadh, Asaf-ud-Daula in 1784 as a farnine relief project. The ornate central hall of the Imambara, containing side by side the tombs of Imth Asaf-ud-Daula and the building's architect, Khifayatullah Khan, is one of the largest vaulted galleries in the world, 50 metres long and 15 metres high. In the courtyard of the Irnambara is a magnificent mosque and to its Ieft a 'bottomless well', connected to the Jumuna, and said to contain the treasures of the Nawab in its sunken depths. Most amazing of all, the Irnambara rests on a maze of Passages leading away from Lucknow should trouble arise with 'the British', while an external stairway leads to a colnplex bhulbhulaiya or labyrinth, with several entrances only one of which Permits exit! Technology as fabula. Like the great architectural marvel tha! it is, the Lucknow I ~ r r h a r aiwnany things at once-a n~ausoleum;a mosque, SYmbol of protection against the ravages of nature, an

"

TecbnoIopv as Fahuh 38

Technobrat

e s c a p e from 'the enemy', a place of legend a n d buried treasure. That its calm, classical exterior conceals a shock of mazes and labyrinths teaches us that any search for the 'truth' necessitates a perilous passing through many, diverse gates ...

Door Ten: Exit? The IIT campus, it happens, is full of surprises. Fences and straight paths may cut its grounds up with a severity any military cantonment would be proud of but, as if to compensate, unexpected birds nest alllong its great neenls and hanyans. Grey lapwing l~alancedelicately on the edges of monsoon puddles. Silly pigeons sporting irridescent plumage on unlikely concrete ledges mimic the neck movements of accompliskd Bharatnatyam dancers. Now and then a great, gorgeous, clunlsy peacock suddenly knocks a cyclist off that carefully-laid grid of a road. The cyclist collapses, dazed by his encounter with the divine. For this is Tvashtri-land, where all sorts of messages fly about in the air, waiting to be deciphered ... A peacock's cry is among the harshest sounds I've heard. I imagine the pqcocks on campus, strutting ahout in all that gloryplumage, must be telling me things-presumably about beauty, about surprises, and most of all, about irony. I could be mistaken of course. Humanities-wallahs tend to be shaky on facts. Throughout HU484, I constantly turned out to be wrong about the winged culture of the Tvashtris. An example: contrary to my gloomy expectations, I found that the solemnity attached to academic proceedings in IIT d ~ dnot in fact prevent my having a great deal of fun in class. Did the Tvashtris in my charge share some of this sense of enjoyment and of exploration? I hope agalnst hope that they did, for it would prove a true measure of intellectual freedom within the campus, of the hopeless but q u ~ t esplendid flight of, say, a peacock. The 'Student Prospectus' of IIT, Delhi, declares that:

39

The accent of student Me and activities on the canlpus is to provide an invigorating and creative environment which promotes independent thinking a n d introspection and leads the young students to become more aware of the consequences of their own actions. This allows them to weave a pattern of life w h c h equips them to stand up to the many pressures of community living, trains them in the making of inferences in everyday situations, helps them derive more insight into their personal relationships and arouses in then1 a sensibility of aesthetic experience.

As an affirmation of liberal sentiments in education, the statement is exemplary. Were Technohrat to contribute even marginally to the realization of the ideal portrait presented in that Prospectus, I shall be gratified. Should it fail to d o so, however, the experience of working on this book has at least given me the courage to make an inference which seems correct, even if counter-intuitive. The invi'ncibility of modern technology app-ears directly proportional to the invisibility of its makers. To ascertain just how dangerous and how necessary a place technology holds within our cultures, perhaps we need first to humanize an activity that always existed, tantalizingly, at the edge of the divine. Of the mythical Tvashri, the Rigueda said: He is the sbaper who h a Y $ x n to heatlen and earth a n d to all things their ,form. Including peacocks. In Technohrat, I have attempted to hold the mirror up not so much to nature, as to the nature of engineers, Tvashtri-Vulcans in the pantheon of modernity. Looking into the faces of the young engineers in this h w k has meant, in that sense, facing u p to technologythe complex mechanics of mind as it might take shape in the twenty-first century.

I have no doubt at all that lndio will progress industrially arld otherwise, that she will advance in science and technology...But what I am concerned with is not merely our material progress but the quality and depth of our people. Gaining power through industrial processes, will they lose fhemselves in the quest of individual wealth and soft living?..,Can we combine the progress of science and technology with the progress of the mind and the spirit also? We cannot be untrue to science because thot represents the basic facts of life today. Sti!l less tan we be untrue to those basic principles for which lndio has stood through the ages. Let us then pursue our path to industrial progress with all our strength and vigour ond, a t the same time, remember thot industrial riches without toleration, compassion and wisdom, may well turn t o dust and ashes.

- lawahorlo1 Nehru

SEW-DEFINITION: The Lexicon of the Technologist

Scenes from a classroom. Act I: the usual backdrop for the first days of term-pandemonium. An extra factor added to the confusion, though. This was my own psychological unpreparedness for HU 484. It was not a matter of books and ideas. I believed, however mistakenly, that these I possessed in some measure. The trouble was that, despite having been at the IIT for nearly four years, I'd not taught a regular undergraduate 'elective' before. I had remained, as it were, in the wings-observing the Ribhus and Tvashtris at their strange forms of play, performing and competing in their ritual engineering bull-rings. Nor was a course on 'Technology 8r Culture' one I'd normally 'elect' to teach anyway. As a result, I was stricken by a sense of the unknown, reminded again that I was stranger in the palace of the hbhus, that I could be gored to death if I stepped into tirat gladiatorial arena. Conventionally cast in the expert role of ;l guru, I did not meet a nlinimum requirement for the part: I lacked knowledge of the minds of my shishybs-to-be. H o y then would we walk together for the rest of the route? In the event, it seerned I'd have to adopt a necessarily incautious apprbach, although I

knew several metaphors warning against the dangers of such a methodology. And they all huzzed, small succul~i,al3out my ears, at the time. This legion of phrases included the on~inous'rushing in where angels fear to tread', 'taking the I)ull by the horns', 'plunging in at the deep end', and 'not looking before leaping'. Yet of course, if one looked, one would not leap at all into that morass known as 'cultural studies'. So, without that pause for thought which proverbial wisdom advises, hut which once embarked on might, I feared-and still fear-last forever, I reproduce below my working 'notes' for my very first class. I've just confessed that we began precipitously. It will be apparent from my initial jottings for the occasion that such bravado did nothing to exempt us from banality. The notes, pretty niuch verbatim:

What is Culture? Images and Sources of Culture Culture is a set of beliefs that you acquire about your own place and that of others in a human conlmunity. These constitute what is often known as your 'social identity'. Allnost all hunlan beings are suspended like spiders, or cocooned like caterpillars, within such a 'we13 of beliefs'. That, possibly, is why we often feel so secure within our 'own' cultural Ixlief system and so threatened when others from 'alien cultures' threaten to \>low our cover. The warnlth of belonging is supposedly what is conferred on 11s I3y a cu1tul.e. (Here I refer my class to argunlents by Willard Quine and Clifford Geertz.) Culture is a set of actions which you perform; it consists in ways of doing that are familiar and recognizable to others within the community but may seem estranging to others who are 'not us'. Such actions often display an enormous range from brushing your teeth with neem twigs to constructing culturally identifiable buildings. Remember the saying-'In Roine do as -the Romans do'. 'Romans' Ixhave differently from 'Indians' who behave differently from the 'Aztecs' who,

again, behave differently from the 'Japanese'. Now, why d o I put these words in inverted commas, I3nlshing the air with double-fingers? Well, because these are ways of marking, flagging, tagging, labelling, different cultural groups. In actual fact, of course, there are several sub-identities that an individual within a super-ordinate community might possess. Cultural skills consist in the ability to handle these various identities with ease, and to interpret cultural images which shift across time as well as terrain. (I hold up a couple of 'defamiliarizing' pictures for my class; they are from O.B. Hardison's vivid book Disappearing 7bmugh the Skylight. I can see fro111 beneath my hooded eyelids that the attention of my class is visually arrested, if only for a few seconds.) A student at the back raises his hand. (I shall call him SAB; it was the first class; I didn't yet know any names): How about those overlapping cultural identities you mentioned? Can w e say that just because we conforln to a grid which has a set of definitional features, that our identity is rigidly defined by those parameters? RBN (copping out): This is a question we will dwell on later when we consider the pros-and-cons of a thesis known in the literature as 'cultural relativism', but for the time being the short answer is-No. For two reasons. First, from the philosophical argument that no definition is ever complete (barring mathematical and logical tautologies-see arguments by Tyler Burge, Donald Davidson)-hence there is always the possibility of escape from under the definitional hatch. Second, because induction (meaning, roughly, our experience of and consequent beliefs about the world) shows that people grow, change, cross cultural barriers, so they are not in fact trapped whole and entire within cultural identities. A student in front asks (SIF, I'll call him; later I find out that he is Anurag the Vedic Sage): But even if cultural circumstances change the essential 'me' or 'I' remains the

46 Technobrut same, does it not? 1 know who I am. People who know me my mother, friends etc.--continue to recognize me, so-I mu8 logically possess an identity that is supra-cultural, untouched by culture. Yes or no? RBN (a little beleaguered, recognizing that this was 4 smart question along essentialist and eternalist lines, and instinctively not wanting to get into such deep waters' yet): Again, no simple answers. First of all, how do you krzozu you have remained 'the same'? Possibly, through introspection (i.e. looking inside your own head), self-observation, or relying on the observation of others? All three? None? In any case, there are ways in which personal identity can be lost such that you d o not know who you are... At this point, I attempt to deviate a little by discussing classic disal3lements of memory that could affect a person's sense of identity: Broca's and Wernicke's aphasias, Alzheimer's; but my class looks as if it too, young as it is, has been stricken by a sudden attack of mental fog. I guess, furtively, with one part of my mind, that their nlodel of the human being is a normalized one-youthfill, healthy, no complications. Perhaps it is too early to talk biology yet. 1 continue: RBN: I guess it's true that in most 'normal' cases we do have a sense of psycho-physical continuit)., that is, of retaining a 'same self across time ... SAB (helping out): I think what he (i.e. SIF) means is that whether we know it or not we do remain the same personhow we, or other people, know this is heside the point. RBN: Well, what's crucial fro111 the perspective of this course is that such an identity--our 'sense' of it-is almost always culturally attested. Point of view can never be 'beside the point' in a course on culture! At this stage, the discussion opened out a bit. It was n o longer possible for me to record individual voices. However, I did manage to nin the following points past my class-individual beads and not a chain-but I

Sev Definition

47

consoled myself with the thought that these were early days yet: 1. The concepts 'community' and 'culture' seem inseparable. There might be no such thing, properly speaking, as a culture that is limited to a single individual. Because

shared heliefs and practices are usually pmsupposed in the definition of culture, a wholly individual culture would be a contradiction in terms (read Wittgenstein o n 'private languages', if you are interested in this point). 2

Our acquisition of culture is marked by the simultaneous acquisition of technology, as well as attitudes towards technology.

3. A partial list of technologies includes food processing, building, sea-faring, aviation, war and entertainment technologies: these contribute to our images and evaluation of technology within a culture. In the days to coine, I grandly declared, w e were going to cross-examine ourselves on our technological values, beginning with Nehru's tribute to 'the scientific temper' and Gandhi's cultural critique of 'machinery', but nly class looked splendidly non-committal as usual, a band of sullen Tvashtris, unmoved by the excitelllents in store for them. Before me,. I saw a route without any travellers.. ..

Ramnik Speaks of his Travels: The journey of students through a course like HU484 does not hegin at the first lecture. It starts illuch before. The route to, through and then away fro111 this course is really a metaphor for the routes to, through and then away from IIT. I trace the journey, then, hack to its roots: the pre-IIT days of the technologists to-be. How did I take the decision to

48

Technobrat

'become a technologist'? My motivations-and I guess I am typical in this-lay far away from technology, even technocracy. They were really about 'next guy' syndrome. My final year roommate, for example, is still convinced film making was the field for hinl. 'Why did you take u p science in senior school then, man? Should've taken u p arts ...' 'C'mon man, I scored so well in science in tenth grade ... besides all guys who scored high took u p science ...and 1'111 doing well in this field ... BUT film making And so the choice is made. Everyone takes the IIT entrance-so everyone else does s o too. The IQ and diligence of those who 'make it' are probably unquestionahle. These are the qualities that get them the seat that almost a hundred others fiercely sought. But dedication to technology? Easily questionable. Not that the ace technologists are non-existent but those that really stick to technology for a career are, well4ifficult to locate. 'I'm taking the IIM entrance. b a r , technical jo\>s have nothing in them. Even multinationals pay more to management consultants than engineers. Your IIT stamp can't get you those salaries.' 'You mean four years of training down the drain?' 'Oh please ...Had to graduate in some field right? Besides if I was really interested in the field, I'd apply to US Univs., d o a Ph.D ...at least an MS. Become an expert!' ....I

Problems of DefLnition and Solution. Who is the Expert? As the class, technologists without an apparent mission, shambled

in the next day, I handed them sonle definitions--of culture, civilization, technology and measurement (sources: Lo?~gnza?z% Lexicon; Raymond Williams' K~tuords).This caused immediate trouble. Yhat good are definitions, demanded Mayank the Zen Master, one of the most sceptical of my students. In any case,

Dejiizitin~z 49 you yourself (RBN) have produced arguments to show the inadequacy of definitions. Yes, I replied teacher-wise and lately, but you have to climb ladders hefore you kick them from under you. That is the alleged purpose of intellectual discussion--of a class like this one. ~ a y a n klooked quizzical-an expression he has perfected. The rest of the class merely looked bored. We should as a classroonl con~munity,Mayank the ZM insisted, be primarily concerned about what to do. Solutions not definitions .ought to be what we're after. I saw his point. It was clearer and nlore familiar than mine. Play with ideas was a form of esoteric iclleness; it was inaction. To a class groping towards a discussion of value, which to them seemed ol>viously embodied in 'right action', words were illere obfuscation. How could anyone's dharnza consist in pure thought? Idiocy! It seemed I'd come up against a foundational plank of engineering thought sooner than I'd anticipated. Problenls were always solved through pr~ctical means-that was the wisdom of Tvashtri. Forget the verbiage. Yes, I could see I'd k ~ v eto rethink my strategy, find ways around this obstacle rather than rise to Mayank ZM's argumentative bait directly. Ganesha, vighnesuam, removerof-obstacles, I appealed to my alter-ego within, what woulcl you d o in such a pass? Oh, I'd retreat, said Ganesha, nonchalant, unless you're as good as I am at miracles. Well, I wasn't; so, I conceded: Okay, let's put aside definitions for the time being and consider some solutions put forward l>y a contemporary technocrat-R. Narasimhan. This humility Seemed to pay off and my class immediately looked more interested. My cynical diagnosis-technocrats arouse a n instinctive .filial interest in techrzohrats. Briefly, Narasimhan's cogent articles recommend the following cultural measures if Inclia is not to fall hehind in the technological revolution: a ) going in for widespread Self'

50

Technobrat

'technology literacy' b) buying into 'cutting-edge' technologies, especially computational ones. But I thought I spotted in these appealing-to-engineers notions of technological 'literacy' and 'cutting edge' technologies, the thin end of a wedge, whereby I could begin to discuss with my class a seemingly very different, but philosophically related, idea-that of 'expertise'. Who decides what a 'cutting edge' technology is? Who pronounces o n the paranleters of 'technology literacy' in a modern nation state? Whose justice Whose rationali(fl The words of the philosopher Alastair Macintyre, attempting to infer a model Aristotelian ethic for the contemporary world, returned to me. I wondered whether he would appeal to the Tvashtris, but we'd have occasion to discuss Aristotle's ideas later in the tern>. As to who decided upon the quality of Brahamanspati's sharpened axe, the cutting edge of technology, that wasn't hard to guess. Very probably, a panel of experts like Narasimhan himself, respected technocrats on whose advice any government had to rely implicitly. I wanted to raise questions about the role that this extremely influential modern priesthood played for obvious reasons. Many in my class were bound to live out the life of experts themselves in not too distant a future. Therefore, my queries at this time included the following: What sorts of power does an accreditqd expert wield within a culture? Why does this idea of expertise attach so crucially to the role of the technologist in today's global, post-industrial, massproduction cultures? Who exactly are experts? When you pass out of this Institute, will you be considered experts? And so, I was able to return by these roundabout means to the minimalist definition--dread word--of a 'technologist' as it is presented in the Longmany's Lexicon: A technologist is a specialist (read, expert) in

technology.

Sev &?finition

51

N~~ v e v helpful, was it? But one thing was clear: a technologist counted as an expert, a specialist. Lurking in that dead-pan, p i ~ ~ - ~ ~ t h i n g - adefmition, way was the w i s e connection bemen tachnology and expatise that I was looking for. Therefore, I hammered away at the students. Would a11 the people in my then consider themselves experts in the making? A long silence. Then Akhil the Pragmatist spoke up. Apparently, most institutes in our country award 'Engineering' degrees, but the insignia of prestige of the five Indian Institutes of Technology (Bombay, Delhi, Kanpur, Kharagpur and Madras) is that they g n n t degrees in 'Technology' instead. Predictably, the semantic categorization embedded in this very pertinent distinction impressed me deeply. Did it imply, I asked, that technologists occupy a somewhat more exalted position in the intellectual universe of the practical problemsolvers than mere engineers? My question me$ with an unexpectedly enthusiastic response. Of course, chorused my class, technologists were able to d o more than 'solve' problems, they were able to formulate them. They possessed, ideally, the kind of scientific knowledge that enabled a n overview of problems. That's why technologists could be regarded as innovators, but engineers not necessarily so. Another glance at Longman's confirmed this self-congratulatory understanding, at least partially. An engineer is a person who understands the making of machines, roads, bridges, harbours etc., a skilled person who controls an engine or engines, a person who works with machines in a factory... NO mention of specialization here. The engineer appeared to be defined solely in terms of the inaninlate things he built or controlled (harbours, engines), wlule the specialist technologist was consulted about machines by others in the community.

52

SelfD
Technobmt

The technologist's power was thus exercised more directly over people. I must confess that I had not regarded the technologist/ engineer divide in quite this light hefore and had pretty much used the two terms synonymously. In this usage, I now understood, I was typical of the non-scientific laity. I made no distinctions between Tvashtris and Ribhus; but nly class did. The engineers produced by other plebeian institutes were Ribhus, while they were that superior class of being-Tvashtris. The caste system, that stereotypic signifier of 'Indian culture', had shown its fell hand again. Akhil the Pragmatist's cornrnent made me realize with a slight shock that the IIT engineer's perception of himself as a technological specialist was quite different from mine. Furthermore, this self-ascription could arguably be seen as directing his future career path as an ideal 'technocrat' a la Narasimhan. As a technologist, he was already poised for managerial, not merely mechanical, takeovers. He was, just by the semantic hegemony of the epithet 'technologist', equipped with certain rights to pronounce on problems and to suggest solutions that could be carried out by others who were skilled at doing, but not at diagnosis-perhaps engineers from all those other non-elite institutes. Was there more to the hierarchy? We soon discovered with the aid of the nowreinstated Longman's that there was. This was the rough semantic scale. Scientist: A scientist who carries out new work in a science

53

Engineer: (see above) Technician: A highly skilled scientific or industrial worker, a specialist in the practical details of a subiect Mechanic: A person who is skilled in using, repairing etc. machinery I wondered silently if this ladder was pushed down far

enough, whether the last ning o n it would inevitably b e occupied by that ubiquitous creature-a robot. A not implausible thought-and it was something we'd I>e brought u p against time and again. Meanwhile, I suggested that we consider briefly some extensions of Saul Kripke's famous arguments on the general role of experts and expertise within a culture: 1. Experts are masters of nomenclature. They name things, and thus impose checks on the relationship between words and objects. Hence questions of semantics, of the meanings of terms, could not be dismissed all that easily. 2.

Experts are persons trusted by the community to pronounce o n disputes at Lhe houndarie.~qf knowledge and to settle problematic cases of definition (for example, when an object glittered like gold, felt like gold, but might really be imitation, only an inorganic chemist could assure the community of its 'true' value).

3. Experts are experts over either natural or nominal kinds, Technocrat: A person skilled in technology and using his skills for a purpose, especially in industry etc. Technologist: (see above)

scientists belong to the former set, technologists to the latter. Hence, in a neo-Kripkean hierarchy,~echnologiststurned out to be the absolutely highest court o f appeal as far as a

54

Technohmt

culture's use of nominal kinds (computers, aeroplanes, packaged foods, gas chambers, tables and chairs-the list is endless) went. They, the 'IIT hoys' were the very king-pins of material knowhow-what do you know! But my class, I could see, were not particularly impressed. Kripke via RBN seemed to be a highly complicated way of getting at a social perception they were already quite familiar with. Of course they were tops. They were Tvashtris. I capitulated again. Right, I said offensively, you might be crown-princes of consumerism, the highest of the high in the caste system of technocracy, but all the same, are you really cultured? I mean, do we have to assume that 'experts' are by definition cultured? That unexpectedly provocative word 'definition' again! It aroused in Mayank the Zen Mastel. a yen for the last word. In answer to a question about definitions in the curiously named 'Minor I Exam' (part of RBN's 'Archive'), he argued stoutly: At the outset, it becomes necessary to clarLfy the definition of a 'definition'. To he fair to all users of definitions, it would be rather inhibiting if the object under scrutiny began to dictate terms as to how others should define it! Since this discussion is confined to the relationship between culture to technology, and since both terms are indicative of human activity of some arbitrary sort, it becomes imperative for us as analysts to first of all free ourselves from the shackles of those 'sacred guiding words' that serve as definitions. Let me insist that in discourses involving human affairs, it is the human being that has the upper hand, and definitions have no sacrosanct status. So definiti6ns out of the window: and here's a Zen koan for

55 you, Mayank, written by the Bodhidharma himself some time in the sixth century AD: Self &finition

...No dependencies on words Pointing directly at the mind, Thus seeing oneself truly Attaining Buddhahood. I admit it's more than possible that words may simply be a measure of our fallibility. Enlightened souls, able to 'point directly at the mind' might be able to discard words; but if one was not already a Buddha, words could provide all the scant confirmation w e possessed of our common existence, of that communal form of 'being' which w e called our 'culture'. Hence, some words from another quarter.

Ramnik's Perspective: Pragmatism is the only way to survive. Preparing for the IIT entrance usually involves a two-year affair with tutorials, postal coaching and extra classes after schoo) hours. Followed by four years of grilling, gruelling schedules! Eight semesters in all, six courses a semester, an average of 30 contact hours a week, apart from project work, home tasks, assignments and extended lab hours. And as if that were not enough, there are three written exams a semester, throat-slitting competition for grades and fi~rtherentrance exams to prepare for. These circun~stances produce the qualities that are so visibly 'IITian'. 'After two consecutive night-outs, this damn programme is not working. I feel like such a failure! This is gonna kill my A grade...proba1)ly the only one I'm getting this semester.' 'Hey don't lose hope, man. If the due date gets extended, it's a cool scene. Others couldn't do it either. In the worst case, cop it! Go have chai and parantha at KLS.' Somewhere in this milieu of 'core' engineering courses

56

Self Definitiolz

Technobrat

and lots of practicals, but not quite integrated into the student psyche are sixteen compulsory credits of the HU courses (i.e. courses to be taken in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences)-the declared motive being to provide for overall intellectual development, a feel for the humanities, and the developlnent of comnlunication and personal skills. An aim met with much skepticism. 'I mean, why should I spend time doing criticism of Yeats? It's a waste. Besides, that course was forced on me. I'd rather have done econoinics but the seats were full. Anything but literature ...' 'Hey, it's more enjoyable than heat transfer at least. No numericals right? Just some essay work ...' 'You can say that ...you're one of those "English Boys Club" category. Why should my essay writing have to be good? Anyway the only language I'll eventually need to use is C++! And why can't they have Hindi literature courses?' In such a situation, choices of humanities courses are made often for the wrong reasons. Or perhaps we should say reasons inscrutable to the outsider. 'Look I don't give a damn about the course contents as long as the work load is low and the grades are good. Seniors were saying Modern Fiction is a cool one. The Prof. usually gives lots of A's.' 'Yup, I heard that too, but I am sure it will be oversubscribed. It's a lottery!'

The Lottery: Cultural Judgements, Measurements and the Construction of Pasts Written at the time, my notes sun~marizesome of the criterianot definitions mind!- we finally arrived at, after much to-ing and fro-ing, for judging a person 'cultured', with ratings on a scale of 1-10. But why did we argue so n&h about these criteria? ~ > r g e l because ~, there seemed to be a clash between

57

my world-view and that of my students. I thought, for example, that it went without saying that, when w e referred to a person as 'cultured', we automatically accorded her sonle appreciation of the arts, literature and so forth. A great many of my students found this point of view very strange. They didn't think a person's being cultured had anydung at all to d o with the arts. It required a great deal of on my part-including the by-now-familiar act of summoning a dictionary to my aid-to get the class to include any reference to aesthetic knowledge in our definition of culture. I saw I was up against another deep conviction of the practical Problem Solver as Expert. Knowledge of aesthetics, like the aforementioned play with language, was to be dismissed as light-weight. A cultured person could do without the froth-and lure-qf art. There were, thus, disagreements. Plainly so. The most important thing about the set of features recorded below is by no means its universal validity, or its large-sounding claims but simply the fact that it genuinely did emerge out of classroom debate, although I have to admit I pulled punches as far as the inclusion of feature numbers 4. and 6. went. Anyhow a cultured person, according to this class, had to be: 1. Socially accepted 2. Responsible towards the community, able to transcend personal concerns 3. Able to coinmunicate effectively with mernl~er of her cultural group(s) 4 Knowledgeable about the aesthetic productions of a culture 5 . Self-confident about her 'own' culture in a global context 6. Tolerant of 'other' points of view both within and outside her culture 7. Have a broad range of general knowledge \

Sev Definition

59

(&e hour-glass is more pleasing because it suggests a woman's

Questions from RBN: If you were asked to arrange each of the points above according to their relative importance, which would you place first? (The consensus which emerged is in fact reflected in the list above). How would you rate yourself on this scale? And 'how would you rate:

figure in its shape); functional (the hour-glass is less messy and less wasteful of a precious resource, namely, water); and historical (colonization by the British set in motion processes of cultural amnesia which made it a virtue for Indians to Iforget their pasts'. At last, I felt we might be getting somewhere, despite the still inchoate nature of our talk.

a) the most cultured person you know b) the most unci~ltured,and c) the average IIT/D undergraduate on the same scale?

Hearsay from Ramnik:

Answering c) was fun: and the collective score we arrived at was 42/70! Not so greht, huh? On a scale of 1-10, the Delhi IITian rated himself: 9/10 on 1; 6/10 on 2; 7/10 on 3; 3/10 on 4;,4/10 on 5; 5/10 on 6; and 7/10 on 7. However, I did not want our conversation to degenerate altogether into some variety of party-game. And so, we veered off sightly at this juncture to explore another tack. Thought: could technologies as well as persons be said to be 'accepted' or rejected by cultural groups at certain periods? Here we considered, as I remember, the case of the measurement of time-the manner in which two now obsolete timetechnologies had once competed-the 'water-bowl' and the 'hour-glass'. Most of the Tvashtris knew the hour-glass, but few had heard of the water-bowl although it is mentioned in such classics as the mathematician Bhaskara's Lilavnti, and is said to have originated in India (the coconut has a natural hole at the hottom which slowly drains out water). I showed my class photographs of wondrous Mughal paintings where the water-bowl is foregrounded in depictions of the birth of Akbar and Jehangir. Yet today they knew only of the hourglass. Why? Why had one rather than the other obsolete technology sum'ved i n czlltural memory? The cpestion seemed to interest my class and in tutorials they came up with at least three classes of reasons: aesthetic

'Heard of "Technology and Culture?" It's a new course, new prof. Couldn't be too heavy.. I mean what can you have when the title is so vague. I think if you have a knack for sounding vague and gassing around in "Angrezi" about nothlng-it's the course to take.' Most of the 'good grade' courses are oversubscribed at pre-registration time. Econoinics and management courses are hot favorites. But when the registration sheet shows you didn't win the lottery, you have to choose one from the 'left over' ones still open. My own choice for HU484 had been clear. I had already taken a course called 'Science, Technology and Society' which had 'sensitized' me to issues that I had never imagined existed and had convinced me of their importance for technologists themselves. For some others, it was a hit and miss choice they made after attending a week of the class, and yet others took it by elimination. Still, I discovered to nly surprise, quite early on in the course that a sizeable chunk of the class ulas receptive and participative in critiquing their 'own' community, their 'own' profession. 'So, what d'ya think? Planning to stick to I-IU484 or change?' 'Too early to say, man. Did she say presentations? Means hours down the drain. God knows what she'll want the topics to be ..."instruments speak" or some such jazz ...If la13

I

60

Technobrut

instruments speak, I think they should d o the presentations too!' 'Very funny. Didn't you enjoy the part about technologists being "higher" than engineers? We are the only ones who get B.Tech (Bachelor of Technology) degrees as against the nomlal B.E (Bachelor of Engineering) right? 'Yeah, it is enjoyable no doubt ...hesides no need to take notes ...can catch up on some sleep on the back benches if it gets boring. But yaar, he honest about it .... Do you think these big words, so called "discourse" can make food? I mean we are after all just very conlplex biochemical reactions. So how does it matter what the truth about the position of technology is? It's OK for time pass, but it doesn't move us a step towards gaining our material goals, which should be the priority. ' 'We technologists have to maintain our position in society. So we shouldn't be bothered about what "they" think about US ....'

'Oh don't worry. "They" can't d o without "us", rather without technology and so without us! And anyway, the IIT Engineer stamp will get you a good wife without going through classifieds, so what's your worry about the social position of technologists, ban? 'No stamp will get me a grade till I work for my presentation so just let me d o that, OK?' Ah, the presentations. In this chapter, they are by Ramnik the Philosopher, Radheyshyam, Choric Commentator and Raghuvendra, Choric listener. But before the presentations, our keytext and subtexts:

~eytext-~awaharlal Nehru 'The Discovery of India': Nehru is widely canonized as the architect of modern India. There could therefore be few better voices to initiate a popular discussion on science and the future of India. He is the first of our gurus. Although

61 Nehru's discourse seems to typify the opti~llistic progressivis~n of a technological determinist, it would, I think, be a mistake to oversilnplify his position. Nehnl's views are always in uneasy juxtaposition with Gandhi's. This keytext thus lead naturally on to the debates in our next ~hapter; it also provides a necessary backgrouncl to the debates in this one. Se.lfDcrJi:urition

Subtexts: Martin Heidegger: 'The Question Concerning Technology'. This famous meditation by a phlosopher whose phlosophy was, thankfully, not as suspect as his politics, concerns technological 'essence'. In what does the 'soul' or essence of technology consist? And how does modern technology, which treats Nature as a 'standing reserve' to be converted into utility objects, differ from the ancient Greek notion of tecbne as an aesthetic mode?

Sam Pitroda: 'The Resistance to Technology' : Saln Pitroda is an expatriate Indian engineer (not from the IIT!) who emigrated to the United States as a young man and proved hugely successful there as a inventor and businessman. He returned to India in the 1980s to advise Rajiv Ganclhi on India's 'Technology Missions'. Pitroda symbolizes the type of the successful engineer, whose Nehruvian faith in technology has brought him great rewards. Although, in the true spirit of engineering, Pitroda has not written much, his speeches are hard-hitting. His main contention seems to be that in the modern world technology is, so to speak, no mere esoteric Heideggerian essence. Technology is a 'happening place'. To resist technology is to be out of it. A country like India simply cannot afford to sleep through the 'information revolution'.

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Seyorfmition

Technobrut

On the Continent of Circe, Encircling Questions

fascinated the Tvashtris; they just loved numbers and serialization.

Reading Nehru's keytext, the irony of discussing his notions of modernity in the most 'modern' 6f 'Thircl World' scenarios, overcame ~ n eonce more. The questions which follow, culled from my classnotes, were not always directly connected to what he said. They are lllore to d o with the subterranean agitation I witnessed anlong the Tvashtris unwillingly trying to come to grips with the phrase 'Nehn~vian nationalis~u'.

3. Co-ordination and measurement. I asked why these concepts may be crucial in a discussion of the links between technology and culture. Consider, I said, the fact that most cultures have always been obsessed with measurement-measuring the heavens, measuring distances, even measuring beauty in terms of 'vital statistics'.

1. Change and continuity in a culture. Quite early on, I'd introduced the HU484 class to the old but still catchy conund~uniof 'Aristotle's Boat' in which an old boat is replaced plank by leaky plank. The question of course is: at what stage in this process does it change into a 'new' boat? When, that is, did the optimistic Nehruvian notion of 'hodernity' transform itself into the 'impatient with hypocritical Nehn~vianism'version of nlodernity favoured l ~ ythe IITians? 2.

My class perked up. Vital statistics!. Is it possible that measurements reassure the cultural psyche by marking out co-ordinates, and thus placing the 'self within a locational grid? In the case of the beauty contests, did measurement provide a simple way of identifying an 'ideal type'? Did different cultures display different attitudes towards measurement? For example, classical 'Hindu' texts always used inflated numbers-tens of thousands-to convey their notions of power and infinity, while 'Western' culture was much more subdued in its use of numbers. Might all this cultural involvement with measurement ensure that those who specialized in taking measurements-technologists-had a special social space reserved for them?

Cultural environments, past and present. Here, w e made ambitious co~llparisonshetween the present shape of technology and the technological map as it looked in 1492, using the lavishly illustrated Guinness Book of Records ,for 1492 for this purpose. What effect did the Inany 'technological revolutions' in the interim have on the global psyche as we had inherited it through historical processes such as colonization? Henry Fordishly, I found the Tvashtris paid very little attention to the historical anxieties concealed in questions such as these but, characteristically, they were absolutely riveted by the pictures in the Guitzness Book, especially medieval instrumentation, which calil~rated measurement. Measurement, I was to find out, endlessly

63

Ahem, yes--the Tshvastris seemed to agree that they occupied a special space ...

4. Technologies as solutions to the co-ordination problems of cultures. For example, the technologies to measure time that w e have discussed clearly help .us to come together at appointed places, to align accurately with general schedules at airports, in classrooms etc. Timetabling the world...

-

!

64 Tecbuobrat 5 . Technologies embody the visil,le, tangilde aspects of 'science' and culture. They are the 'things' that survive to tell us about the subjectivities and thought-processes of past cultures, which w e cannot get at directly. H o w d o w e interpret cultures through their technologies?

Do cultures have peak-periods? And d o we tend to identify these 'peak' periods from monuments and the like? Because, in that case, technological strength at a given historical time in a culture could well contribute to the notion of cultural 'golden ages' (Asokan pillars, Chola temples, medieval cathedrals constnlcted allnost wholly with the help of windlasses). Or should we reject the idea that cu1tul.e~are so monolithic that they can ever 'peak' in unison? Rather, all cultures are subject to different stresses and strains at any given time. The same Greek culture which produced the Parthenon was founded on slavery, and the Taj hlahal built with sweated labour.

6. Finally, how d o w e address the imaginative task of visualizing cultures of the past and future? How would we put together a picture of a bad or undesirable culture? A good one? What part does technology play in this imaging of culture(s). To this theme of technologically motivated utopias and dystopias, we returned more than once during our course. As I've pointed out, the Tvashtris were remarkably kcen on neatly enumerated questions, even as they displayed a candid disinterest in their content. Polnts 1-6 held them rapt as I scribbled rapidly on the board. Afternards, they Ixoke excitedly into spee;h.. .

SeJf Lk?i'nitio~i

65

~amdk Records t h e Class R e s p o n s e t o Nehru: 'Hey, why does Nehlu tly to diplomatically reconcile his views with Gandhi's when they are so Idatantly contradictoly? Nehru wants inclustly with wisdom, machinely with spirituality intact. Gandhi declares them inconsistent with each other. 1'111 not claiming they are inconsistent like Gandhi says, 1,ut can we stop atteinpting this pretence of reconciliation with Ganclhi's views and promoting industry, starting IITs, on the other?' 'Talking of IITs, I I ~ e tnot just Ganclhi, even Nehru would collapse with shock if he saw them today! IITs can't even foster a desire to stay in India. Anyone who can contribute to science and technology, just leaves. N e h n ~said "The IITs are for US", we've taken the us to he U.S.' 'Mr. Bombastic is THE name for Nehl-LI.All these feelings he gets ahout India, depth of soul and what not. Totally escapes me. Any old enough civilization would exhilit the same features, man. What's so great ahout it?' 'Nehru so easily assumes that technological change is "progress"! Change from chnrkhas to looms is progress for Nehru, it's not for Gnndhi. Nehru is blintled hy the brightness of science and technology. I hold him responsible for fostering this view of our government which sanctions all and sundry technology imports and impleinentations based on economic surveys alone. The respect his philosophy has enjoyed all these years inust be questionetl, ~ n a n ! ' With the open atmosphere of clel~atein RBN's class, our presentations became in the end inore ro~rncltahle conferences. The 'stratospheric' levels of cross-topic cliscussion often gave me a feeling of travelling through hypertext. In a class of fifty, soilleone or the other would click at every link, taking with him or her the whole class to a new page, a new topic of discussion with as many potential links as the previous one. Anyone with experience surfing the.S\Jet will know the ease with which one can get lost even forgetting the original aim.

I

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Technobrut

Self oeftnitiorr

But then, in RBN's class there was always the rigorous structure of notes, student presentations, and examinations that kept the track defined-albeit a broad track. Too broad? From day one, my apprehensions about the popular view of technology amongst my co-students began to be confirmed. While the whole class was willing to debate and even re-define definitions, I could sense that everyone granted that technology was an applied science-a Inere product of science, a sort of poor relative. When 'Longman' was circulated by RBN, there was much debate over the difference between an engineer and technologist. Yet, on the same page was the following definition of technology:

d o that? Can it bring fulfilment to the senses? Is it an agenda for action?' 'Well, I want to argue this because the dominant view of the science-technplogy relationship is the converse, which is a dangerous view. To quote Eda kranakis: The dominant model of science portrays technology as applied science, and assumes a hierarchical, almost parasitical relationship between science and technology. If assumes that technological development follows and is dependent upon paths of scientific progress, while science follows its o w n internal line of development, largely independent of technology.

Technology: the practical uses of the discoveries of science. Why this narrow definition that clearly sulmrdinated their whole arena of activity to that of scientists? In an attempt to prioritize my own profession, I presented to the class some of the arguments against t h s perception of technology.

Ramnik (Facing the class seated in the committee room, after college hours, in the evening, with hot tea and samosas as a specially arranged bonus) 'I shall present a case for the epistemological independence and historical and ontological priority of technology over science' (Exchanged glances, suppressed smiles) 'Sorry? Please explain' 'I wish to argue that there is a significant sense in which technology forms a bocly of knowledge distinct from science, and as a world view is historically and ontologically prior' (Skepticism on many faces ... Big Words Bull ) 'Why d o you want to d o that? Why does anyone want to

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I

'A drastic consequence of adopting this view is that it leads to Technological Determinism. Technological Determinism is the theory that technology progresses by working out the practical implications of new scientific results, and thus is a force that impinges on society from outside. Society has no control over its dynamic. 'Technological deter~ninis~n is dangerous because it takes away f i ~ m society the power to decide its technologies. Besides, thls view denies a thought component and a cognitive dimension to technology. The technologist's activity is supposed to be subordinate to the scientist's since the scientist supplies the basic theory.' 'Are you trying to say that we can apply a theory when it does not exist?' 'Precisely the point. I an1 saying that technologies can, and do, exist outside of theories. They can even lead to theories being formulated. Low technologies used by early civilization had no theories prececling them. Even for high technologies, it has happened t l ~ ttechnology has first appeared and then theories were proposetl to explain them.

(,s

-

T?~./~iiot~r(/r

'In :I lecent pso!cct ; ~ t IlSc, ~~ar1g:l~osr c,allc~l !\S'l'liA. rec.llnolog~c.sclc\.elopecl in tlic 1\11-al town of 1:ng1.1,i11c.11l~lirl:;. ;I srnc~liclesst(>\-eancl \\.oc>cl g:rsifiec, openeel L I new ~ area o f funcl:~~nent;il i-e\cal-cll i r l heat tl.;lri,\lel. arlcl ~ I I ( p l q . s i c ot cc~nlI>~rstion. ' T e c h n o l o g i c ; ~ r cnot j t ~ \ t i l ~ s / r ~ ! ~ i ~ c111 ' ? ~tile t . s 1l:incls o f scicnlists 1,ilt rLit1rel- tcrtile :I-oi~ncl t'os n i l \ knonlrclge t o pcr11iin:rte 1 el(1 cc )ncccle. :I> IlI1N 1i:is pointeil out. tl1:it 111). :rrgLrmcnts run the I-isk o f i.s.\cnt~:~lizing technology, l711t f'eel t11:lt since they run contr;lr) to the clo~ninant \-ie\\,. .\i~c,lr pro\roc;~tionis rlrecletl!.' \'ishwnrupt. tllc (;:incllli:ln :ind i i e e m tile 'I'rctdiiion:~li.\t: 'Sirlet. tc.cl~nology\ v a not tht. foi~ncl;~tion tor scicZnce in (I// c;r\es. 11o\v c;111 ).OII ;1\\1111ic' ; I II(~C(>.\..S(~~J, pr.i(II.I~). ~ O I tecliril )logy' Ancl h o ~ v1,:111 yo11 I>c ilr-c tl1:1t .'sc lc-ntif~c" (3s pccl~l:lti\.c t l ~ c ~ ~ l gclicl l l t not in m:uny c:t\i. ~ , r e c e d r . or ;it It*;t\.t p:c~:rllcI. tllc~ni:ll.;ing o f tools fro111 tllr ~ . ; l ~ l ~ co *S stilrles?' t I<;lrllllik: "I'he spirit of t11c. psio~,ityt11;tt 1 ;ill1 t:tllii11g : I \ X I I I I is not spcc~f~ic tc) ~,artict~lar. in!.crltic~)ns o r t11rol.ics. I t is tlic clcrper claim th;~tt11c \\.orlcl \,ic\\. l,r-olnl~tc.clhy teclrnology is :I pscconclitiol~ tor \c.icncc, xnci i t 1 5 In tliis s e n t . tl1;lt lc~'hnolo&y:~ssuliies:I ~lecr%:lry[ > I iorit).. (:I )n;e111po1 :lry scic.nc.c~ is csl>c.~imc~nt:il. clcl>cncienr iipon z;>ccit~crlrc:~nings 01' I ~ I c ' ; I ~ \ I I I - ~ . I ~ ~ c ilncl . I ~ ~ . i i e~illx~cliccl in its irl>tl.il~~~ent:~tiori (Il~clcl S i c i ~ ~ t ~ ~ ~ r e r ti : ~r tci ~o ro o i c : ,t i i ~ l l , c.icr1c.e l > c) ~n l~c cl~.pcnclentorr tcc l i ~ i o l IS\.. t '7'0 in\ c t i g a t c t l ~ ecl~.cpcr.;~rxrrlnc.nt, \\~c'llI ) c g n :it !llc, I,i~tl~pI:lcrof nlo\:~ncc ~\.;t> :I 1~c1-1ocIoi ~ I . c . .; II I~I C ~ I I I I I ) I - ~ I . c c I ~ . tecl~nologic:~l I~~C(I :iclv:tnces. In . \ . I ) OSj, n.:~tc.srn~ll. t ' l l - t st:~rtt:cl npl~c,:t~ing Within l o o ),cal-,i,502 I n.:ttt.~rnill~ \ - c s ein ol>c~-atic>n in Engl:tncl alone. Winclrl~ill\\.ere colulnon t h ~ - o ~ r g l ~IS111-ope c ~ i ~ r 1,)- 12/40, i\T'e'cl /,?in cli>ct~>,\rng~,\\.incll:~>\vs" in class anel li[3\ Il:rcl h r ) \ \ . n 11s the C;ilitl?le.s.s I,'ciok (!/' Rcc~irzls,/i)l. 14()2). clc,\.clc~)pn1cntsf~~nclanlcntall!.;llrt~.cclrllc \\.:I). l l ~ ~ n i a r \l sic\\.ccl

n,tLlrc. F(w the lilst l i ~ ~ i tiir r, ~ r i I i i>cirr \ l l ~ , \ ~ c c l throug]l a ~~iccli:unical11ict:11>1101 ' l . e c h n o l ~ ~ g ya l v ~~llccliatccl ~ > c i c e l ~ t ~ofo nt i ~ n e . 'l'i~nc I,ecame prccisel!~ c l i l : l r l t l i X " , ;llliI c l 1 l : l l l t l f l ; I l ~ ~ c ~ : l t L l ~I>C'c':llll? e cxploitrcl f01. ustancling rcsc,l\.c", a soilrce of rnel-S\ to hL,,llan !lse, ' ~ ' c ~ ' ~ i l 1 O ~l O ~ gC>' ~ \ ~ : ltile ~ ~ \~\ ' O I I - ~ C:l\~ :I ~ ' ~ 1 1 i ' L l ~ : l i ~ ~ coherynce of fol-ccns7'ccl:nOic)~1-tt~i>c 111:ll~lclll:lt~~~~ !.I\\'\. And t l l e e :lrc not scientific ~ - c . ~ ~ i t . \I,ilt . r:~tIler the' grooncl mo(lern x'icnce !l.:Iyton).' I\;I:i).::ink the. Zen lla\[cr: 'Ili~t\ ~ o n l t l\.or1 not agrec, l?:llilnil.;, that it is pc~)intly\>to concc.ntr;~teo n tllis I I ~ > O I U ~ ? ~ C clli(.kcll and egg l~~-ol~len~--\\.llic~ll c m l e fi1.t. teihr~c~log). o r science' Shoulcln't \\.cz 1;1rlie1-I,c con\icle~-inx\\ l i ; l r \\.e ;rse tloil!r( \\.it11 oLlr tecl~nologics?' Ramnik: ' O n tlie o t l i e ~11:lncl.~t 1.oi1arc. :it 1111 uni-ollito~f:~l~le with tllc cloniin:int i.ie\\. 01- tcc.llric)log). :ts :ippliccl scie~lc,c., then is it 11ot i~iiperati\.c.to cltl);rrc tlii. clt~c.tion:IS 17;ll.tof t11:tt very socio~politic:tl :tgr11cl:1 to \ \ ~ l ~ i c ~ l>l. O \ I see111 to l>e co~rlrnittecl:" 1<11ctoric:~i~ l o i , > t f~oo~111cto1,1c.:11 ~~ ( I L I ~ * , \ ~ I ( . I ~I tI i,\ -:-+(I 1) 111.

Tile C;o11l11littcr I < o o 1 1 1 1 1 1 i 1 > t l>r ~ , l o \ r c l 1:111-1Iir!. , ~ii\cl~%>iori.soutside ;)lc.:tsc I % L I I I ~ c ~ t ' o fiuing. ~-e :tll 111~.tc.;~ ( ~ i p > I I ~ L I >l)e ~

collrctecl, cl1.1i1-milst I)c ~ ) \ r t I>;~cl\into tlic c.l:ls\i-oom t11c.y caliic t l c 1 1 1 r . Sleej>in,q \ o n i ; I [ tile I~.tc.li--:~\\:~kcn' 'Iirtrr coi11cln.t y011h;t\e Iicl~t i t s11011ei tll:111tlli\:' \ \ ' I l ) ' don't \,oli get :I I)cpr, c h ; ~ n g ct o I l l l l i l . ~ l l i t i t . , " I)iciil't ) . O I I l<no\\, al)o~lttllc c2ve~it ;I[ Kt~nl:tontocl:1y2 1lostc.l l , o i i ~ t b lo,\t.. i~il:~,yine! At ie:t\t, yo11 \ I 11 )i~li~ccl:I \\.:(I I I I I I ~ " ' A / I C , \vIleri )~, its y o i ! ~tils~l,1'111 surr J . I I L I ' ~ I I I I : I ~ < ~t~ I o r ~ g e r . ' '\X'h;ite\,c~-,1 \\.c~n't 11l:ike the \\.hole c,I:l,\ i.lte f(3s dinncr a t the Ilo>trl. i\~lcI 1f ).ou :II.C s o > C I - I O L I ~; t i > o ~sli:~rir~g ~t l-o~~r vim. point, st;ut the c l ~ s c i ~ s ~a~t toc n. ~nliclnigllt in tlic \\-in:_: Yotl'll gct 1l111cli1,ctter l-csl,on,ic So1iict11111g I co~1lcl11 r : I ~ I C T \\,it11 r ~ ~ o rThe c . rc:tl ~ I I ~ O ~ I ~ I : I ~ I O I ~

SelfDefinition

'Powerful and moneyed cultures have more scope and opportunity to go ahead with the invention of technologies, whereas the temptation in impoverished societies like our own is to make d o with the substitution/up-gradation of techniques, almost always borrowed, rather than evolve our own technologies. And this results in a vicious circle of mental dependence, and the conviction that some other society "out there" is not only better off, but always the powerhouse of ideas-whereas w e are only followers'. 'Is this guy saying we d o nothing? I mean, invent no technologies?' 'Feeling hurt? Where did this patriotic one originate from in you? Stop reacting from your spine. He is right, and you are doing nothing to change the scene ... just working harder for GRE, right?' 'Are you blaming me? Please take a break ... it's the damn system that makes me wanna quit this country. What can I d o with a Ph.D. here? They give 600 rupees start extra if you have a Master's over Bachelor's ... Maybe there is n o category for the Ph.D.'s s o they'll pay the same as to Bachelors!" 'Its OK yaar, why're you getting senti? Even I'm taking GRE so you don't have to convince me.' 'Actually, if I d o make it to the US, I will eventually come back.. maybe after 15 years ... make my contribution ...' 'Yeah? With your two kids saying "India's so duhty, Pop"!' '0 yaar don't start your phattas ... watch out for Raghuvendra's presentation, I wrote half of it!' Raghuvendra presented to the class a reading o n Habennas, which tied into the ongoing discussion o n the nature of technology, and carried it further.

views and knowledge exchange for IITians occurs not in the classroonls but back at the hostel. The classroom environment tends to kill the synergy that invariably flares when ten students crowd around in a 8 ft x 6 ft room. Our own caves to come back to and paint-our experiences of the day ... 'These Kara guys never ever sleep! Whatever the time, all the lights are on. Ace wonns!' 'Give it up man. You are no less. And don't worry so much, sleep or no sleep you will get your schol. That's your main concern, right?' 'D.R. man D.R.! Does it strike you my departmental rank depends o n these buggers keeping awake? Won't get a reco with my falling D.R.' 'You won't get attendance for the 8:00 ail1 lecture if you don't sleep now. And bother about your falling grey hair as much as your D.R. It will get you good recos in Kailash (the girls' hostel) OK?' The next presentation was made by Radheyshyam. He carried forward the prioritization of technology by raising technology to a pedestal higher than 'technique'.

Radheyshyam 'We have to make a distinction between "technology" and "technique" because this is a feature which differentiates between more and less powerful cultures. Techniques may be seen as various strategies and methods to achieve the "same" end result/product, while true applications of technology result in "new" products. For example, there may be various ways in which to build a car, using hand-tools, machine-tools, factory assemblages etc. These are all techniques, each with its own advantages and disadvantages, more or less efficient, but all equally techniques. In contrast, when Ford first designed a inotor car or Watt the steam engine, they were producing new concept3 in transport that could actually b e applied; these were technologies.

71

Raghuvendra

't

I

'The very concept of technical reason is ideological. Not only the application of technology but technology itself is domination (of nature and inen)--methodical, scientific,

72

Technobrut

calculated, calculating control. Specific purposes and interests of domination are not foisted upon technology "suhsequently" and from the outside; they enter the very construction of the technical apparatus. Technology is always a historical-social "project": in it is projected what a society and its ruling interests intend to d o with nlen and things. At the present stage, man is perhaps more powerless over his own apparatus than he ever was before ... One may insist that the machinery of the technological universe is "as such" indifferent towards political ends-it can revolutionize or retard a society. An electronic computer can serve equally in capitalist o r socialist adnlinistrations; a cyclotron can be eqi~allyefficient tool for a war party or a peace party ...However, when "technics" becomes the universal form of material production, i t circumscribes a n entire culture; it projects a historical totalitya "world".' The three of us had tried to carry technology beyond Singer, Holnlvard and Hall's definition in their nionumental 'History Of Technology': 'How thlngs are commonly done or m~lade'ancl 'What things are colnrnonly done or made'. These 'definitions' hacl already started sounding like one-liners to us. .. So, through the ~nediunlof the (compulsory) major exam, a Viltual Roundtable was organized where w e could shoot questions at each other. Me also constmcted a 'virtual clone' of each of us w h o would came into existence when w e had questions addressed to ourselves. These cl~~estions are stored, they are along with RBN's notes, in her computer-where available to interested parties! Although, w e d o not reproduce it here, it is that Virtual Roundtal3le with clones sitting around to which all readers of Technobrat are invited ...

Machines and Modernity Speaking of invitations, our course was gradually settling into a groove-pre'sentatlons, rebellions, keytexts, s ~ ~ b t e x tand s

I

all-when I w a s b y lucky chance invited to attend a seminar where Bnlno Latour, co-author of Laboratory Lzf'e and author f, 7he Pateri.~ation of' France was the principal speaker. In his talk, Latour nlacle a striking argument. Looking into the 'secret' activities of scientists in their laboratories, said Latour, would seem to facilitate a much clearer understanding of the conlplrx concept 'modernity'. NOW, what went o n in a scientific laboratory? According to Latour, a laboratory was actually the scene of a multiparty conversation between instnunents, objects of investigation such as microbes, metals o r mnice scientists and technicians, as well as all sorts of political and institi~tionalpowers. In other words, the scientist was just one link in a chain of potentially infinite agency. Does the ozone layer speak? asked Latour dramatically. Yes, it does, I>y writing its 'message' o n our instruments. Thus, in the Latourian schenle of things, agents are not just human agents. Rather, various kinds of material oI3jects are constantly engaged in an interaction or dialogue with the scientist. That conlplicated whole is what constiti~tes the discourse of science and technology, not just what the 'scientist' says, or chooses to write down. But what has this radical entanglenlent of the scientist with non-human agents got to d o with the explication of 'modernity'? In order t o answer this question, Latour began by appealing to the traditional nature/cultul.e, fact/value, discovery/invention, nolllinal kinci/natural kincl, objective/ subjective, science/non-science divide which is standardly made in Western histories of science. Rational, nile-governed studies of 't~uth's o to speak, are located o n the left hand sicle of the slash, while cultural studies are situateel o n the emotive right hand side. Latour's point is that the entire Weqern epistemology of science, including the foundation of social sciences like anthropology, has been based on a n assunlption of this

74

Technobrot

dichotomy. It has led to science itself being conceptualized in terms of a pre-modern, inagic and ritual oriented period of existence where polarizations were 'conf~~sed'. Societies did not then make a distinction hetween human and non-human agents. Either aniillisl~l or anthropocentrism, or both, constituted the ordering (or disordering, if you like) principles of such pre-modern science. From this Cartesian perspective, supposedly less 'advanced' civilizations like the Indian or the various African cultures continued to confuse these categories, and therefore never really developed 'modern science'. Newtonian science, emblematic of true 'Western' modernity, managed to get rid of this 'pre-modern' confusion completely. Therein lay its trilllnph. RBN's query for Latour here: Consider Newton. His biographers show that he appealccl to a luetaphysics in which a kind of divine animacy was displayed in nature; Sewton was a believer in numerology, astrology and all solts of protocols of 'pseudo' or magic-ritual science. Does this not run counter to the claim that the fact/value distinction n u s very strictly maintained in 'o1odern1or ' ~ e w t o n i a nscience? ' In other words, w e return here to the proble~naticof Aristotle's Boat. Can a 'moment' of changeover be identified quite so unmessily? (But since, as happens at seminars, mine was merely an inchoate mental note--entered silently into the ledger of illy classroom talk with the Tvashtris-Latour, understandably, did not answer.) Instead, he completed his argument with panache hy suggesting that the triumphalism of that phase of 'modern' science is now being called into cluestion. In areas like quantum physics, for exainple, the role of the hitherto bctore~iout observer in the experimental situation has prot>len~atized the simple dichotonries proposecl by early modern science. In such cases human and non-human agents seem to b e dynamically interacting to affect readings or llleasurelllents of experinlental results

Self Definition

75

The micro-wodd of particles, ol>selval>le only through technological means, seems to be strangely 'alive'. It has therefore become a task for scientists to redefine 'agency' in ways similar to Latour's own by allowing non-human agents, such as the technological tools we use, to play a much more significant role in scientific thought. Today, it seems that the scientist1 technologist has to retrain himself to listen to and translate the language of nature, nature's inscriptions o n *ientific apparatus. Could it be that we are returning full circle to the 'confused' perspective of pre-modern science, where nature and human interpretive abilities are not kept sundered? And are we witnessing, then, also the beginning of a paradigm shift here from modern to post-modenz ways of approaching the scientific enterprise? But now my shower of questions for Latour at the end of his talk, this time spoken out loud: What are the implications of reducing s o drastically the differences hetween human and non-human agents? Does not this effectively amount to a world-view where poor populous hullIan countries and their non-industrialized, non-instrumentalized labour is devalued? Is the radical device of allowing machines to play such an oncular, pivotal role politically co?zsenlative, because this version of scientific and technological post-modernism, alas, discourages not just anthropocentrism but also simple, oldfashioned humanism? Given that we humans are the only interpreters as well as creators of these theories, is there any getting away from anthropocentrism in any but the most trivial sense? And if there are no logical upper bound to the endless post~ilation and proliferation of arrays of non-human agent.;, does not this Way madness lie? For all of which Latour had a s h o ~ Imt , inspirational. m e r : 'I'm not too good on ethics, 1 ~ 1 part t of nly intention in introducing these radical notions is sin~plyto restrict the

power of those scientists, technologists and science-policy * makers w h o think they are all-in-all. So my position is partly rhetorical-nzakir~g sure that .a critical a n d t h e ~ r e t i c a l ( ~ challenging barrage is constantly kept up. This is not a conservative position, is it? However, I appreciate your critique and would like to keep up a dialogue with you and your Institute. Perhaps w e could work together on a project on the anthropology of the engineer/technologist.' The anthropology of the engineer-a suggestive cadenza. It was the pied piper tune that would lead us o n for the rest of our course....

GANDHIANISM, COLONIZATION & INDUSTRY. The Moral Status of Machinery in the T U d World

The ghost of Gandhi stalks this book. Yet, when I first introduced our keytext Hind Swaraj to my class, few had heard of it and no one had read any of the essays in it. For most of my students, the second generation after szucrrJ; Mahatma Gandhi belonged within the history books; he was f d y locked into the context of the f~.eedomstruggle. What then caused the unexpected spirit of Gandhi to suddenly rise and disturb a class who quite fulfilled Einstein's prophesy'generations to come will scarce I~clievethat such a Inan as u s once walked the earth'? It was true. I was confronted l>y a gtoup of young Indians to whom Gandhian philosophy was about as alien as Martian logic. Gandhi was in fact not quite "a1 for them; he had walked a different earth. Not that the Tvashtris reacted entirely from Ignorance. They knew all about the conflict between t h spinning ~ wheel and the steel mill-that allnost ll~ythologicaltension between the Gandhian and Nehruvian views on a future for India. And

GANDHIANISM, COLONLZATION & INDUSTRY: The Moral Status of M a c h i n e r y in the Third World

The ghost of Gandhi stalks this book. Yet, when I first introduced our keytext Hind Swaraj to lily class, few had heard of it and no one had read any of the essays in it. For most of my students, the second generation after szuarl; Mahatma Gandhi belonged within the history I>ooks; he was f d y locked into the context of the freedom struggle. What then caused the unexpected spirit of Gandhi to suddenly rise and disturb a class who quite fulfilled Einstein's prophesy'generations to come will scarce llelieve that such a Inan as u s once walked the earth'? It was true. I was confronted hy a g o u p of young Indians to whom Gandhian philosophy was about as alien as Martian logic. Gandhi was in fact not quite for them; he had walked a different earth. Not that the Tvashtris reacted entirely from ignorance. knew all about the conflict between t h . ~spinning wheel and the steel mill-that alnlost lllythological tension herween dbe Gandhian and Nehruvian views on a future for India. And

I 80

G u l z ~ ~ i r ~ i ~ i sCoIorrizcrtion rrr, 6 [n&4stT

~echnohmt

they had few doubts that the latter 'modernist' vision had. rightly, won out, What took them by siirprise was the absolutely ol>durate tone of the argument in Hind Szlnrai, an original indigenous critiqLle of They had technology, And tiley got it; hut they hod also expected Ibis critiqlle to be delivered in the calm and l l l e a s ~ r e d - ~ ~say ~ bland--cadences that they had come to associate with political discourse. Instead, they were confronted wit11 law feelingthe feeling of utter recoil from the ven, idea of m:lchinev. This they did not expect, And I *lust admit that, rereading the text through the eyes of nly class, I for~ndmyself thinkingsee111 very violent sentiments fro111 well, [hese apostle of non-violence.

A ~ ~ ~ v e m a t with i o n ~amchandraCiandhi ~h~ simple prose of the essay on 'Machinery' that we rook as our centrepiece literally sl~ookwith anger This was 3 V J indeed-a Bil,lical figure, rather than the lllec'itative Hindu sage of convention. he fact disturlxd me enough to consult, off the record, professor ~allichandra Gandhi (Mahamla Gandhi's grandson, as well as a ~~~~~~~p~~~~ doctoraes from both Delhi and Oxford oniversities) How do I asked him worriedly. the almost you J ~ hat informs the discourse of Hind Sli~irafR answered 1 , ~ reminding ltle of three hisroncal One, Hin J ~ f i ~ ~ iwas r g jwrittm wllen Gandhi was a I loore i young I I U ~(thirty-nine): if was, informed l,y burning youthful fen'our thin the work of later Gandhi of the ~utohiogwlph4' ; I was not qllile prrsuaderl, tl~ougll.If m"' "3s he why was it t1lnt, nearly t l u l ~years lder. his preface to the English edition. lie declared tlxLt'Ie than ever to his earlier convictions It 'v3s held illare a g e Well. rep'ied 1,een n1eIloaed not as if llis fewout ")

'

~

.

81

Ramchandra Gandhi, his basic thinking on ~ ~ ~ a c ~ l irelllained nery the same-there was no doubt about that, Perhaps what lllight /lave changecl had he re-written the work was his sryle; it might have Ileconle more nuanced, less B ~ of~ , course, it was not a book that could be rewritten or not, I queried. And Ralnchandra Gandhi responded with his second historical fact. Hind ~.~unraj was unique in that it was written in one single go on Gandhi's 1908 voyage from England to South Africa, and was thus a topally selfcontained work. It presented a world in itself, impervious to counter-argument, other points of view, other arguments. Although shaped as 'dialogues', there actually no dialogue in the I'ook hecause there were no interlocutors to spar on that lonely passage. G,andhils sole audience was himself, and he was convinced enough of the horrors of a mechanistic universe. What reason had he then not to present his perspective as strongly as possible? And why change it one jot later? ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ True, he would write other books, but never this one To illustrate his point, Ramchandra Gandhi made an interesting, if contl-over~lal,Comparison here, He likened the psychological nl~ti\~ation which producec] Hind ~~~~~q to the one - ~ b i c hcompelled Ludwig Wittgenstein to attend [he writing of that most focused of philosophical the ~ ~ PhiIosc,pI!ica4 ~ ~ fighting in ~ [he c~~~~ ~ Tractatus Logicus while during World War 1, Ranlchandn (;andhi saw [he Tractatus as litenliy an 'entrenched' work. ~ n so, d he said, l"aJ Gandhils Hirid ~ ~ u a r was 4 more than just a collection essays. Like the Tractatus, it was an attack as much on the of intellectual blindness, of ignorance and of war-

familiar one, and one which 11d put to ;,,/ lass. (;andhi's cv against machinery was e q ~ i v a l e n t , ~ ~ ' est against Colonization. In rejecting n ~ c h i n e ~ . ~ * ,.

/'

/"-

~

82

Technobat

Gandhianisrn, Colonization G Indldstry

.

83

Indeed, it was for this reason that Hind Swaraj had not dated. Like all classics, it spoke directly to us ahout contemporary issues. Especially one that obsessed us allconsumerism. Or, even more specifically, consumerism and its still obscure but not insignificant links with machinery. was a theme to which we were to return repeatedly. once, I'd enquired rhetorically-
rejecting the racism that threw him out of a first compartment in south Africa, the fascism that led to the of the many by the few in c ~ m m a n dof superior machine power, That is why the tone of Hind SwaraJ is so savage. ~t isn't machinery alone that Gandhi is taking on in the book; it is the horrors of colonialism.

Gundbiunisnr, C o l ~ r l i z u t i&~ Industry ~ 84

~echnobrut

Did not, then, them the present day reincarn"t'ons of Gandhi,s technologic3~ rokshasbas? AS "elf-stylec' instenc' s. technobrats, they coulcl hardly clcny the c h a r reiterating the of trying to defend the~nSelves IY' silll~l~ cliched arguments 'hat technology is the lxnlgn liand-o'ai'len of 'development,-there was ~lreadytoo much proof ''la' it was not always sdwished the Tvarhtris to test Out a

Gandhi about the precise nature alterations in technology.

of

~;fi

current

Computer versus Charkha, information versus Industry

Big was no longer that impressive, they could tell Gandhi, for exanlple. The rakshasha of technology toClav in the ... appeared dwarfish guise of uamana. Computers, e-mail, faxes and different approach,. o n e ~ n n d h i a ncolllpa"ion other channels for electronic transmission incredibly speeded byl class was eye') they '"'ght dismiss 2s up the processes by which information was received as well (.wipe evely tear from everi 'impracticaly. such unmoduiar 'IinWng as reduced the space in lwhich such inforlnation could he 'idealistic. to hsndle within the summoned up--often a screen no I3igger than 8' 10' hard, if not methodology of pmhlen~solvingthat SI'" inches. con,panmentalized to the philosophy of engineering Gandhian ~ ~ ~ g ~ " " ~Speed ~ ~ :lnd ~ space-two ~ ' major alterations in the nature of no was another matter, though. M O S ~ of my students ,ha'1 technology-affected the p&ameters within which 'industrial roblems with the ~ ~ ~ d hperspective i a n that big c'nnls) labour', as Gandhi saw it, could be defined. For Gandhi, the P "L'i't tor ,ifpons and barge shopping centres were not exactly mute to development, as we'd all been taught in school, was any of 'he n13sses. They accepted. "unuch through 'cottage' industries whereby the links I,etween hull13n the ineans henltll-carel pri"'"'Y beings, their homes and thcir labour were holisrically Gandhian, that !development. really maintained. That was the true meaning education, and self-respect for 'industry' -hbouring Ralnpant consumerisnl WJS ol,viou~l~ the enel"y of within a tradition of anisanship, one of the worst [hings since they were apparently cPite about 'heavy' industry of the colonizer's variety was that I , ~ development. Tllerefore, consulnerism while not e s s i n g efficiency, quantify it clevalued [he willing to gil,e UP on role 3s consullcfi 3rd fecdcrs of nncctions I~etween hurIlans and the proc~ucts of abrogating them: W3"t at a" possible to CoLlllte consumerism, 1 asked Our. That was the why, despite its low yields, charkrl~athe incipiently f"xist lXzture Of 'pun cloth Was, 3s it were, lnorally preferable to the ,-loth Gandhi on the point suggesting that the reicction Of Out by textile mills exploitative of human centralized planning by revO1ution" /,.heavl n,achinefy Was in itself no longer now, we seer,1ed to new age? which a i because our 'lndi:-n' cLlltrlre hJd' i,ARd why? Not so (lluch yea" h" rather hecause us aspects of current \changed .for the worse' over innovations. In ?f iechrzolog~had c h a ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ . schema, it was possible to starkly oppose just two cOu'd technological experts this was "here they labour-'cottage' or 'heavy' industry. The new ahout the ical phase of the eighties ahd nineties, llowever, intervwe with confidence in the dehlte Or i n a w0 ly complicated the Gandhian dichotomy, nlechanization on the p ~ ~ d l ~ of l ~ g y [he ones kst-positioned to i consumerisnl. They were A

X~I

T~~~-ht~ol~r(rl

Ilicl thih n o t , then, 111:tkc tlleni thca prc>>c~:tcl;i>. I . ~ ~ I ~ c . ~ I ~!!15 I I ; I ~ ~ I o f (~;:tnclhi's tc.c,linolog~c.:~l~.trksi~ctsi~ci.c" .4s :,c.lf-st\ !c.[l tecI1nol11-:~t.s.t1lc.y c,o~llclh:~~-clly clCli!. the. char-??. 13~1tIn\[, , icl computer versus Charkha, Information versus o f t l ) . i n ~ t o t lefencl t l i c ~ l l s c ~ l \ ~I>y c ~ s srlnpl). rc.rtc,ratlng i i ~ndustr~ clicliCcl : l r g ~ i ~ i ~ c ~tli~lt r l t s teclir~ologyis t l ~ cI>eni,q~~ ~ ~ : I I ~ ~ ~ - Ilk.1, I I ; I I ~ o f ~clevelopment--rl~er-c~ \\,as ;111-c.acl).too rn~1c.11proof t11.1; I[ ~i~ was n o Io:igc.~-th:l[ iri~pr-c.ai\.e,t1ic.y co~ilcltell (;;~ricilli,for\\/:I> n o t alurays ( + I \\-isliecl t h e ' l ' \ . a \ l l t ~ - it o tc.il O I I ! a exanlple. Tile t.ciX!s/~ci.\.l~tr of. rcclinology appc-al.c*cl today in t h e clifferent nppro:~cli. clw3fiisli gui,ie of' u t i ~ ~ z ( ~ i zC,ortlp~~tcr-\. le o n e . <'i:lnclhiar~ c onlp:l\.-l :n other ch:innels for electronic tI-anhllil,\,\lorl i n c r e ~ l i l ~s pl e~~~e~e 1 ~ d ('n.ipe e\.er7. te:11. flu111 e\.ely c>.c.') the\ 111ig11tcl~s~ili\.> .ts u p the processeh 1,); \\.liic-li ~nfc~)r-ll~:lric~n w;ts I-ecc.i\,ecl ; I \\.ell 'icle~li,stic':11ic1 ~ i r i i p ~ - : ~ c ~ t iS~rc,ll ~ : ~ l ' , L I ~ ~ I I ~ O ~ I L I I : I It 1~ 1 i 1 1 1 < 1 1 1 ~ \,.~, I > as reclc~crcl t h e s p a c e i11 1whic.h s l ~ c iinfi~rmatiori ~ c . o ~ ~ l cl>c. l h:trcl, i t n u t irnpossil,lc., t o I~:~ncllc\\.itliin t h e intc.n-i.!y s u ~ n r n o n e d u p - o f t e n :I acl-ec.n 1ic1 I3iggc.r- tli:~n 8' I3y 10' conipfirt~ilenr:llizccl ~iietllocloloyyof p r c ~ l ~ l e ~ l i - . \ o l \ ~rh:~r i n g i,. .I> inches. 13a4c t t ) tllc [3llilosophy o f c.ngl~~t.c,rilig. (~;:~i~clIii:~n pr-:lgrll.ll!L!n Speecl :Inel sp:ice-[\~e) 111:1jor : ~ l t e ~ ~ t in ~ ot11e ~ l sri:tt~ire of w a s ~lnot1ie1-rn:ltter, tllough. hlost o t lny st~lclc.nt\ 1l:lti i i o technology-:tltc.ctccl tlie p:tr-;~r~~cter-s ~ v ~ t l ~n .il in~ c , l l'in(luhr~-i;~l prol,lems \\.it11 t l ~ e(;anclli~anpc.~.spec,ri\-r111:tt 1112cl:t~li\.!1!!,4e lal>our', 2s (;:11lc111i s : ] ~i.t , co~11cl11e clefi~ircl.[:or (.;:~rlcIl~i, llle :lil.ports ancl large s h o p p ~ n gcentres \\.err \lot c s ; ~ c t l yI > \ l l I i ! o r route t o d e v c l o p n i e n t , 21s we'cl a11 I ~ e e l ir;i~lghtIn s c h o o l , w;ts t h e I x n e f i t o f the I l l a a c s . 'l'llcy c~cceptecl.:I,\ 1iil1(.11 :I\ : i !I., through 'cott:~ge'incluhtl.ies \vl~cr-c~l,)t l i ~links I ) c m r e e n 11~1riian <;:~nclhian, t1i:lr 'cle\,c,lopnlcnr' ~.e:~lly rllc:ln\ I~c..~ltl~-carc~, pri~i;,ir). beings, their h o n l e s :inel their lal,i)\~r n.c're 11oIi,\tic.:111y e c l ~ ~ c : r t ~ oa n ,d self-rc1,cc.r for all. maintainccl. 7'1lat na tlie Init: Iileanrng of 'ind~ratr).'--l.rl)o~~ring K;rinp'~nt c o n b ~ l l l ~ e r i s m n.;ls ol>\-~ousl).tl?c enc.lll). of I I L I ~ : within a tratlition of :rrtia:~n.sl~rp.( ~ ) n e of' tllc \ \ , o f i t tlilngs c l e v c l o p n ~ e n t . ?'lic.rcfore, i n c c t11c). \yere irpp:lrcntl!. I I L ~ ' : C : about 'hea1.y' incl~lstr):o f tlic> c,oloni;lc-r\ variety nxh t t i : ~ t I,)r n,illing t o give LIP o n o u t - ; ~ n c I - o ~cc~)r?h~lr~lerisn~, ~t \\.llllc ; i o t stressing effificienc)., c/~l:lntity :In([ lii:rl-k:t5. i t clc.\.;~l~recltlie a l ~ o g a t i n g rllcil. c,\\.n role :I> c.o~l,iurncraa n d f e c c l i ~ -r ~l f Integral ccinncc.tiol~>l)ctn.een I I I I I I I ~ I I ~ ; I I ~ C I 1 1 1 ~ . I>I.OCILIC.~ of c o n s ~ l t n e r i s ~ nI axkccl t11c11l:\%':is it at ~ ( 130>sil~le 1 to c o ~ i ' : ' l : r their l:~l>c)~lr. '1'Ii:it \\.:IS tllc \\.11),, c!c.hj>itc, 11, lc )n yielcls, chtztL?/,(~C ; ~ n d l l i o n tIlc p(~Jlrit~ l I 2 o ~ ttll(t t i ~ ~ c . i l ) i ~ . ~ i k~scist ~I!. I I ; I ~ I I I . ( . ot spun cloth w a s , ; I i t -.ere, mol-all:, pl.ct~~:ral7le t o tlie cloth ' l > ~ gccntr-:11izctl ' p i ; ~ ~ ~ n i11y n g suggcsring t11at tlie I - r j c e t i o ~of' ~ churned o u t I)). tt.stiIc 11lrIIs espIoit:~ti\-eo f Ilrlrll~~n IaIx,l~r.. 'hc:~\.y' ~ ~ ~ a c l l i n c\\.:I\ l ) . In itself n o J o r ~ g c ~\.c.ry ~ . ~-c\.oi~~lio~~.li\':' But no\v, \ ~ c .5cen1cd to ir~hal>ira ~ i c wa g e , in \vhic.l~a rind \\-liy2 Sot so 111uc1i l > e z : ~ u e O I I I - ' I I I C ~ I ; L I ; C . L I ~ ~ L I I - CI ICI critique of 11e;1\,y i n c l ~ l s t ~ i ca>l o n e n ~ ) ~ l l c~ln i s so ~ r to n tl-11ly cl>;rngc.cl . f o ~t -h e \ v o ~ - s cO\.CI' t l ~ c .!c.;tr~h. h u t rall1c.r I,c.c.a~~sc! / J L ' dangerous aspects of c.uI-l-cnt tc>chnol(1yica1 in111) \ z : ~ t i c ~ r i \ In ~ i ( / t / ( r(?/' c t ~ ~ ~ - / ~ ih(i(1 ~ o l~o~~/q~~t ~~ t i ~ o d Gand11i.s SCIIC~III;I. i t \\.:I-; p o s ~ ~ l , l ct.o st:~rkly 01>1x)sc l ~ l s tmo As tccllnologic.,~l c.xl)c.~.th t 1 1 1 \\,a \vlicr-c. rl~c.!. c c . y p e s of l:rl,o~~r.-~colt~~ge' o r - .IIV;I\.),' i n c l u \ r ~ y . *l'llc ne\\. i n t c r ~ e n c\\.itti confidc.~?c-e111 t h e elcl):ttc a l ) o ~ l ttile i ~ ! ~ l > ; ! c i of t e c h n o ~ o ~ i cl,Iiase ; ~ ~ of t h e e i g l ~ t i cancI n ~ n e t i c s ,I ~ o n e v e r , mech:tmzation o n tile. psycholog). ot clcsir-e, 01-i l l .I \ \ - r , l ~ . l , Severely cornplic;~tec.l t h e (;anclliiar~ c l ~ c l ~ r ~ t c ~ r l l y . c o n s u ~ ~ ~ c . r - i s'l'liey rn \\.ere t h e o r i e I>c.,\r-l>c 1\11 ic )nee1 t o i11f.c : I 112 l l i 1

86

Technobrat

It did so'by pre~entingus with an Ariel substitute for the earlier Caliban technology. This technology was light and unencumbered, characterized by speed, small spaces, much grace. It was mediated by literacy and marked by a one-toone transaction between Inan and machine. On the face of it, then, this sort of 'machinery' was apparently not in the least plagued by the degrading qualities of the earlier heavy machinery which required sweated labour from mill-hands. This machinery was meant for different ends-it was intended to handle information, to make comlllunication smoother and cheaper for everyone. And what in the world could be wrong with that? Surely no Gandhian would, or could, oppose this beautiful new 'computer technology'. I could not, however, resist warning the recalcitrant Tvashtris that it would be naive to adopt such a position, as well as to seriously underestimate Gandhi. For Gandhi woulcl have been quick to point out that the monster of computer technology could be infinitely Inore dangerous than the railways and printing machines which he'd condemnedbecause great power through information control would now be u p for grabs. Consumerism itself would no longer amount just to the mass-practice of consu~ningpre-packaged thirzgs, hz~t of consuming preTfahr-icated thol~ght.That was why any true Gandhian would welcome a thorough-going investigation of the effects that the metaphor of the tiny Iwt :ill-knowing computer could have on the psychological worlcls we inliahit, on the culture(s) that we grew up with, and on our aspirations for the future. It would enable a cross-esat~zit~ntiolz ?I the conscience of' the rechnologist. 'The hypothetical Gandhi(an) we were aclclressing woulcl begin by suggesting that, with respect, most of us in the HU 484 class seemecl to be wearing typical egotists' blinkers. After all, microchip technology was only avrtilal,le to a narrow band of privileged metropolitan perwns, >o how c o ~ l c lit bc

that important? And in any case, microchips didn't feed mouths; hunger, destitution, disease couldn't be wiped out by c o m p u t e r s . ' ~ ~most r Indians, computers were irrelevant] To which, the Tvashtris and Ribhus as potential Defenders of the Technological Faith could, in turn, retort that if cumbersome technologies like railways and steel mills, and even more pertinently, the demntzd for these technologies, could spread like wildfire, what was to stop computers proliferating? Given the imaginative hold they had already acquired over the human imagination, it was unlikely that the aching desire for the symbolic horde of riches that computers have locked within themselves would go away in a hurry. We would want to consume computational pottage for a long while yet. As for real physical hunger, because computers manipulated information, they could be used pretty effectively to create the impression that hunger did not exist anymore, that disease had been wiped off the globe. The clanger then was the following: it was true that computers could not solve the problems of undernourishment, 1,ut they c p ~ l ddissolve them by deliberately undernourishlng.krr$sSAnd how would they accomplish this? Well, i n a kind of Orwellian way by controlling information and the language of information. It was possible to argue that computers coulcl d o much to create a climate where the handlers of informationinforlllation about markets, about politics, about scientific innovations, about literacy and gender, about builcling technologies-were clesensitized to the information that they were 'passing on'. Furthermore, the innovators of technology, such as the IIT engineers, coulcl remain chillingly i n s ~ ~ ~ a t e h j from the possible consequences of the systems that they are! building. Not that this was in itself a new debate. Standarclly, scientific innovators replied to all of this by pleacling that they couldn't be held responsible for every horrible use to which

68

Gandbianisnr, Colo?zization & I?rdustv

Tecbnobmt

Technology is associated in Gandhian thought, or in the Gandhian 'web of belief', with the violence o f colonialisln and highly urbanized cultures. It is the main symbol of an alien and destructive approach to human relations. As an Indian, tiandhi suggested that the traditional tools of 'village India' were all the technology we needed to be self-sustaining as a culture. Our performance as a culture was quite satisfactory before we were forced to import ~nachinery.Western technology needed to he rejected because it:

their inventions were put. M y point was-should not a class who had read both Nehlxl's Discovev of'I7zdta and Gandhi's Hind Szrmraj react differently? Should they not question that standard creed of liberal 'Western' individualism l>y refusing to s h n ~ goff notions of cultural culpability so easily? In fact, the goal of the HU484 Class, and now the document Technohrat could be seen as an attelllpt to elnl,ecl technology within its particularized context of cultural reception. While accepting the monster-status conferred on technology and tecl~nologistsI,y Gandhi it was cn~cialfor us as a class-and as a country currently given over to a programme of 'liberalization'-to explore the psyche of this powerful beast lnore thoroughly. And who cot~ldbe I,etter placed to look into the technological mentality and its capacity for damage than the IIT engineer? My students were soon to he certified 'expert' at diagnosing the ills of ~nachines.13erhnps,then, they were also prepared, after Hind Szuaraj, to diagnose the hidden social ills caused by their own roles in producing and maintaining those machines. Physician, heal tllyself. The distance between Gandhian critiq~~e and self-critique, it appeared, was closing in my class. Verl,ati~n extracts from my notes to the class at the time follow. Much content is repeated, but this, as Gandhi would recognize, is an inalienable element of all industry, not excluding classroom labour.

harms our health and spreads disease destroys social relations, especially gender relations reduces respect for human potential and is thus mentally corn~pting becomes a tool in the hands of the rich to exploit the poor necessitates large-scale url~anization which is culturally alienating encourages corn~nodificationand consumerism results in a 'loss of self' hy homogenizing cultural preferences produces uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence pollutes the environment

Acquiring Culture, Accepting Technology Gandhi's critique of lllachinery (cloth ~nills,printing presses, railways, electricity etc.) consisted in an almost conlplete rejection of mechanical means of 'solving prol~lerns'I>ecause, according to Gandhi, technology always creates more prol,lenls than it solves. For Gandhi, being 'Indian' or belonging within Indian cblture, meant, first and foremost, non-acceptance Western machinery.

89

I

The Tvashtr-is were thrilled. A summary of the Mahatma's arguments in point form-1-9. For once, my handouts seenled to satisfy the deep need for form and sylnnletry that is inhorn a Tvashtri He is sryled the beaidtlj,~l,or skil~jiul-bntzded,the Omnijom, or arcbetype qf nl,fornzs, and Cauitn, the uivlfier. BY now, I had grasped at least this fact. Enumeration was a m - a t stimulant, a vivifier, in any conversation with the Tvashtri. So I went on unabashed to spell out another symmetrical *ties of points 1-9, this time agaitz.& the Mahatma's position On technology. Since Gandhi's views on technology were so

Gnnrlhiurzu-m, Co~o?zizutiorzG Rdusty

strong, we needed to produce an e q u ~ l l yspirited defence of technology. Contra Gandhi, we would have to argue that technology: 1 2

3 4 5

6

7 8

9

improves health dramatically, prevents disease frees us to think about hulnan relations by saving time and energy increases our ahility to comlllunicate across cultures and thus mentally liberates us ultimately makes everyone richer, ~llateriallybetter off ooerates best in an url7an environment because 'closer' contact between various parties is typical of large cities; hence technology is not necessarily culturally alienating if we take a more glol>al view of 'culture' enables us to choose between various products of human skill and ingenuity and therefore stimulates our minds and bodies results in a 'loss of self only if 'self' is conceived of in very limitqd ways no more results in barbarism than the feudal and marauding traditional cult~~res cleans u p the environment as well as pollutes it

Bottom line: We need technology more than it need> us. Human beings are tool-users and -are can no more 'resist' the growth of technology than we can--or should-anifici;~lly restrain our bodies. Technology, like culture, is a natural growth given the environment of the human genetic system. (See Stephen J . Gould, suhtext, Chapter 7, for a reasoned perspective on the natural human propensity to tinker with technologies in order to create liiashtrian nominal kinds.) ~~d having made these luclic closing statments for p r o s e c u t i ~ and defence, 1 left, as I had to, the textual arena. Shll, the Tvashtris were talking!

91

Sttel fur glinting in the neon light, the Tvashtris discussed the Mahatma, and I felt the eavesdropper's febrile excite~nent at the sound of these personal tapes unspooling. It's tnle that I might have given the impression so far that joyless selfcast~gationwas all I was after in getting my class to discuss the revered doctrines of Gandhi. But 1 could not pretend that the Tvashtris had taken on the colours of my guilt. Their comments, following on the heels of the Mahatlna's austere anger are riotous. Melee, medley and mcla-as Indlan as aam. t

Keytext:

'Hind

Swaraj'

by

Mohandas

Karamchand Gandhi

, I

/

II

Like Nehru's Discotvey of h d i a , Gandhi's Hind Swalizj is imbued with the personality of its author. It shares with that book, too, its singular ol>session-the identity of India. Despite the fact thxt two texts more violently dissimilar in tone and sentiment are hard to imagine, a thenlatic continuiry does emerge in the intense attention paid to the question of technology and nationalism in both Gandhi's corpus and in Nehm's. Our reading of the chapter on 'Machinery' fronr Hind Swaraj 'was an attempt to figure out whether Gandhi's resistance to re-engineering our 'tnditional village culture' in still relevant in the age of the global village. The views on materialism that Gandhi expresses so forthrightly also enahled a direct transition to our next chapter on 'Conspicuous Consump tion'.

student Unrest: 'Is

it not true that for all practical purposes we have never

followed Gandhi's philosoplly? Have we not shifted in, die post-indepndence

hm h a d to nylon and polyester W'

'rhrough the ages. from the prehistoric time to the present,

92

Technobrat

"might" has been and is, "right". Should we not therefore try to advance technologically instead of crying over our past? 'Well, Gandhi would call that a short term solution which will fail in the long run. He says this "might" that you desire is itself poison! Might might not be might!' 'Technology is not something that we impose o n ourselves. It is part of the natural process of huinan evolution. This drive is what keeps a culture going. Why should we stop the process of natural growth?' 'Yaar, the real question today is not whether we should have technology or not. It is too late to ask that! What's relevant is: how should technologists and scientists act responsibly within their cultures? Should they try to bring about any changes in the attitude of the people, towards the environment, for example.'

Subtexts: Claude Alvares: Homo Faber: Decolonizing History o n the impact of colonization o n indigenous traditions of scientific/technological knowledge and the importance of the figure of the 'survival engineer'

Jayant Narliker: Interview in 7be Indian E x p ~ s son the role of science and hitechnology in Indian planning and the constitution of the 'scientific temper' and an article in 7be Times of India o n the bureaucracy.

Michael Adas: Machines As the Measure o f Man o n the role of technologies of dominance m d the role played hy such technologies, e.g. the railways in the processes of colonization.

Gand/?iunisrrr, Colo~ziz~~tio~z & Indusfry

93

Ramnik Reports: m e curtains of the classroom are yet to be drawn. The handouts reveal there will be a discussion on Gandhi, probably some presentations.. . 'Yaar explain something to me ... How come we get to study Gandhi in every course w e do? Last sem I did "Sociology-The Science Of Praxis". We did-rather were made to d-andhi there also. 0 God ... praxis and Gandl~i -it's gotta be an oxymoron or something' 'What d'ya mean? He was very practical. Remember he would fast every time he was sent to gaol, till he fell ill andthey had to release him? But jokes apart, he was an achiever right?' 'Yeah man, achieved separation. But for him and Nehru, I would've been a son of a rich zanzindar in what's now Pakistan. Wouldn't have had to ~ t ~ g g like le this!' 'Oh please. Stop making provocative reinarks o n a touchy subject. Anyway you've done all that you could to go against his message.' 'What the .hell? Me? Not at all-at least not me alone! The whole world has. It's a hard fact. The world's gone -the technology way. If we wanna survive, we've got to go that way too. Or else we need another Gandhi to pull the whole world back ... or forward.. or sideways... or whatever. But in that case, four years spent at IIT-khatam!' 'What-you've pledged to give all the clichCd ones to me in one go? Look spare me.. I've to d o my talk on Gandhl, irrespective.. .' 'Irrespective of what you really believe in?' 'Nope. I believe in Grades. So that's what I'm working towards.' 'Hey guess how the trailer for a motion plcture o n Gandhi should go?

..

Gundl~iunisrn,Colonizution & Industry

Deep male mice ... American accent: The whole world is caught in a tuleezer grip. A grip that holds minds, hearts and souls alike, and pulls them into ,fire, destruction, spirittral doom. Show a Jik shot of Hiroshima OK-or maybe show a Mirage bombing a city, or show a city in smog ...Show ci garbage dump.. . n e grip of techndlogy...Technology overtakes man.. Show rocket exploding... basically e v e ~ t h i n ggoing wro~tg,show morose-looking childre~z. .. And only ONE man can save us ,from catuc[ysm... bring us back to the right path .... GANDHI (soothing ,flute mtlsic, Gandhi with his charkha) ...starting... ' 'Look relax, else go to Hollywood, make trailers for them.' 'Oh don't you worry I am going to d o just that.. nvhy do you think I'm working this hard to go to gmdu3re school in the US?' 'To join Bill Gates I guess ... and pull the world further towards doom.' The cu~tainrises. A student has been invited to speak.

'

.Ibrahim, Choric Commentator: 'I wish to explore one of the knots in the web of interaction

between technology and culture by pointing out that countries can be differentiated in terms of their attitudes to machinery, their ability and willingness to mechanize. That is the 111easul.e of their modernization, and thus, by implication, of their cultural "sophistication". 'Those cultures where the tools widely in use only affect the inlmediate environment and arc nlanually operated are further b3ck on the path to ulodernization than those where tools allow for long distance inlpact and less nlanual Ighnl~r

'However, just hecause a society is able to afford Inany of the "latest" gadgets (private jets, faxes, hydrofoils) does not necessarily mean that it has truly "modernized" (e.g. a Gulf country). Modernization is a matter of having technological know-now and appropriate attitudes. 'The way in which a country absorbs the inevital~leburden of. modernization is a measure of its political stability. If a country allows most people to participate in the discourse of nlodernization it is relatively modernized despite uneven levels of economic success (by this standard Imth rich and small Singapore and huge and poor India have been successti11 at modernization; China because of its closed door policies less so). Thus there is a close link between "modernization" (i.e. increasing mechanization and mastery over technologies) and political prozess. No nation, no culture, can escape the global drive towards technological modernization.' Sandeep the Indianist: 'Do you believe w e Indians posses the attitude that you are claiming is so essential to the modernization process? Recent "tech-cul" studies have pointed a finger at our cultural attitudes as actually being deterrents to scientific and technological progress.' Ibrahim: 'I d o not wish to enter into this debate. My aim was only to point out that technology and culture intermesh, which you anyway grant as a premise in your comment.' 'Ma'am, I think the point is very relevant. I strongly feel we do lack the "right" attitude.' Ibrahim: (Sounding rather stung) 'Are you saying you and me also lack it?' Audihle comments on Ibrahim's presentation include the perpetual mystery 'If we d o lack "it", how come Indians d o well once in US?' as also 'I think it's the system that is a deterrent' and renlarks in the 'You might lack it, I don't' category. Then, Nalli, the Indianist and Vijrty, the Choric Listener "e the stage, -,

;

,

L I

95

96

Technobrat

Gundhicrtzism, Color zizc4tiun

Nalli and Vijay, Indianist and Choric ~is'tener: 'The pulAication Bharnt ki Chanp traces the history of science and technology in India. It explores evidence of 'scientific' thinking in ancient India, including attitudes to art. Take the cave paintings of Ajanta (5th century AD). These paintings reveal a sophisticated knowledge of perspective, proportion and symmetry. They also demonstrate that the painters knew how to mix pigments so that they would last through centuries and glow in the darkness of the caves.' . 'Ah, beautiful!' 'Apart from the subject matter of these paintings, which depict a court culture with 130th high religious and aesthetic aspirations, the sheer technical skill that marks this work, shows that this was a technologically skilled culture. Thc standards of symbolic representation through metaphors such as the lotus, swan etc. also show a great capacity for abstract thinking. It is legitimate to infer fro111 the Ajanta paintings that here was a high level of civilization marked by ideals of gentleness rather than tribal aggression. It was a culture capable of the kind of abstract thinking held to be typical of science. An ancient Gandhian culture, w e could say, that wasn't inimical to technology!' Reaction: 'Well, using your line of argumentation, one could claim that our mythological stories also provide proof of our scientific thinking, being rich as they are in symbolism, imaginative content and depth of thought. 1s there a contradiction here?'

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Amit and Bhupendra: Indianists: 'Interestingly, Bharat Ki Chaap asks the same question too, attempting to find the difference between myth and history as documentation of the past. Myth is an important part of every culture, and Iqdia has rich resources in the Ranzayanrr, the Mahabharata, the Purana-in fact, all the Smritis. However.

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because the characters and categories of myth (gods, demons, supernatural happenings etc.) are so different from those of standard history, it is difficult to grant them historical status despite the fact that their authors claimed to I,e describing observed "truth" and "fact". 'We could claim that it is this confusion of myth with history that leads to cultural consequences such as the one we saw at Ayodhya where a historical monument (the Babri Masjid) was pulled down in favour of a mythological vision. Do not the ways in which we judge the sources which tell us about our "past" also affect the ways in which we act in the present? Here's the connection hemreen Gandhian non-violence and history. After all, Gandhi always spoke about ~ n & z j y a , relying on myth to tell US how to c o n t r ~ lour present.' Sudclenly Viswan~pe the Gandhian sr:lnds i ~ p .He is excited. Evidently he wants to make a speech ... 'What is the clifference between myth and history.' he demands, addressing the gang of Inclianists. 'You have specifically asked wh;tt repercussions this difference can h:we on our present actions. Let me tell you. 'Iristory is not just 3 stildy of kings ancl kingdoms, of battles and wars ... not just visual manifestations of a c ~ ~ l t u r e victory towers, mausoieums-but of the lifest)lc, h:,bits and attitudes of the people througil music, dance, F~hles etc. History encompnsses ntytholok5y. Without inclucling myths into the range of its studies, history wo~l!dremain incomplete. 'I-listory educates people about their previous errors and successes. We profit fro111 the esperience of history. Myths seme the same purpose. They instil in the impressionable minds of children moral values and precepts. Fables and tales are frsmed such that the right is easily discernible from the wrong, the gods from the demons, the heroes from the villains and the lions fro111 the jackals, In other words, ~nyths function as simplified guides to living. I-listo~y,though not so simplified and idealizecl, works towards the same end

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'That myth and history cannot and should not be dissociated is best exemplified by the Ayodhya issue. A reality (the Babri Masjid) was demolished in favour of a myth (that the mosque stood on the site of the 1)irthplace of Lord Rama). The issue was posed in conflictual terms - myth vs. history, but any decisions to demolish or not should not have been linked to the question of whether The Ran~janmabhoorniis a myth or not. Even if it were proved "scientifically" that the piece of land was in fact the Ramjanmabhoomi, Muslims would still be unhappy at the cle~nolitionor relocation of the mosque. 'Likewise even if Ramjann~ahhoomiwere to be proved a myth it would not make an iota of difference to the sentiments of a large majority of Hindus willing to fight for it. The solution does not lie in proving its historical basis, nor in a referendum, when people are so easily swayed by tendentious preachings. The solution probal~lylies in constituting a group of socially responsible "cultured" people from all walks of life and leaving the decision to them.' The class is impressed, and stunned into silence. An altruistic soul assumes the role of Vishwanipe's interpreter: 'You have to realize that it's a case of heart over mind. If science and inythology strike you as being contraclictory, it is because we have made it so. Fundamentally, the scientific attitude is visible in myths too.' 'I feel we Indians lose perspective all too easily.' (Whisper) 'Yeah!, you've lost ~t too. Ever since this chap's come back from his exchange programme in Europe, he's heen saying something or the other against Indians!'

Vishwarupe & Raj, Gandhians: 'To change the subject, we present soliie economically as well as emotionally motivated arguments against multinationals and their opera?ion in India. Multinationals are big fish, and it is well known that big fish eat little fish! Now, while it

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could be argued that it is actually "good" for the little fish to be eaten up, you will find few little fishes who agree whole heartedly with this proposition. India is full of little and middle sized industrial fish. In contrast, she has few really big indigenous multinational units (Tatas, Birlas, Ambanis, Hindujas-you can count them on the fingers of one handand even these appear to have co-existed peaceably with the small fry for quite a while; perhaps Indian fish are less ferocious, being mainly vegetarian). 'The question is, once we allow the multinational biggies to enter our seas, how can we "prevent" them from absorbing our industries? The answer is, Dmw on Gandhi. Research among co~npaniesin technologically advanced countries (USA, Japan, Germany) has shown that there is no necessary link between either size, or expenditure on RSrD, and contribution of the company to GNP. Hard figures demonstrate that bigger is not necessarily better, at least in terms of national interests. Therefore, there is every reason why India should not slavishly let in any and every multinational relying on a dubious ideology of free trade, How can anyone be free who has been digested by someone else? 'Our aim, foIlowing a suitably adapted Gandhianism, should be to defend our own traditions of nlultiple small businesses. We should create semi-protected environmentally suitable waters in which we can face some competition but grow at the same time. This makes-sound econonlic sense for India because then she will a) not be giving up the advantages she already has, b) retain her entrepreneurial spirit, c) slowly be able to expand her markets cl) achieve a stable and sustainable growth rate, without the inflation caused by overlarge inflows of foreign money e) have time to assess the impact of liberalization on the new generation of companies/ managers and correct for economic imbalances and 0 retain an industrial profile, which while, globally informed, is in keeping with her own traditions.'

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'Wait a minute ...did you say "have time to assess impact"? Do you think w e have any time left? We are already lagging behind, so w e will at most be decreasing the lag. Besides, the middle path you are talking about is not at all practicable. If it could work, it would have in all these years.' 'As if anything works here ...As if some new policy will! See, I told you. ..first culture.. .then technology ...n o w economics ...God knows what w e will be discussing next, or will it be God himselfl' (And indeed, we did get round to God in Chapters 6 and 7). 'Hey, this is hypocrisy, calling this policy "adapted Gandhianism" is an abuse. This terminology seems to have been invented to appease Gandhi diehards. Gandhianism is not a policy that you can adapt. It's a way of life!' Vishwarupe: 'Well, if they can call almost anything from Connaught Place to airports to hospitals by one of the Nehni family names, I think hypocrisy in naming should not bother us anymore!' (The sly smile reveals that Vishwarupe the Gandhian is aware that he's evading the question, but no one is going to pick on him anylnore, it seems.) Ramnik: 'In the meantime, the overhead projector has refused to work anymore. It's overheated, like the debate. The next presentation must wait.' Finally, the OHP cools down. Vivek declares he will not be using it anyway! The audience deserved the break, or at least so he felt. Now who does our cyborg class have to thank ...the OHP or Vivek?

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large dams are not yet proven. Perhaps the same amount of water can be saved iising less hinds and with less displacement if a series of smaller, more traditional dams are built. If coercion by IMF/World Bank is suspected, will you be party to such violence against a vulnerable section of society?' Reaction from Akhl: 'If a thief was caught and put in prison, would you compensate him for the loss of his livelihood? If not, is there not an analogy to the situation of the tribals who have no ownership papers to the land they inhabit? What proof exists that the land is theirs? No comments, everyone is taken aback. 'Look this is the business of the policy makers, to decide what to d o or what not to do. They are paid for that. We are paid for implementing the decisions. So can we stop interfering in other areas of operation? That's a kind of landgrab too.' Ramnik remarks: At the end of the day, we take it for granted. that w e have to d o our iobs. Our task as technologists is not to question technology, only to deploy it. This was the attitude I felt around me. We don't want to commit professional suicide, d o we? Gandhi is dead, w e are not!

Cross-examining Gandhi Here are some extracts from students' answers to a small segment of their Minor I examination. Imagine G a n d h suddenly walked into IIT, Delhi today. Write a brief dialogue in which you seek to convince him that he was wrong, and that technology is indeed the hope for India's future.

Vivek the Environmentalist: 'Suppose you as a civil engineer are leading the construction of a dam, say the Narmada Valley project. What you need to know is that the project is socially damaging. It is hound to rob tribals of traditional rights. Often the loss is triple - of land, livelihood and self-respect. The Government admits that it has been 'unable to resettle most dispossessed tribals from other such 'projects. Furthermore, the benefits of these

92085 Kanupriya, Choric Commentator , Gandhi: What is this place? KP: The Indian Institute of Technology. \

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Gandhianism, Colorziraiion & Irzdust y

Gandhi: Technology? Do we need technology at all? India was always happy without it! Weren't our traditional ineans enough for us? KP: Technology is not something that we imnpose on ourselves. It is part of the natural process of human evolution. Traditional technologies were good, but they need to he updated to keep up with growing needs. Gandhi: Why do we need to borrow technology from the West? KP: It's true that we cannot adopt technology from a different culture wholesale. Technology must evolve within the culture to actually signify growth. Yet research can't take place in isolation. If equipment and methods have already been developed, why not adapt them to local conditions? Science & technology improve the quality of life. We need institutions like the IIT to improve science and technology.

more comfortable. And if they are in favour of technology, then how can you, the "Father of the Nation" go around criticizing technology?'

92103 Sanjeev, Choric Listener 'A point that Gandhi raised related to trains. Trains supposedly spread plague through more villages, but the actual fact is just the reverse! Earlier a lot of villages were wiped off in a single incident. Today fast transportation nleans we learn of such situations early and can send help to restrict the damage. There is no dark side to technological advancement. 'The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do. Gandhi will have to understand that machines do not have minds. It is the huinan mind which can be corrupt. Gandhi might have been right in his time because most of the new technology was imported. We were slaves of the British and they exploited us. That's why Gandhi thought of machinery as sinful.'

92095 Raj Bahadur, the Gandhian 'I consider myself a Gandhian, and yet I feel the question to be addressed is not the ,ahsolute merit of Gandhianisnl but its relevance' in the 90s. In response to his philosoplly, I would like to say: Gandhiji, you see things and ask Why? while I dream things that never were and ask Why Not? Life in the Gandhian sense would be static, and devoid of adventure. I feel that creating new things is a kind of freedom that should be granted to each man.'

92275 Uttam, Choric Listener 'Technology serves in liberating us mentally by increasing our ability to comnmunicate across cultures, and across geographically diverse locations. With the new information technologies, our perceptual, conceptual and physical understanding of the world has changed and this change, I hold, has heen for the better. We may wander anywhere and not lose our way, thanks to technology!'

92073 Akhil, the Pragmatist Addressed to Gandhi: 'Go and meet the people, the masses. And ask them whether they would like to live without electricity, transport and communication facilities, medicine and machine-made goods. Ask them whether they feel that these things have made their lives much

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...Serried ranks of numbers, all moving towards soille point on the horizon invisible to me. IVe may wander a?zyzuhere and not lose our way, thanks to technology. Uttam-92275's words, the wayfaring words of a true explorer, were telling,

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but I would have to learn to read them before they guided me into the heart of Tvashtri-land. I heard the clank of Tvashtri metal marching, hut how did one pierce the armour of language? There were, I knewf, vulnerable limbs, blood and coiled gut, tucked under those smooth, mechanized, numerical surfaces. The stock phrases that the Tvashtris used in their examination answer scripts, 1 understood. What I felt I could not access were the hidden subscripts of meaning in a still unfami1i;ir tongue. 'The real problem is not uhether nlachines think but whether men do'. Sanjeev-92103, quoting from sonle typically unattril~uted authority, had put his skilful, workmanlike finger on the axle of the turning wheel, the nub of our encircling problems. How did the Tvashtris think? All my listening in on their reactions to Gandhispeak had still not passed this semantic litmus test. As R.K. Narayan, novelist of the Gandhi generation put it once, I was still 'waiting for the Mahatma' w h ~ l ethe Tvashtris clanged forward to a different future. Who was their Mahatma? And which cyherperfect heaven did they stride towards.. .?

Once there was an occasion for me to motor down to Calcutta fiom a place a hundred miles away. Something wrong with the mechanism mode i t necessary for us to have a repeated supply of water almost every half a n hour. At the first village ...we asked the help of a man to find water for us. It proved to be quite o iask for him, but when we offered him his reward, poor though he was, he refused to accept it. In fifteen other villages the some ihing happened. In a hot country where travellers constantly need water, and ater supply grows scanty in summer, the gers consider it their duty to offer water to those eed it. '[hey could easily make a business of it, owing the inexorable law of demand and suppl deal which they consider to be their dhorma h me one with their life.,. ple; but that simplicity is the product of centuries of culiure; such simplicity is difficult of imitation ...Simplicity takes no occount of its own value, claims no wages ...[and] is the highest product of

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION: The Vocabulary of Technological Desire

Collective guilt has a way of surfacing, just as individual pleasures tend to get pushed under, submerged, in a group environment. I had not imagined that anxieties about consumerism would bother a class as young and ambitious as mine for one moment. Well, I was wrong. We had struggled hard with the difficult legacy of Gandhi, but perhaps this phenomenon was the most amazing part of that legacy. I must confess that I was puzzled by the surprising consistency with- w h c h a generation only born in the seventies still reacted with nervous unease to the idea of absolute hedonism. How history comes snapping back at us! I myself had very little of interest to say o n the revolting subject of consumerism and never brought it up myself, but there it was popping u p again and again. Is it right? Is it right to g o o n a spending spree? If one can talk of a classroom culture, I could see that a reassuring answer to this questioning refrain was sought desperately by severar among my class of Tvashtris. Consumption and its consequences mattered not

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just to one or two individuals but to my students as a group. Why? One answer was just that the 'opening up of the Indian economy' had become a cafeteria topic in recent months. The media was full of it. Foreign collaborations, MNCs, the free floating rupee, megabucks, hypermercantilisn~, cyberspace, on-line communication. The vocabulary, viruslike, was everywhere, and the IITs obviously formed a conducive host environment. But there was another, perhaps more psychologically interesting, answer, as well.

Commodity Fetishism and the Machine of Mass Culture Consumerism troubled my students because it was their Achilles' heel. Admittedly, as human sorrows go, not a \,ad weakness to have-but still a weakness. These were golden children. They were the pride and hope of their families, certain of a wondrous future ensured by the mere fact of admission to an IIT. Yet, the divine Tvashtris knew that this future was one whose glory was defined mainly in terms of what both Freud and Marx would have characterized as 'commo&ty fetishism,' although it is doubtful if anyone in my class was familiar with the phrase. They had certainly not come across Roland Barthes' musings: Mass culture is a machine for showing desire: here is what must interest you, it says, as if it guessed that men are incapable of finding what to desire by themselves ... All that media intimidation, the addiction to brand names, to the glitzy splendour of Hindi cinema cornlined with the comforts of a bourgeois value system-themes which came u p ad nauseum in my class-had been anticipated by Barthes, a prophet f r o k quite another culture. Barthes was, of course, talking of the literary creation of the artifacts of love and

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desire in the West but he might just as well have been analyzing the effects of the discourse of conte~nporaryglol>al advertising or Hindi cinema. The body which will Ix loved is in advance selectecl and manipulated by the lens, subjected to a kind of zoom effect which magnifies it, brings it closer, and leads the subject to press his nose to the glass: is it not the scintillating object which a skillful hand causes to shimmer before me which will hypnotize me, capture me? This 'affective contagion', this induction, proceeds from others, from language, from books, from friends: no love is original. Nothing, I know, could have been further from Ba~thes' thoughts than the ethnography of the engineer when he wrote about desire. But consider how apt his insight is. When you are highly rated products of your culture-as my students definitely were-you conform to social expectations. More than just conform--you are in fact 'hypnotized' by those 'scintillating objects' which that 'machine for showing desire'mass culture-places before you. And because your social status depends on your continuing to 'press your nose against the glass', as Barthes mercilessly puts it, you have no particular incentive to 'find out what to desire by yourself. You leave it to others. So, there it was-the connection between the elitism which was obviously basic nlriongst students at an institution like the IIT and popular culture. Not only did film and media prescribe the life-style for which a career in engineering provided the structural Support, I,ut a perhaps more insidious weakness was involved. This was the incapacity to choose, to really choose, for oneself. , . Barthes would have seen it a sort of imaginative

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impotence. Leaders of the future my students might be and managers of extremely sophisticated machines, but their elite image, as well as I dare say imaginings, were both controlled by an even more powerful machine-mass culture. Loss of individuality was the price one paid for opting into a culture-grinder. Not surprising really, except for the fact that we'd agreed uncontroversially earlier that 'originality', i.e. innovativeness and hybrid interests, were characteristics of the true technologist, trained to move his discipline forward. But here was a simple contradiction between the sclf-ustechnologist and the self-m-epitomeaf-a-c tr lttr re. What the technologist did in his work-space was invisible to mass culture in general; however innovative h e was, such originality showed u p only indirectly in a ledger of public awards, acclaim, monetary rewards. But the ways in which he spent his earnings were dictated by mass culture and that culture-a machine-would allow for little innovation in the display of wealth. It defined quite transparently through its sub-systems-films, advertising, magazines etc.-the parameters of success, the how, when and where of spending. Very little wrong with thls either, the Tvashtris informed me repeatedly, with m ~ t c h bravura. Work hard, e a r n well, attend to your own comforts-an honest creed. What's this soft-headed claptrap about originality? (A flash-forw ard to Akhil the Pragmatist's presentation: 'If you have lots of money, you are considered cultured, right?' And the class nods approvingly. I can spot no disagreement. I'm dumbstruck but everyone else is quite matter-of-fact). SO what was the problem? This-the nagging traces of cultural memory. As a group, my class had imbibed-from school-texts, Hindi films, television, where else?-the generic idea that 'our culture', a 'spiritual' ace, differed from that of dominant West in its rejection of 'materialism' (the Tagore keytext for this chapter

Conspicuous Co.orzsumprfon 11 1 is illustrative). Now, as ideal types within 'our culture', with high approval ratings, it behoved my students to fit into this anti-materialist mould as well. But of course, that would not d o at all, It went completely against the grain of the competitive mentality that had brought them through the tough-as-nails Joint Entrance Examination of the IIT in the first place. And so, they were caught in a conflict of myths. Not any old myths either, but two of the most powerfiil in human historythe myth of world@ success a n d the myth that worldly success was a myth. Where would we go from here? My ears caught a fragment of conversation in the corridors outside class. 'So our desires are dictated hy mass culture.' 'Makes you feel debased, does it?' 'D-RASEd, huh? Look, you are speaking to a future computer engineer., Obviously not. We are a part of mass culture also, right? Besides culture is mass culture, else it is a cult. After all, as RBN says, we are the producers of the products of mass appeal; what we do in our work space becomes mass culture.' Well, well! I went into my next class a r n ~ e dwith two subtexts:

Subtexts: Ashis Nandy: This essay on the mass culture of desire focuses on the individual consumer and the sense of inadequacy created in him as he is bombarded with the media's vision of the things he 'lacks'. The catalogue of the things supposedly needed by a consumer transforms itself into a psychological sense of lack, a lonel lines^ This is the malady of modernism. Nandy's article entitled 'Targeting the Lonely Consumer' can be read as a critique of late capitalism and its ever more alienating construction of 'false desire(s)'.

Bibhas Sen: Sen's story on intellectual property rights is called 'Zero Sum Game'. It combines high farce with satire to reflect on the relatio~lshipbetween India's poorest farmers ancl the worldadministration of the USA. No summary could clo ji~stice to this story about how hunlan needs, desires, opinions and rights come to he phrased in the language of international trade. It silnply has to Ile reacl. Even the po-faced Tvashtris wel-e taken I>y Sen's sto~y.I watched their faces crease in delight as they figured out the consequences of Sen's 'zero-sum game' and then their l7rows crease in concentration as they worked their wa)7 through Nandy. But they saicl nodling, of course. Was I never going to get anywhere in Tvasl~triland?That fanliliar sense of apprehension in me translateci, as is often the case, into rhetorical inflation. It clidn't work, of course, hut thanks to the robust scepticis~nof the Tvashtris en mnsse we mrt.re in the end able to move on. tIow w e clid so, stunil~lingly,fornzs the nest segment of my narrative.

A Typology: Needs, Desires and Feelings Rec:lll, I said to my class-the demagogic gleam in my eye clearly visil>le-the etymology of the mroiti 'consume'. It nras an etymology that would have pleasecl Galldhi. Latin conszlmem, -sumpturn, to clestroy; con-, signifying completeness; swnere, to take. Was there not a prophetic element in the origin31 nleaning of this wortl-'the destruction of wholeness'-from which its later, more familiar, derivative, 'to consume' meaning 'to eat' but in the process to destroy what you ate. My class, hr)aever, did not favour the etymological route to unclel-standing. It was too pedantic for them. And they were unmoved I>y the clem:~goguery. Nevertheless, I persistecl for a hit. You I>ecome, I insistecl, Y

Conspicuofts Cotts7~rnption 113 quite literally what you eat, right? Right. Is it possil>le then that intense consumerism leads to a mental identification of human I~eingswith their objects of desire-the house beautiful, the state-of-the-art car, the ioh-to-encl-all-jol>s?But Akhil the Pragmatist, clearly Mammon hinlself in disguise, inte~venecl: Logically, since nzotlLy will hzly you uri-vthi~zgyou zunjlt, it should he considered the prinluly ol?jcct ?f de.sire. Everything else can be had if you have money. \X1l~at,I asked, but without much conviction, :ihout all those things that money is supposed not to be ahle to buyhealth, happiness, love? But I knew what Akhil's answer was going to he. Oh, those, he said, those can he \>ought; in fact they are hought most of the time! I was in a bit of a jam. Because it was I who 11:icl brought clippings from an old article of mine (Nair, 1992) on marriage and dating advertisements across cultures. I t was I who'd pointed out to my class how l ~ u m a nI~eings were often themselves the prime commoclities being bargained fol. within a culture. Among the ndvertisenlents I'cl shown the Tvashtris: SUITABLE match, preferably Engineer, for 23/155 fair, slim, beautiful, non-working Engineer girl. Dow~ylessmarriage. Write Box XX. (India) WE WOULD LIKE TO PROPOSE TO AN educated

Sinclhi girl, n Sinclhi boy arriving shortly fro111 USA on a month's vacation. Apply Box XX. (India) STYLISIl MAN, financially independent, mid-fo~ties, slim, ~nediunlheight, brown hair, varied interests (not too interesting) seeks lady with plenty of flexi1,le time to share long lunches, leislrrely afternoons, evenings, holid:~ys, I > L I ~ especially sincere friendship. If you are under forty, slim, attmctive, fun-loving, independent, please write. lcleally London area. Box M(. \

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And I'd asked them why: Why was the woman engineer declared 'nonworking'? Did this not have to do with the ways in which 'our culture' conceptualized gender, by, for example, first equipping a woman to handle machines and then tying her hands so that she remained economically still subservient? Or, who were the 'we' in the second advertisement? Clearly, it was not the boy himself but his ,family who was doing the 'proposing' on his hehalf. Why? And did the al~nostnlanclatory use of the noun 'alliance' and verbs like 'apply' and 'solicit' in the Indian advertisements illlply an elnphasis on fornlal and familial relations, while affective relationships were focal in Western ones, which used verbs like 'desire' and 'seek' insteacl? In other words, a Western advertisement relied on the classic literary motif of the quest for a romantic partner, a heartsearch; the Indian theme, on the contrary, seemed to I>e that of the request, the solicitation. Indian advertisers asked for a 'suitable match' in a 'matrimonial colun~n';Western advertisers for a 'perfect mate' within a 'parrnership/dating' format. So, was it possible on the hasis of semantic evidence of this sort to begin to identify jmtterns of' cz~lturaldzflereizcc? Perhaps the manifestations varied, hut sexual conl~noclification was evident in I>oth cultures. Having helcl forth thus to the Tvashtris, I was hardly wellpositioned to deny Akhil's assertion that 'love' and 'happiness' coi~ldbe bought. I'd already uncter~nined~ n yown case Oy suggesting that Illen and wolllen were 'advertised' and then 'sold' to appropriate customers in India as well as in the West, although the protocols dicl appear different. Vishwarupe the Gandhinn spoke up. Desires, he saicl, were temporary. They had to be instantly satisfied. Once you got what you wantecl, the clesire for it ceasecl. Love ancl happiness, in contrast, were long-lasting. Would you then, I asked Vishwarupe, cease to clesire the girl you lovecl once you 'got' her is m:rrriage? I would not, he said, desire her in the same way, hut I would continue to love her. What al>out

Co??spicuous Co?zsumptio?z 11 5 things like water, or food, I continued, suppose you want them desperately, could you I>e saicl to have a desire for water? But it was Arnit the Debater not Vishwarupe the Gandhian who responded right away to my question about desiring water. No, he explained to me patiently, water and food are needs, not desires. Needs have to be repeatedly met, unlike desires, which are sporadic and changeable. A typology was emerging-f needs, iteratively punctuating a life, like commas; of desires, temporary and occasional but overriding, like the exclamation marks of life; and of feelings, long-lasting, like the pattern of a sentence. Needs, desires, feelings - of these the first two were easily commercializablefood products, drinks, sleep-inducing drugs etc. meeting 'needs' and practically everything else on the market creating the demands of desire. To a great extent, technological inventions existed to meet our needs and manufacture and fulfil our desires, as Akhil the Pragmatist had cannily anticipated in his remark ahout money as the primary object of desire. I was reminded of Tagore's sentiments:

Because today progress is considerecl to he the characteristic of civilization, and hecause this progress goes on gathering an endless material extension, money has established its universal sovereignty. For in the world of ambition, money is the central powerhouse sending impulses in all directions. Tagore's technological metaphor of llloney as 'a central powerhouse' could not be more pertinent. Money financed machines and mechanical devices in turn created ohjects for money to reinvest in. It was a closed circuit. Human needs and desires circulated within this loop Rut they did. not constitute it. The system ran itself. Bal-thes again-'Mass culture is a machine for producing desire'. Okay, desires and needs, yes, I>ut feelings?

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Lave of Technology? Ramnik Reports: 'Yaar, something bothers me. Look, that w e have a fetish for certain articles or even a lifestyle dictated by solneone else is not a problem. This is really superficial. I just realized something else. Our profession, our choice of technology as a career has more or less the same otigirt. Remember J E E days? What kept you awake through the nights working on those problems ...was it not the glamour of IIT nther than a love for technology? I can understand a basic liking for science, or mayhe just a basic curiosity hut I don't think that's enough to keep anyone working for eighteen hours a day.' 'I just hate your philo ones! Nothing to get senti about if you ask me. If you long for something and are able to get it, nothing can be too wrong. On the other hand, if you can't get it, it is time to raise questions about the origin of your longing, and maybe claim for self-consolatory purposes that the source of your desires themselves are unjustified ...or even that your desires are really not your own. And as far as I can see, you are not in that position anyway!' 'You don't understand. First it is IIT, next IIM or IAS or MIT that looms over you, makes you work. You'll probably even get it but then there will be a next step. Yaar, as long as this phenomenon is restricted to material stuff, no problem. But here w e are talking about our whole lives, all our activities being encircled, dictated. If you decide you don't wanna consume disposable cameras you just stop. But you can't get back your life once you've spent it doing something YOU didn't desire in the first place.' 'Put simply, are you suggesting we don't spend tonight working on this assignment and sleep instead ... or go for a movie. Own u p man, this is your laziness speaking up!' 'One day you'll be sitting and asking yourself the same thing, mark h e . ' 'I've told you guys 'n' times that money is the real desire

Corrspicuous Co?zsumption 117 in all of us, not technology or I1T or IIM. Now just shut up. I'm going to make a presentation on lnoney laundering. And because money is the real thing your soul yearns for, this should interest you!'

Akhil the Pragmatist and Sanjeev the Choric Commentator: 'In the global economy, money laundering is an essential component of the get-rich-quick syndrome. Why launder money in the first place? The answer is simple. Dirty money is money obtained by illegal means (i.e, the profits of the drug trade, bril>es in arms deals, smuggling, underhand business transactions!). Such money would have to be forfeited and dealers jailed if it weren't possible to clean it up firsr. 'Three Further points: one, dirty-money-made-clean speaks a global language; two, dirty money is most often made most successfully on an inrernational circuit, which involves transactions that cross international borders (e.g, as in the drugs trade): and three, most i~nportantly for this course, spending such internationalized laundered $$$ requires that its profiteers sustain a cultnre of conspicuo?~~ consumption. 'The spenders of laundered money are associated with n high-flying, jet-setting lifestyle (sailing yachts, Swiss watches and vintage cars) which itself can be identified as transculti~ral or "global". Anybody with the requisite amount of money can share in this money-culture, no matter what hisher background (Arab sheikhs, Indian godmen, South American drug barons or Swiss bankers). In this sense, laundered money promotes an open democratic, nouveatl-nche as opposed to a closedclub, old-money, aristocratic culture. 'But okay, even if we are convinced that there are strong links between money laundering and money culture, what's it got to d o with technology? The answer Las to d o with the fact that money laundering is an "internationalized" process. Today,

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all important currency markets have gone electronic. This means that (dirty) money can change hands several times and travel across the globe in a matter of a few ninutes. Such a development is very useful to money launderers because it makes it much easier to disguise through complex financial transactions and diversification of portfolios the origins of dirty money. Hi-tech innovations have so far gone hand-inhand with the spread qP dirty money and the proliferation of the laundered money culture which conspicuously (re-) invests in technology.' 'I hope you're not going to shift the hlame onto the technologist again? He probably didn't design electronic banking for money laundering!' 'I'm not blaming anyone. I'm not even blaming technology, let alone technologists. I'm just showing that money makes people of all cultures and backgrounds talk the same language. Technology only enriches the vocabulary. 'To me, the syntax is not important. The modtrs operandi of money laundering, or money making is secondary to the semantics we attach to having big money.' 'Technology plays an unmatched role in deciding the semantics! Take media. It works by attaching a semantic value to all kinds of things. Advertisements today are not about selling a product. They are more about selling a sensationa "feel good" sensation, in which the object to be sold almost disappears from view. As Ma'am says, that vanishing point, that unattainable utopia, is ultimately what the consumer's gaze is fixed on. You may have a photograph of a couple on a beach to sell cold drinks or watches or even computers. The message conveyed: the product doesn't matter, the ,leeling that the ~ i c t u r egives you does. 'Media now sells us the se~narlticsof life. Foreign media bring with them Western culture. And we seem to be lapping up Westernwvalues, lifestyles and desires. This is potentially dangerous for our culture.'

Conspicuous Consumption 119 'Oh come on, we watch TV together, I know your peferences, yaar, and of the rest of the hostel. It is not as if we passively accept the "foreign" influences that come our way. There must be some sense in which we want/desire the values/entertainn~ent that the cable media bring our way, some void in our cultural network that the foreign agencies fill. Otherwise, we wouldn't respond so avidly to this media. The values that the foreign media bring in are not so alien after all. Let's not panic too much, yaaf 'I think we must realize that technology has and will continue to change our way of life. It is bound to affect our psychology, our mental worlds. Learning to live within these new psychological worlds will be the most singular challenge of the 21st century!' 'Hey, wait a minute! We are going back to Technological Determinism. It is OUR technology. We are not products of technology. If we see adjusting to technology as a challenge, we are making the wrong choices and need to stop.' 'Are you a prophet or what? That's what I'm going to talk about now-stopping the culture of consumerism.'

Ankur the Idealist: 'Realizing the per& of Consumerism': 'The eco-devastation caused by modern society is already well documented. This destniction in the world of nature is also replicated in the cultural sphere. World populations, for example, are growing very unevenly, with the rich North constantly inventing new objects of desire since they can afford them, while the poor South, which cannot afford such items, still falls prey to these desires. Such items can extend from cosmetics sold to individuals to war weaponry sold to governments. 'World economics is sustained by the production and sale of curiouser and curiouser objects of desire, so there is no end to t h s highly exploitative process. Media and capital

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have conspired to create an inescapable culture of consumption, the tentacles of which are global. 'Everyone everywhere, Midas rich or mouse poor, now wants more of exactly the same things-Japanese cars, hnerican dollars, French fashions. Mail order catalogues and television advertising pursue yo11 into your homes in an attempt at soft sell. The process of buying will get easier and easier and so increasingly harder to resist. Can such a process of not merely conspicuous hut compulsive consu~l~ption lead anywhere I ~ u to t the prospect of ecological and social disaster? 'I think realization h s two senses-we may either "realize" the perils of consumerism by making them real, so to speak, or we could "realize" them by coming to appreciate or understand their consequences. I hope that in India, as well as globally, we have the maturity and courage to hold fast to the second meaning of "realize" in the hard choices that confront us.' 'Ankur, to me it seems you see perils in everything, I doubt if we need to be that pessimistic. It has become fashionable to see perils in all technology. Hey something's got to go right! As I see it, the choice lies with the consumer. You cannot really differentiate between consu~nptionthat is harmful to us and that which is beneficial.' 'I agree. Had it not been for consumerism, we'd still have been living in the "Planet of the Apes". Technology develops only if there is a market for it. If there were no one to buy anything, there would be no progress. We would not develop. There would he complete stagnation.' 'Depletion of resources? It was the need for oil fuel that led to the development of efficient means to extract oil. Even if people use up oil, what is the big problem? When we run out of oil, consumers will demand a replacement and technology will provide them with one. So consunleris~llwill take care of us all!' '

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N o Worries: Cultural Tastes and Technological Choices Classnotes: Social scientists may construe the ways of desire, but engineers actually construct the objects of desire. What would the profile of the IIT engineer reveal about the material goals of our cultures? A couple of weeks ago, I reminded the Tvashtris, we'd considered the question: who is a cultured person? In this class, we will conduct a parallel enquiry. We'll ask: what is a cultural environment? Here is a list of those technologically produced objects and processes associated with us from hirth to death. 1

prenatal technologies (scans, blood tests, amniocentesis) - the womb months

- 0-9 interior months 2.

natal technologies (baby foods, baby clothes, feedng bottles) - 0-3 years

3. childhood technologies (educational equipment, toys, books, games) - 4-12 years 4.

adolescent technologies (films, videos, sports, fashion & cosmetic products) - 13-19 years

5

adult technologies (homes, cars, cooking and cleaning aids, computers) - 20-70 yrs.

6. gerontology technologies (health and exercise aids, medication) - 70 onwards 7. death-bed and post-death technologies (I>urial,preservation and exhumation processes) - for eternity

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Natumlly, there is a great deal of overlap between these exemplar technologies. Adults also watch films and videos and may need blood tests! Then, there are what we might call 'general' technologies that hzve now beconle an integral pan of the modern donlestic environment in many countries, such as electrically powered refrigerators, fans, heaters, lifts; mill produced clothing; factory made beds, tables, chain; gardening and agricultural tools; dahes, cups, plates; water and sewageworks and kitchen and bathroo111 fittings; telephones, faxes, b o o k s , writing equipment; artifacts a n d decorative accoutrements. Since these tool-made products, nominal kinds, are such familiar parts of our surroundings we could consider them extensions of ourselves-that is, natural kinds. The grossest exampler would include: spectacles as eyes, clothing as skin, forks and knives as hands etc. But of course, w e d o not have to be so literal-minded. Perhaps solnething like Foucault's notion of 'care of the self applies to the ways in which w e treat our technological social problems-pot~erty, extensions. Attitudes toz~~ards madness, illiteracy, pain-are acutely manifested in Ihe attitudes we adopt towards technology. If we regard ourselves as members of a cornlnon culture, our sense of cultural contact is mediated and reinforced by our technological extensions. It is obvious that the kinds of access w e have to technologies, and the kinds of care we lavish on them, play a crucial role in determining whether we are regarrletl as 'cultured' or not by in-groups within a culture. Our 'tastes' in furniture, in clothing and in the everyday technologies , w e choose as part of our 'natural' environment, function 215 indicators of whether we are considered central members of our culture or not. Techndogical productions in this sense perform 'the function of what the ethnomethodologist Harvey Sacks once

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called 'membershipping devices'. As extensions of the human self, they confer a social grade on the people they are identified with. NO one on HU484 may have studied ethnomethodology, but every one of us is familiar with the exclusive car, watch or idea of a 'status symbol-that education, which is the icon, the image of social standing. If w e were to sketch the 'epithymetic profile' of the IIT graduate, who is a high achiever both by instinct and by training, we'd find it defined in terms of his access to, and acquisition of, these symbols of success. Nobody can gauge his degree of happiness o r frustration. These a r e imponderables, but his social place can be measured pretty accurately through the technological extensions that come to attach themselves to him. Bottomline: Our cultural judgements haw come to be substantially h e d on technological totems. ~abindranath Tagore, our keytext for this chapter, once pronounced ominously on technological totems and the decadent mentality which produces them: Purely physical donlinance through mechanical and modern machines is merely exaggerating our bodies, lengthening and multiplying our limbs. The modem mind, in its innate chddishness, delights in chis enormous bodily bulk, representing an enonnous material power, saymg: 'ktme have the big toy and no sentiment which a n &h it1.It does not reali7.e that in thk we are ~turningto that anteduvian age which revelled in its production of gigantic phwical - . frames, leaving no room for the freedom of the inner spirit...

Keytext: Rabindranath Tagore: 'civilization and Progress': As one of the great sages of the mentieth century, Tagore's legendary status matches those of Gandhi and N e h . Like them, he was passionately engaged

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in debates about the future of India. What would happen to India if we embraced the Western model of technologically and scientifically driven progress? That was Tagore's question. But is this style of soul-searching outdated in today's global economy and can it possibly make sense to the technocratic mindset? Only a renewed reading of Tagore will tell. Tagore's poetic and rhetoric flair, though, certainly connects up with extract on 'art and our keyten for the next chapter-an technology' from Roben M. Pirsig's cult text Zen and the A n of Motorcycle Maintenance which, among other things, translates 'India' for the 'West' and vice versa.

According to Ra&

Deep Discussion Yaar

'Tagore is a diehard cultural relativist .when he says that the definition of "perfection" cannot be crystallized into an inflexible idea! But in the values that we have internalized, technology has, in effect, become synonymous with perfection.. .' 'Yaar, he suggests that Indian culture lacks the concept and- hence the word for expressing the western concept of civilization. This is really a return to our discussion on the suitability of our culture for science and technology. Dharma is far from "progress" as understood in the technologized West. If it is through a-dharma that a man prospers, gains his objects of desire and conquers his enemies, as our scriptures tell us; then this a-dhamza must be science! Obviously our culturally negative attitude towards science and technology has to be the reason for our poor performance.' 'True, yaar, but Tagore regards this as a virtue. The problem is that when the whole world madly rushes towards one goal, how can we in isolation regard it as an evil and yet prosper.' 'I think. Tagore has unnecessarily brought in words like "civilization" and "dhama". The debate is larger than these words. For instance, someone could say that for all he cares,

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call it progress or call it retrogression, what he wants is material prosperity and power.' 'But we are trying to cloak it all under the word "progress" aren't we? Using such a word gives one a false psychological confidence in science and technology, That is what Tagore is questioning. Consumerism boosted by technological gimmicks .hardly counts as progress! Where exactly are we going? Are we in touch with our feelings or are we machines? Are we merely the passive victims of the media and its sensationalism? Seriously, yaaf

Epithymetics, A New Branch of Philosophy It was the alleged capacity of machines to eliminate feelings, while pandering to sensations merely, that seemed to constitute a deep source of anxiety amongst the Tvashtris. In addition to Barthes, I recalled both Wittgenstein ('Why does it sound queer to say: "For a second he felt deep grief'?') and Ariitotle ('Happiness cannot be achieved in less than a complete lifetime. One swallow does not make a summer.... And one day, or indeed any brief period of felicity, does not make a man entirely and perfectly happy'). Vishwarupe's point exactly. Feelings-happiness, grief-are definitionally long-lasting. Unlike desires and needs, feelings are not to be fulfiled; they are fulfiling (Aristotle: 'Happiness is not in need of anythmg-it is self-sufficient'). Thus happiness, and feelings generally, according to this analysis, fell outside the arnbit of the mass-culture machine. Pleasure and desire were appropriate sensations to discuss in connection with conSumerisrn; feelings we would have to discuss later... Aristotle, however, was important to us for two reasons: first, Aristotle was a generalist; second, in the Ethics, he Considered propositions relating not jqst to happiness, but to 'the good life', of which desire and the. pleasure we derive from satisfying desire foml a significant pan. What did I mean when I categorized Aristotle a generalist? Well, Aristotle was

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a surveyor

fields-.ethics in the ,vicomachean Ethics, politics in his politics, aesthetics in the Poetics. He was a rypologist, a keeper of disciplinary fences and therefore disciplinary neighbourlines~--at any rate, Ihis was One of the intellectual called 'Aristotle' within dominant culture. ~ u my t students were not too familiar with of

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and the seductive gleam of gold a.k,a. money. How did desires enter our souls? HOW did they constitute the 'selfy? Traditionally, these questions had heen meated within h e old domains of ethics, aesthetics and politics MY gut feeling was that epithynletics was now ready to hive off and establish its own credentials as a discipline hat explore the cross-cultural histories of the concept of desire.

this ~ristotle. ~h~ Tvashtris knew their Aristotle through the general One reason why we had seen the sudden and amazing Alexander (Sikandar) who had come to conquer India hut collapse of the brave socialist experiments of the early because porus, the king whom he had taken as rwentieth CenQIY, it could be argued, was certainly he drab prisoner of war, together with all those ubiquitous sages fashion in which socialist theorists dismissed the allure of ~ ~ dconvinced i ~ , him that he would b e better off conquering his instead, Aristotle was Alexander's tutor. Tutor a consumerism. left no space for the bright baubles which mind already receptive at tweflty-four to the idea have always held such a terrific a m t i o n for the human psyche slogan 'To each according to his nee&, from (conquering oneself'; creator, perhaps, of that Complex Alexandrian mind-that is how my students knew Aristotle. each according to his abilities' sounded perfectly ratiorwil, N ~ for~ the, first time, they were meeting Aristotle Ihe addrably decenf, but it ignored the respect most human have always accorded irrationaliry. 7 0 each according thinker as well as teacher. And as their teacher, in turn, I to his needs and desires..: might have proved a canfier found that I, too, wanted to emulate histotle in one respect. ideology. I wanted to name a new discipline. Academic ~ h i l o ~ o ~ ~ ~ ! E ~ i h ~ m e t i is c s the discipline to cope with that gap in and Afistode in particular, had already systenlatized such philosophies, that slightly embarrassed silence about areas as aesthetics and ethics. At the end of the twentieth hecontibr~tion of desire to the nouon of the good sociev century, I thought we were ready to introduce another subthe good human being that we find even in the &hics field of philosophy. Epithymetics. histode was Prissy on the issue. kudoxus, the founder of the Epithymetics: meaning 'pertaining to desire' fro1'' the school, he dismisses as a good man but not a Greek ep+, upon, and thymos, the soul. Epithymetics, as I particularly good thinker. Unlike Eudoxus (and ~ ~ saw it, was an area of study fantastically suited, in fact allllost who pleasure to be the highest good and source of demanded, by the ethos of the late twentieth century. It was Aristotle thought v i m e the source of happiness. an obvious focus of attention in the age of consunlerism, was two kinds--monl and intellectualand he this discipline would study the .foundatio?ls of the notion qf pnctice h t h Was the only route to m e happiness, pleasure desire, ~t would seek to analyze exactly those questions about to be had from being virtuous. the differences between needs, feelings and desires that the I not imagine the Tvashtris co~vincedby hstotle.s Tvashtris hadSraised in HU484. It would ask about the triangular views On the pleasures of virtue-intellectual vinue, in relationship that obviously existed hetween the thrills PMicular were doers and consumers; I knew [hey saw consumerism, instant gratifiction, the ex~itelllentsof the lnarket

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very little 'virtue' in contemplation. It was alright for sages, females, teachers, but not for go-getters. However, as I've noted at the very beginning of this chapter, my class as a collective was still disturbed by an anxiety about the limits of consumerism. Would they end up swallowing the world? What about the irreplaceable depletion of the world's reserves of wood, oil, water? population? Pollution? Too many consumers, too few goods. Result-selfishness, vicious competition, disaster? Ah, well, I said, that's why epithyn~etics.The twentieth century is different from the third century BC of Aristotle in at least one respect. Today more nominal kinds (read consumers goods) litter the world, while natural kinds (flora, fauna) are being rapidly reduced. Nor is there a shadow of doubt that it is aggressive technological creativeness, rather than the virtue of Aristotelian contemplation, that has led to this gradual substitution of the foci of desire from natural to nominal kinds. To consider a slightly lugubrious example: where, let's say, ownership of an elephant was once a status symbol in India, today that elephant is replaced by a Volvo. Less exotically, where a hundred years ago, very little of the world was electrified, today access to electric power is regarded as a basic quality of life indicator. The character of cultures all over the world has been irresistibly changed by technology. A culture's relationship with the natural environment is now mediated by complex technologies (dams, mining equipment, power plants, trdctors etc.). Contemporary cultures have as a consequence learnt to understand technology as both the poison and the remedy. Technology can solve huge problems but its very inventiveness drags desire in its wake-the desire for higher and higher levels of satisfaction-physical as well as intellectual. Epithymetics as a discipline would attempt to place in perspective'this desire for nominal kind of satisfaction that seems especially relevant to our times. In order to do so, it

Conspicuous Consumption 129 would concentrate on the links between technological productions, which are always nominal kinds, and the circulation of desires within a ci~ltl~re. .. The word 'epithyn~etics' was, in this sense, a kind of verbal talisman which the Tvashtrk and I could carry ahout with us if we wanted to get lucky ahout understandin9 ourselves, our times and our technologies. Half-remelnhered, Yeats' line kept recurring in my mind: 'my soztl, sick with desire and .fastened to a dying animul...' I think Yeats - --, ~oliticalconservative, poetic radical, might have understood me ambiguous value, especially for those makers of desiretechnologists-of studying the subject I've called epithymetics. ---0

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ACROSS THE DIASPORIC WORLD: The Art of Measuring the M i n d

I.

There was no contest. M.C. Escher was definitely the man of the match; he hit a boundary every time. My own guess is that, were my class to vote o n the artist closest to their hearts, it would not be M.F. Hussain or Amrita Shergil or Rembrandt van Rijn or even Andy Warhol, although, to be fair, Mayank did bring up Picasso and his cubist asymmetries but, knowing Mayank and his giFt for being controversial, that was just to be contrary! Despite competition, Escher dominated the field. The funny thing is that I suspect we repeated the Hind Swaraj syndrome here too. Before I brought my set of Escher prints to class, not one person in my class of forty-five had heard of the man. Afterwards, there were queues to borrow the prints. Even the quasi-Ribhus who never spoke in class came up, silently photocopied the Escher reproductions and returned them, equally silently, the next day. By the end of the course, I was informed by a nun$er of Tvashtris that a major multinational brewery had begun an advertising campaign in India based on Escher's etchings. Escher, in

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short, had turned out to be hot propin the e n of liberalization-and we had just about anticipated that trend in class. It was as good an example as any of the small thrills of deja nl we encountered along the meandering route of HU484. Like Gandhi, Escher was a cultural icon, a classic. He provoked the imagination. The reasons for his popularity in a class where graphic design was a compulsory subject were not hard to fathom either. Even more than Leonardo Da Vinci, lle epitomized the type of the engineer as artist. Da Vinci had once described human feet as a triumph of engineering, but Escher went further. He presented not only the human body but all nature in the visual language of technology-trees, water, birds and fishes. A world mechanized, measured.

Measure for Measure: The Background At this time, w e were talking rather a lot about measurement. One conlmon view of the 'Indian mind' dating at least to Macaulay's infamous Minutes is the following: Indians are, to put it mildly, careless about numbers. As long ago as 1935, Macaulay had sneered at what he supposed was the Indian concept of 'history, abounding with kings 30 feet high and reigns 30,000 years long'. Ahsurd, wasn't it? In other words, like a true orientalist, Macaulay found hirnself unable to concede to the subject peoples of India their rights to their myths, while readily permitting his own culture its equally fantastic Greek myths as a ~llost noble inheritance. Indian niythological discourse was to be condenmed as false 'fact' while Greek ~nythologieswere to be uncle~~stoocl as 'tn~e'metaphors. It is one of the best exainple of cultural I~lindnesson record, ancl none the less striking for being quoted over ancl over again by colonial historians: but 11ly questiqn to the Tvashtris was: how was it that 'we'Indians today-had so thoroughly internalized the Macaulayan Line in our own self-assessment?

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Popularly, we appear to have accepted the colonial categorization of ourselves as a culture given over to imprecision. Jokes about Indian Standard Time and the Hindu Rate of Growth abound in our everyday conversation. For example, a 'Westerner' asking for directions in India is always said to receive the reply that the place he is looking for is just 3 little further d o w n the road-without any further specifications in terms of minutes, miles, twists and turns. And so forth. As a culture, we d o not, it seems, value space and time, regarding them always as infinite. Yet, if one were to search for the most convincing repudiation of this persistent stereotype of 'the native', we would have to look no further than the average undergraduate class in engineering. Measurements and their applications absolutely fascinated the Tvashtris-and the more precise, the better. They were comfortable with calibrations, calculus, grids, exact statements; uncomfortable with speculation, vagueness. And Escher counted as one of their favourite artists. If Indians as a culture were sloppy, IIT engineers, rated highly by the culture, seemed to provide a decisive counterexample. Surely, if our culture had otherwise trained our children to disregard exactness, they would not take so easily either to Escher's art or to a profession where measurements were of such intrinsic importance. From my notes to the class, verbatim: Last week we discussed, or at least mentioned, the following aspects of culture: 1 Continuity and change 2. Measurement, extension ancl comnlunication

On I., the main insight we've relied on is that cultures are not to be regarded as monolithic. At any given time, there are various stresses and strains within cultures, some of which

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It was a line of reasoning that divided my class right down the middle-as indeed it was meant to! Meanwhile, two of my students, inspired by Escher have decided, quite on their own, to read a paper on symmetry in art and science.

tend to preserve or conserve, while others promote or catalyze change (remember Aristotle's boat?). We've also looked, briefly, at differences between the technological state of 'world culture' in 1492 and 1992 in relation to the matter of continuity and change. And we used technologies of 'keeping time' and their inherent virtues and drawbacks as an example of the relation l~etweenculture and technology. O n 2., we've talked about 'extensions of the self within a culture and of how a child gradually acquires knowledge of 'self/'not-self. Just to remind you, observe this drawing by a three and a half year old (I hold up a sketch). Observe how watches, dressing cases etc. are treated as part of a n extended 'monster' body by the child. Notice, too, the cultural clues to his nlilieu already evident in this 1in;-drawing. Slowly, this child will learn to draw the boundaries differently; he will develop a more precise bodily geography for the location of what Freud would have called his 'ego'. However, you can see here, even without having read Freud, how non-intuitive the idea of a 'self-even a simple, physical self-can seem. Despite the fact that the child who has drawn this picture is a modern, privileged metropolitan child from your own culture, you find h s sense of self a little odd, don't you? Why? Obviously because the idea of a self is largely learnt, culturally acquired, and, once learnt, militates against other ways of seeing things: the child's way, the tribal's, the modernist painter's. I think we could make the connection here, once more, between the provocative powers of 'art' versus 'science and technology', which are supposed to Ix mundanely tied down to objective measurements. This little three year old's drawing, for instance, provokes us to think that artistic impulses not only precede but actually help members of the human species to develop a sense of self. Ergo, perhaps we can go on to surmise from this: first art and culture, then self, and only then science and its ally 'objective' measurement.

Manoj and Sunil, Choric Listeners: 'Art and science both appeal to a notion of symmetry. Nature herself seems to have a preference for sylnmetrical fon-r-rations. Complex symmetries have long been observed both by physicists and by mathematicians. Engineers and technologists too need to understand how synlmetry works whether they are constnlcting buildings, or aeroplanes or bridges. All cultures without exception use the psychological propensity which human beings possess to appreciate symmetry in shaping cultural objects and cultural spaces. This tendency can be noticed in the earliest structures with a ritual significance such as the Egyptian pyramids, and also in modern Imildings such as the Bah'ai temple in Delhi. 'Synlmetry can actually create illusions of/in space. Dress designers use the principles of symmetry by, say, dressing a bulky person in longitudinal stripes to make her look taller and slimmer, while dressing a thin person in horizontal stripes to fill him out. So important and basic is t h s fact of synunetrical organization that modernist art has been able to create new styles of drawing and painting either by playing around with and multiplying symmetries as we saw with the art of Escher, or by deliberately breaking up conventional synmmetries as in the work of Picasso. Therefore, are emphasize that the search for synmletry motivates both scientific and artistic activ~tywithin cultures.'

Gut Symmetries, Gut Reactions; Ramnik's Report \

'These guys from DL1 hold us to he total duds. Asymmetrical nerds. Arbit man, arhit opinions they have about us! They

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think w e are one shady lot, who can d o nothing but cram. They've got to open their eyes yaar. We're no "Baldy and Specy" lot. Despite the roaring success of Rendezvous and of our performance in their cultural fests year after year, they think we're nuts when it comes to extra-curricular activities. Those guys think they are perfect and symmetrical beauties and w e are ugly brutes-lacking any idea of syrnnletly!' 'Yup, it is some kind of a "inverse halo effect". But it's still okay man, at least the rest of the world gives us the benefit of the halo without the inversion!' 'Come on, if you exclude DU what's left, ban? I mean, where can you find an aggregation of young women like at DU-what symmetry, can you find such nat%ral symmetry anywhere in nature? But jokes apart, we gotta work o n changing our brand image. We're not just motor-cycle engineers yaar, not even Suzuki motorcycle engineers! We're Zen, yaar-like Mayank! Forget what Ma'am had to say about engineers being boring etc.!' 'Yaar, she doesn't seen1 to think too highly of us when it comes to these things, does she?' 'Die hard, buddy! Watch Pankaj, he's taking u p our cause today.'

Pankaj the Musician: 'This presentation gives me the opportunity to show that the engineer is not such an uncivilized creature after all. He at least understands and appreciates a significant part of our cultural heritage-namely music.' 'What is he going to harp on? Ilis Music Club activities or something?' 'Harp on, huh? Good pun, man!' 'Cultures have developed distinctive musical theories and traditions over centuries. Western music is distinguished by harmony, whereas Indian music, which is mainly n~elodic, has diversified into two or three streanls: court music, temple

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music, and abstract dhrupad music. Rhythm, in~provisation and decoration are very important in Indian music, both Carnatic and North Indian. 'Today, w e have not only these traditional forms in music but a tremendous explosion of popular tunes, mainly circulated through the medium of the cinema. Additionally, w e have witnessed the rapid technologizing of music instrumentation through the agency of new inusic directors-the TechnoKings. And as in many cultures, music is closely connected with dance in most forms of Indian 111usic (from Bharat Natyam to Bhnngra to Rap to Filmi Geet). This implies that music is not merely useful as therapy for the mind (e.g. soothing meditation music, soulfully uplifting kirtans etc.). It also stin~ulatesthe body to exercise and keep fit. 'There is no human culture without music. Yet general comparisons of musical traditions raise more questions than they answer. For example, is illusical ability innate like mathematical ability, or is it the result of cultural training? Are tastes in music culturally delimited or does music cross cultuml boundaries effortlessly, defining the tyranny of taste? 'Can babies learn music even in the woml-, as solne studies with infants suggest? And is there a universal language of music-because for example, it might be alnlost inlpossible for a n Indian t ~ s t a dto appreciate Chinese opera music, given the constraints of his own tradition? 'What new shapes and powers, what new Tansens will music acquire after the, intensive technologization of its instrumentation that it is currently undergoing? As a musician and an engineer, I feel especially qualified to address these Speculative questions'. Aseem the Rock Enthusiast: 'Ma'am I wonder why the engineering community should have to defend itself like this ...We weren't born engineers, were . we? Perhaps most of us are unacquainted with the fine arts and will probably remain so, but that shouldn't mean w e are incapable.'

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'I think it's a defensive reaction on the part of the nonscientific community. They know we know a lot of stuff they know nothing about, so just to make a position for themselves and show us down, they claim we are incapable. I've never heard of an engineer who pronounced anyone inherently incapable of engineering! Shows these artist folks carry a complex.' 'Well obviously you're speaking from the heart. I guess just as w e as technologists would love to "essentialize technology", they as artists want to do likewise with their field.' 'Your comments in the matter are biased because your girlfriend is in the arts. You're the one who is speaking from the heart, not me!' 'Hey wait a minute ...this is argumentzcm a d hominem!' 'Yes-both of you hang on a minute. I think we are missing the crux of the issue. First of all, are science and art really antithetical? If yes, we cannot hope for any reconciliation. Could it not be that engineering or science are acquired skills as against art which is inborn?;. 'I just don't understand why people here are prejudiced against themselves. A r q , yaar, weigh Science and Technology against Art in a pair of scales and see who wins!' '

In the Background, A Pair of Scales RBN'S notes: We've asked: Why is the matter of keasurement, establishing measural~lesymmetries of shape and then defining boundaries through them so important within most cultures? And we've answered the question with the following observations: A . Measurement gives us a common grid for making judgements about relative merit in almost every social context: In sports: how fast, how far, how strong?; in wealth: how much? We've spent some time on the flashy example of beautycontests too,.hecause India was placed first in both the Miss World and Miss Universe contests last year. A matter of

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evaluating symmetries. Another controversial example: the Ndebele women of Africa. ~ o ~ l i i s t i c a t emetal d technology welds lovely gleaming rings onto the gecks and feet of the ~ d e b e l ewomen. A woman's beauty and worth is, allegedly, determined by the number of rings she wears. Could anything be made, I asked the Tvashtris, of the correlation in the Ndehele example between 1) technological achievements, 2) the social evaluation of gender through literally counting rings welded onto a woman's body and 3) possibly 'universal' ideas on (the symmetrical scales of) justice? Were there grounds for arguing that measurements played as pernicious a role in 'unspoiled' traditional Ndebele society as in our 'corrupt' modern one? Could not the 'ringing' of Ndebele women be seen as crippling by degrees, since calibrated increases in the number of rings ended u p atrophying the neck muscles, causing swollen feet and generally much asymmetrical discomfort? And given this scenario, did not another culture have the right to intervene, if they found such a conception of aesthetics morally repugnant? Ramnik the Philosopher responded immediately with a quite central objection. How can we, he asked, ever presume to judge the customs or actions of meml3ers of 'other' cultures if we have not internalized their feeling and attitudes? Only being born into, or having lived very long within, a culture, ensured rights to judgement. Otherwise, we could be riding roughshod over belief systems such as those of thc Ndcl3ele. Here %as a replay, then, of my remarks about Macaulay's cultural insensitivity. Ramnik's question brought thi: supposedly uncomplicated matter of 'objective' measurement right up against the problematic hypothesis of cultural relativism. But I wasn't ready to discuss relativism with t h ~ sclass as yet. Wait, I appealed to Ramnik, we'll get to grips with your question presently. It's too importan% to dismiss in a few words. For the moment, let me just say chat I used the

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Ndebele example for stqtegic reasons. It is sometimes clarifying to analyze a culturally distant scenario, hut you could find similar exanlples closer home such :is nleasuring a woman's merit in terms of her dowry or her height or complexion. Meanwhile, we'll get on with the uses of measurenlent. B. Measurement helps us to solve co-ordination problems. Illustration: We meet using mundane teinporal nleasurements, i.e. clocks and time-tables. Likewise, spatial measurements help us decide where w e stand in the here and now, e.g. 'we've travelled a hundred iniles froill Delhi towards the southeast, so we must be nearing Agra by now'. C. Measurement and quantification are at the heart of 'modem science'. Measurement devices and innovations help us to represent the laws of nature in extremely powerful ways, whether in classical or in quantum mechanics. D. Measurement and matheinatical arrangements are a source of pure mental and aesthetic pleasure, i.e. they possess aesthetic value in and of themselves. For example, harmony (a.k.a. 'internal consistency' among scientists), economy, symmetry and proportion (often mysteriously referred to as 'elegance' by scientists) are criteria used to judge between theories in the sciences as well as the arts, despite the spectacular vagueness of these 'nleasurement' parameters. Simplistically, we could think of the notion of measurement as a cultural bridge between science and the arts, between theory and praxis. Measurements gave us the psychological reassurance of having a grip on the shifting world. As a heuristic of organization, they make this world at once comprehensible, beautiful and logical. Hooray for measuren~ents,then. So far s o good. The best thing to have done would have been to close the discussion after this linear ABCD recital. Perhaps I would have been a better teacher in Tvashtri-landmore on-line, to use o u r current jargon. At the very least, it would have helped, I think, if I'd had a greater implicit belief

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in the value of boundaries. But I could not suppress the feeling that the benign view of measurement that I'd presented to my class was a little misleading. Incautiously, I ventured into discussing mimeasurement: We could also ask ourselves about the relation between measurement and nlismeasurement.. Can this relationship be culturally significant, even ideologically loaded? Are soine uses of measurement a characteristic of the 'pseudo-sciences1phrenology, astrology, intelligence testing etc.? And I referred my class to Stephen Jay Gould's classic m e Misrneasure of Man. Could the sets of interpretations and protocols of the measurements used, I wondered aloud in class, form a possilde methodological boundary - between the sciences 'proper' (physiology, astronomy) and the pseudo-sciences (phrenology, astrology)? But before I was able to launch on this speculative flight, Anurag the Vedic Sage stopped me in my tracks-luckily for everyone. We might have strayed anywhere, if I'd been allowed that excursion into the pseudo-sciences. We had to draw the limits somewhere. If I had not yet learnt the value of boundaries, the Tvashtris certainly had. Anurag's questions illustrated rather effectively my earlier comment about the engineer's commitment to precision, Before we go into all that, said Anurag firmly, you'll have to tell us what exactly a boundary is. You've already stated earlier that 'experts' settle boundary disputes. How exactly? And why?

Of .Boundaries and Off Limits

I

I knew Anurag would never stoop to reading poetry. Otherwise, I might have reminded him of Gertrude Stein's cautionary line 'Exactitude is killing'. In the event, I just got on with it, attending to Anurag the Vedic Sage's desire for exactitude with more 1eaves.from my ?lass notes: This week we go hack to the question of boundaries, especially the boundaries and boundary criteria that might

I,

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define social groups such as engineers, women, Indians, etc. In class, we've read Umberto Eco on how the limen was conceptualized in Western (i.e. Greek, Latin, Modem European) history, and on how it permeated ideas about rationality, science and logic in the West. Here is an extract from Eco's disquisition on boundaries: The Latin obsession with spatial limits goes right back to legend of the foundation of Rome. Ro~nulus draws a boundary line and kills his brother for failing to respect it. If boundaries are not recognized, there can be n o civitas. Horatius becomes a hero because he manages to hold the enemy on the border-a bridge thrown up between the Romans and the Others (incidentally, Horatius happens to be Macaulay's special hero, celebrated I J ~him in a famotis poem-RBN). Bridges are sacrilegious because they span the sz~lcus,the Inoat of water delineating the city boundaries; for this reason, they nlay only be built under the close, ritual control of the Pontifex .... The ideology of the Pax Romana is based on a precise definition of boundaries ...If the barbarians succeed in imposing their nomadic view then Rome will be finished ... Julius Caesar, in crossing the Rubicon, not only knows that he is committing sacrilege but knows that, once he has committed it, there is no turning back .... Time is irreversible. This principle governs Latin syntax. The direction and sequence of tenses, which is cosmological linearity, makes itself a system of logical subordinations in the consecutio tenzpoum....even God cannot cause what has been not to have been because such a violation of the laws of $me would be contrary to his own nature. God cannot violate the logical principle whereby

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'p has occurred' and -'p has not' occurred' would appear to be in contradiction. This model of Greek and Latin rationalism is the one that still dominates mathematics, logic, science a n d cohlputer programming. The Tvashtris clearly approved of this logical God that Eco had summoned up. Within the classroom culture of engineers Latinate God who was himself He made perfect sense-a disciplined enough to o l ~ e ythe absolute laws of linear time and measured space. And Eco had made it even easier for me by mentioning computer programming in connection with the ideology of I~oundaries.Still, I hadn't yet directly confronted Anurag's question. What exactly was a boundary? My notes to the class said at the time: In the simplest definition, a boundary is a word for 'a dividing line'. The inside-outside dichotomy is intrinsic to the concept of a boundary. However I'm not sure exactness, i.e. in the sense of precise measurability, is. Many boundaries can be inexact, even strategically so, e.g, where are the boundaries of India in Kashmir? The boundaries of words are notoriously inexact, too. Where does 'happiness' end and 'joy' begin? Answers to such a question would differ not only from speaker to speaker of English, or whichever language one chose to analyze, but perhaps even more problematically between cultures. Cultural materials, unlike physical matter, might prove intrinsically untidy. Space-time was perhaps mathematically describable as a harmonious, curving grid exquisitely fashioned by an Eco-logical God. Cultures were more aptly understood as a set of overlapping and criss-crossing boundaries. They differ from one another in defining their boundaries differently;

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one another in sharing their notions of where they the boundaries are to I>e drawn: (;ultural boundaries are harcl to fix rigicily. It is not that they d o not zxixt I>ut that they arc, ch;iractcristicalIy. negotialde-perhaps I>eGluse they : ~ r cin the hands of mere moltals. Perhaps one theoretical way in w h i c l ~ to disting~.isha 'god' fro111 a .111~1tal' is via hidher handllng of boundaries! The Tvashtris look vaguely interested. Perhaps some archetypsl lliernory of their divine status moves them. My notes continue: Expelts have god-like powers in this respect-they can 'decree' boundaries and thus still our doul,ts, subdue otlr anxieties. What a l ~ o u tmachines as 'experts'? V'e shall talk al2out this in thc ncxt session. Eco emphasizes, on the other side of a boundary, often lies fear nnd clanger. Most disturbing of all are the boundary-crossers-those who can make their home on both sides of the houndaly but belong to neither (Eco's 'nomads' or barbarians). 'l'hesr creatures cannot he tn~sted.And again, wandering off-limits in my typic:ll way, I tell my class about Mary Douglas' anthropological classic fi~ritya72d Dr~tzger.Douglas suggests that, in Jewish culture. anin1:lls like crocodiles and swine are regarded as 'nonkosher' (impure) because they hreak through I~oundar.ies such as the I:~nd-water divide. Fish on the contrary, are 'kosher' (pure) because they oper:lte in one ~nediunlalone. For my students, cu1tur:~lly fnrniliar with the notion of pollution, and in particular the iclea of food being made impure through physic:~l contact (joothri in Hindi, ctho in 13engali, echil in Malayalani etc.), D o u g l ; ~ hypothesis ~' makes instant sense. In effect, a forbidclen caste 1,ounci:u-y is 1~rc:lchetl when you e:lt food someone else 112s partaken of. Remelnher our earlier discu>sion?-you are (:lnd hecome) whr~tyou eat! I t isn't a matter of germs, however. One-in my \7icnr, s~~perficial-:defence' of the ritual food pollution nlles in Hindu culture is that they rely o n a 'scientific' premise.

namely, that eating others' food is unhygenic ancl potel. bad for one's own health. What this r1tual-r1s-scicntifi~-1~ygicnt' position fails to take into account, is precisely the 'I2oundnry ciisputes' that Anurng the Sage asked about. It is polluting for ;I Urnhmin to eat foocl from a Sh~~ctra's plate, I ~ u tis the reverse cq~lnllypolluting? What about a Brahnlin slxiring another 15K\hmin's victuals:) Only an authority figure like the Br~lhn~in Iiimself was ilccorclecl c u l t ~ ~ r alicense l as an 'expert' n.llo coulcl settle questions like these. Lewis Carroll's facetious lines 'I'll I>e judge ancl I'll Ix jury, said the cunning old fury' could \\.ull .serve as a passing description of the brahminrcal expelt 111 Hindu cult~~re-the final court of appeal, even when the prohlem-sct includcd himself. More generally, the point is that while the cultural environment trains us to recognize various l3ounclarycrossings-such as crossing the k(rlnpani-as possihly polluting, only certified experts can decide on the degree of danger resulting from such 11rc:aches. Hence their psychofunctional illlport as (god-)men. Speaking of men as gods and gods as nlen, then, \Ire returned to our olcl m).ths in class. As I re~nindeclthe Tvashtris, and as they enthusiastically agreed, seenzns ancl Irrkhsmatl rekhns were repeated motifs in the narr-:ltive stiucture of the Ramayarza and the ,lfa/~rthharnfria n d in folk-liternture. Concepts of the good life/good society (e.g. nioder:ition, modesty, duty and purity) were exemplil'ied by a person's ability-ften a woman's ability, such as the long suffering Seeta's to remain within socially specifivd li~liits,usually at considerable cost to one's 'self. And these were still texts India lived by.

Class Rooms, Textual Boundaries and Brain Drains Stanley Fish, the A~nerican 1iter;lly critic, once famously

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enquired: Is there a text in this class? One response to this sort of radical doubt is to assert that there are al~c.tzj~s texTs in class. There have to be, I~ecausetexts flag the boundaries of a class. They define a class. There can be classes without rooms-in fact we held our classes o n the lawns of IIT during the cold winter months, January, February-but no classes, I imagine, without texts. In our class there were forty odd student texts, one teacher text, and infinitely many inter-texts. And then there was a hidden text-a text that we never quite managed to get at within the 'local' context of our classroom, but which was always hauntingly there, like a raga in the distance. This was the narrative of the IIT Diaspora. The story had a familiar title-The Brain Drain'-and it had a her-the Non-Resident-Indian or NRI for short, who by dint of hard labour and professional expertise had made it 'out there'. 'Out there', a favourite word in IIT or Tvashtri lingo, was as often as not America, the land of limitless desire. Like it or not, the Indian psyche had to come to hard terms with the fact that these state-trained young engineers left in droves the minute they got their precious degrees. But why was a poor country like India spending over a lakh a year to educate students whose expertise only served to fuel the economy of a rich country like America? Should our students not be required to pay back a certain amount in sorely needed foreign exchange to the Reserve Bank or at least to their alma maten, the IITs? Didn't this lni.~sez, faire attitude encourage the selfishness already latent in the idea of an elite corps of master technicians whose labour was so valuable that nothing they wanted could ever be denied to them? Whenever I raised questions like these, I invariably got the same response-from my colleagues and from my class. India was one of the largest and 111ost vibrant democracies in the world. In such a land, it was 'undemocratic' to restrict

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individual freedom. These slliart young lads had the right to choose. If we could not provide them with appropriate jobs, we had no business to restrict their rights to find jobs &ewhere. After all, they had been equipped to compete with yhe best anywhere in the world'. Yes-hut what ahout their duties, I would ask helplessly. Don't they owe something to this democratic land which has invested so heavily in their etlucation? And what was an appropriate joh-the one which gave the111 the most money? ~ u int that case, India could hardly compete with a dollar economy. As for intangibles like 'a better work environment' and 'job satisfaction' wasn't the subtext simply that, for engineers, the West was always best and India eternally imperfect? The truth was indeed that simple, as both nly interlocutors and I knew well. An entire ideology of the aspiring middleclasses of India was i~nplicatedin the 'hands-off' attitude we took towards those perfect products of a Nehruvian nationthe IIT engineers. Tvashtsis, divine beings. We could not bring ourselves to question their moral choices or their decisions to cut and run, because these clecisions mirrored our own concealed desires to actually become our 'other1the dominant West. The I I T i c c n - t z ~ n ~ e d -represents N a dreamfigure in the subconscious of the I72dian bozrrgeoisie. It could be said that in him is emboclied that inysterious, unquestionable 'essence of technology' of which Heidegger wrote. What could be more the stuff of fairy-:ale, of art, than the story of the invisible mechanical man turned through his travels into a potentate of enornlous wealth-and thus enormous power. Frog into prince: the romance of Sam Pitroda, Swaraj Paul et al. Enomlous wealth and enormous Power-which two words better describe the political economy of America? A couple of years ago, in-another IIT classroom and in pursuit of a different set of objectives, I'd n a d e my es use of by students play a language game s o ~ l l e t i ~ l ~made

Across tbc DirrsJ~oricW/r~rlrl

l3c:l~ltlftil very ~ : I I democ~r;icy technology high Ixiildings high lifesvle co1ilfortal3lc freeciom

universities v e q I,ig cheap po\.'cl.ty olcl c'ulture ~";"e :I mis~iianagecl country

S5

aclvanced l>asel~all Magic .Jolinson sports tcchnolok~ space computer sciencc pomrer race

politics 1angu:lge .;ociety paradise festivals deriicinstrations ctilture history population unions, horne

S6

pesfectlon power insecure r:lurcicr recession nionry donlin;~tion justice

heritage emotion clisorcler

most powerful country busy higher studies high I>u~lclingb crime expensive cars

c':lst poor religious poor economy Iiistoric:~l pl:1ce5 family relations

gestalt psychologists. '[his was 'Associ:~tions',in ~ ~ l i i ce h ve~~one in the cl:,ss h:id to write dotvn the wcosds tliat inlmecliately came to 11lincl w t ~ c nthey tilotight o f the complex concepts 'India' :inel 'America'. Exalnples:

S1

America

India

f~reign rich cornfort crlrile scientist powerful

noth her land great poverty leaclers democr~cy unity in cliversity (.different cultures)

S2

rich critical solve5 its problems

liiore c~lltural activities teaching process good

S3

superpower high ststus advanced technology developed interfering nature clcstnlctive inventive racial cliscrirni~i:ltion

unity in diversity developing countq civilization c:rsteism nir:rl people good copying people de~ott.clto religion disrespect for Illother tongue

S.4

_

~ich strong expemlve

S7

developing terrorize iiard ~vorking

l 51

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world leaders racism wrong use of power advanced technology

several languages golden hstory freedom struggle mismanagement corruption

force power freedom even in killing people madness

large population peaceful good relations (political) disturbances beautiful places

S9

patent law super 301 brain drain movies Michael Jackson Madonna CIA technology Pakistan lawn tennis

Vivekananda foreign policy changeover to market economy hi-tech written constitution nuclear missiles

S10

crime superpower star wars rich high standards of living extrovert society industries

poor democrac)l freedom dirty politics non-aligned peaceful introvert society agriculture

S8

Strong steieotypic patterns emerge from these lists of

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~associations'. America unfailingly evokes images of: a) (political) power b) technological pre-eminence c) wealth and economic resources. In these gross ways, it is the absolute 'other' to an India defined by: a) (historical) tradition b) a huge population c) poverty and economic under-development. m e s e impressions could well be ones that are shared worldwide; if they do not seem especially 'Indian' that fact is hardly surprising, given the exigencies of electronic globalisation.

The Professional India.The Tvashtris had been reading a subtext, in counterpoint to Pirsig's keytext, uncompromisingly entitled 'Of India, Indian and Science' by Pushpa M. Bhargava and Chandana Chakrabarti. An extract:

!

L.

To understand the ramifications of Indian science, o n e would need to look at it against the background.. .of the Indian psyche .... It is primarily an agricultural country yet it is among the top ten industrial countries of the world ...To a casual visitor, India's variety in life-styles, dress, food, and habits seems staggering. All this variety has a bearing on the evolution of the Indian perception of science and has partly determined the way science and technology have developed in the country...At the time India gained independence in 1947, we had 16 universities. As of today, we have 155...Out of the ten institutions of national importance we have 5 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), 1 in statistical techniques, 2 in medical sciences, 1 in the Hindi Language a n d o n e in oriental studies...Before 1947, India produced virtually, no finished product ...Today, India igthe only country that makes every variety of consumer goods that one buys in the open market .... In some areas of

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defined constitutions and citizenship is just happenstance. Like the medieval guilds of Europe or the castes in India, the constitutions of modern professions consist in a tacit acceptance of the basic laws governing the system. The social workers of a profession are the teachers and professors who nurture that particular profession. Citizenship can be obtained by displaying adequate knowledge of the profession, being perceived as loyal to it and subscribing to specific societies or clubs-the equivalent of tax-paying.

science and technology that did not even exist 30 years ago, India's capabilities are as good as anywhere else in the world...However...all this has not happened without our having to fight forces that have I)een opposed to our policy of selfreliance. This opposition has heen garbed in names such as privatisation, open competition, costeffectiveness of imported products and quality, and at times we have fallen for the bait. Bhargava and Chakravarti's essay was written in 1989. In the interim, it has indeed come to pass that India has 'fallen for the bait'. At the turn of the century, fify years on from the formal declaration of Independence in 1947, the country has embarked on a massive programme of 'liberalization'. It has opened its markets to the world. Among the chief beneficiaries of t h s move have been, predictably, the always migratory tribes of Ribhus and Tvashtris, divine workmen with wings. It has become even easier for the Tvashtris to fly the coop, untramn~elled by nationalist obligations. 'It is a sad reflection o n our value system', comment Bhargava and Chakravarti, 'that a brain becomes a brain only on the day it decides to settle abroad and ceases to be a brain the moment the person returns to the country with the deternlination that he is going to work where he belongs'. And if in ironic affirmation, I notice that Ankur the Idealist has passed me a note o n 'global boundaries'. It says: Professionals fornm a global culture, with the boundaries being those of the different professions. As with nationalities, so with professions. Each profession constructs its own past and future, its own pioneers and patriarchs. As you've said, culturalv boundaries are not rigorously defined, but the fact that professions do not have formally

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:

To me, the implication of Ankur's note was that the professionalism freed an individual from the tyranny of national loyalties. The transnationalism or supranationalisnl of the IIT engineer was justified by his allegiance to another set of codes-the charter of his profession. Within this perspective, the vocabulary of nationalism seemed outworn, ragged, pointless. Those endless debates about su~adeshVvideshiwhich preoccupied many of us so deeply, were simply irrelevant to 'professionals'. Professionals had interests (music, art, tennis) and motivation (to rise up corporate ladders). They also usually had more money than most. But they did not have countriesnot really. Ergo, it followed that if the country to which they 'technically belonged1--and how ironic this phrase wassuffered fro111particular prohlenls of poverty, injustice, illiteracy, these were not especially their problems. They had jobs to do, and they did them well. That was the extent of their responsibility. Professionals weren't heroes; they were regular guys. In his gentle Fashion, Ankur the Idealist appeared to be criticizing my narrative of the IITian as a NRI hero. Speaking in terms of art, again-that perfectly oppositional black and white world of Esther's-my portrayal of 'India' versus ,'

%America'w:ls, :IS he s:lw it, k ~ ton r polarizrtl. By asking rny Was the tlulnan brain unicit~e?o r would olrr smart stlldents to clescril,e tllehcr coi111trie' in 'colu~nns',I'd :l!r?aciy technologies ultim:~telyhe t?ctter 'profc:ssionaIs' than 1157 Would >i<eweclthe rt.sults. I'd ilnposecl a f i c t i ~ c.II-[istic'synlrnctl;\' on they manage work :I lot ~ n o r ccffic~cntlythan even the l>est of tile nurerial. the tt:chnol>rsts, reducing then1 to mere niirldrrs ot ~nactlines, .The re:\l worlcl, the profession:ll u-orlcl, nr:ls not like th:lt. ancl n o ~llore?171 u contrrt hetrr-c.tcn t h ~ 7i1(z-sI)tri.q , ~ i ? l dt I ) p i r It wasn't I,otht-reel :~l,oi~twho yorl mrerr or wl~crc.yo11 cnme macbi~lc>s,?1!/.)0 11.011Id ziliw? from as long 21s you \\,ere good at your joli. At any r:rte, th:rt Dr. Frankenstein's cluestions ~ e \ ~ ; ~ ~ n p.The e t t . answer wds the ideology. If you paid your cl(res i l l kind, a 'professional supplied by Robert Mall;~rv. and quoted hy I-Iardison, n;3s clul,' w o l ~ l d ;idwit you, n o cluestions ;~skecl. Nation;lli~. this. Perhaps the only role a professional of the f i i t ~ ~ rcould e lleroisln etc, were the wrong concepts to appc;11 to in an)assign himself n.c>l.llcl he to plug in his ~naclline---or pl~llthe discll,ssion of '[tie culture of the engineer'. I'rofession:~~isn~ plug o ~ l t .lYT:lsn't this, I ;~skc-d,rather a il:iunting scenario? A was the culture of the engineer-and of the NRI. L stoat! machinc playing fincr chess than a nlnn was okay, I>ut if a correcteel. Tlle ex;l~nplesof I>oundarius tli:~t I'cl colne 11p witli machine could also produce 2111 rtlol-e sensuolls, more in thc IlU484 cl:lss t\,erc texti~:ll, artistic., n:ltional. They were w o n c l r o ~ ~niorc s, appealing tliari ii l i u ~ ~ l athen n , nrhal was left tcrnotio~lnlI>ound;~ries, where:ls w e sl~oulcllia\.c l>ecn t:~lkin; for this slo\x., evolution;^^^^ I,east to doi profrssic~~lalism inste~~d. Well, these %,ere h~l-cllyql~estionsthat could I,e settled, l'echnologies (nucle:lr, meclicrll, infor~n:~tional)crossec! of course, since their rxprcss intcntion \\-as t o llnsettle. And I,ound:~rics effortlessly. Tliere \vas no >topping thcrn. Ft:n we d o return, obsessively, t o the [ l i c ~ l ~ofe the i ~ u ~ r l a],rain n cultures, certainl!. not an open-g21te. assimilLiri\.c c ~ ~ l t t ~511cl~1 rc, and its capacirics in the next c h ~ ~ > t eI>ut r . , n ~ c a n w h ~ l etlvre's , as tnclia pricled itself o n Ilaving, col~lclcffcctivcly prcsvcrIt 1 1 1 ~ our keytext. inflow of alluring ne\v technologic^. Ilow then col~lcli t src>l-) its technolog);~nr:~kers from moving out? t % ~ t , I ;lrg~~ecl \i.itll Keytext: Robert M. Pirsig: my c,l;~ss,tint \?';I\ preci~elythe p r o l ) l e ~ ~Should i wc s o casi!). Ze?z mid tl)i, Art r.f jllolo?<)~cl~~ dlliii?lfil?ltrfzc-e: With I'irsig w e identify our e~~gineers-:ls-j~r<~fcssic~n:~ls wit11 technolr)gics-niwitness a ~ ; I ~ : I C ~ I ~ shift III in the ili>col~rse of ollr keytcxts. transnational:' Exactly how proft,ssion:~l coulcl a profe>sion.~l Ganclhi, Xcllrl~ ancl .I':lgore \vrotr :~hoirt thy futilre of get? Did protcssionalism imply paring ;iway :ill other C L I ~ ~ I I I L I ~ technology in hee I r i c l i , ~ I I L I ~ I~istoric,;~lly c:lch of their works att:lchments, until one b c c a ~ n e ,ancl rlspirecl to I,i,c,onle, ji!.t was grountled In a n Indi:~ still coloni7ecl. I'irsig's I~estselling an en~otionlc-ss,si~pcr-efficient~llact~inc'! Pop classic, in contmst, is located in the Americn of the Pcrh;~psI was over-reacting a hit, 11\11 t l ~ e r ewas ;I contcxl. ""enties The c ~ ) n [ i ~ of ) ~ \\.rorlcl ~ r politics 1i:lve significantl~~ In tutorials, aroi~nclthis time, nve'cl ji~st rerltl nothe her e.utr;I( t changed. ~ c t qilcstiuns , :lI,o~t tectinoIofi ;inel 115 relation to from O.B. Harcli\on'x popular sti~dyo f the I-elationship \ > ~ ~ V L . C I I [he arts, not to inmt~cin India I I loc:~le \\,here pence of techno lo^^ :and culture in the hventictl~c.entury-Di.su~~~~eurf~~~~ mind can l>e s o ~ ~ g l re111ain ~ t , t1ie111:iticalIy i~~lport:~rlt In I>ir.sig's 7brough the Sk.yliroblematisingthe boundaries I,etwei-n ,:I!.[' Despite Ix)untIarirs cif tinle, pl:~ic ancI oinitaiitl;, lliilni of prc~ducedby hunlans and machines. my students on HU4H4 from' Aseern the ?.~.aditionalistto Akhil

Across

the Pragmatist seemed to find Zen as irresistible today as I imagine it was when first published-a sure sign of a classic. Ankur the Idealist, for example, carries about a tattered, much-underlined, pirated and inherited version of the book under h s belt, so to speak. Given that my students normally blench at the thought of reading anything at all, let alone a novel of 400-odd pages, I think we may derive some insight into the atman of the engineer from this particular choice of guru, .One final point: Z m is such a wide-nnging tract that subjects such as drearns and madness which came up spontaneously in our classroom conversations fomi part of its philosophical structure as well. The themes that Zen introduces thus carry over naturally into chr next chapter o n 'Computers, Dreams, Boredom and the Soul'.

Ramnik's Report 'Well, I see Zen as going back to the binaries of science and art: Pirsig's characters are all divided between the two worlds. They are either on the side of technology or not.' 'Is there really such a dichotomy, yaar? Haven't we been trying to figure out some kind of a complementarity between art and science and technology all this while?' 'Hey, according to me, art relies o n science for its very existence. Painting requires quality pigments and brushes and other tools in order to portray b e a u t h l scenes. Good music needs good instruments. Even jewellery and other ornamental arts cannot dispense with the help of science and technology!' 'That's Pirsig's point, huddhu! Technology not only helps create beauty. It is motivated by the search for I>eauty, samjhe?' '1 don't know about Pirsig, yaat! MY point is solid. Human beings cmve beauty SO much they beautify even functional prducts! RBN mentioned wall-calendars when we were discussing time, remember yaa3 Why do they carry reproductions of paintings and photographs, ban? Artistic

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urges impact on technological fixes. Like Ma'am said, criteria like harmony, simplicity and elegance aclopted by scientists share principles with the classical ans. Scientific proclucts are judged by artistic nonns A n and Science clo conlplement each other for survival It's all to satisfy our aesthetic hunger!' Mayank the Zen Master: 'Hey, don't mention hunger, or I'll lose concentration! By the way, 1'111 in favour of a stronger thesis. The appreciation of art requires you to have a scientific background. Having a "scientific perspective" or "tile spirit of inquiry" leads to a better understanding of art!' Amit the Debater: 'Most would say worse, or evcn claim that the scientific spirit kills all ahility to appreciate art...' 'Pirsig seems to hold a gn~dge,yaar He thinks technology has been made a stranger, an outsider in modern culture. The "No Trespassing" signs lluther him. I think that's over-rcxacting! M e r all, contenlporary art is as indccipllenhle as contemporary technology. It's just a question of being initiated.' -. 'Dost, his morose description of industry bothers me. Those ugly shapes of brick and nletal that he claims are . . bothersome because their purpose is unknown? I think t h p v ~ - - - - - ---are equiv~lentto lines, patterns, shades, in a inoclern painting that Ifind ugly because I can never figure out their purpose. An art gallery is almost a "No Trespassing" sign as far as I an1 concerned! As an engineer I have never felt so intimiclated, like an ant, in front of big machinerr. Rather, 1,ig nl~ichinery gives rrie a sense of power.' Kanupriya: 'Ma'ani, can you ple;.c stop this cliscussion, it's pre-empting my talk'

b u p r i y a , Choric Cornmentatoe "ly Presentation will settle your petty disputes, ~ e t

say,

Once and for all: art relies on the descriptions of scitmce and *ience on the representations of art. F Q ~exanlplc, if a wOrdswonh Poem exactly describes tire position of a star, he Is making use of the astronomical knowledge scientifically

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available at the time. Similarly a novelist may exactly depict, say, the technicalities of making steel, or of making glass (for instance, in Peter Carey's novel Oscar a n d Lucinda, which Ma'am lent me). In the process, he not only rnakes his art more convincing, he also brings science into the sphere of popular culture. Art relies on science and technology to extend the bounds of its discourse. 'Conversely, as you've been trying to say in your own confused ways just now, artistic urges also motivate scientific and technological thought. Newtonian theories of mechanics and gravitation, Schrodinger's wave equations and Rutherford's theory of the atom have heen called theories of ilil~nense beauty, showing that standards of artistic judgeinent are applied, naturally to scientific productions.' Whisper: 'Blast. Now we will get a "both are correct" argument. I just hate this. First order hypocrisy! It irritates me ...' Akhil the Pragmatist: 'Kanupriya, you've shown us that the fields borrow from each other. But the original debate concerned technologists' alleged distaste for art.' Mayank: 'Ma'am. I feel a11 this amounts to surface level discussion. People don't matter. Let's talk about the cnlx-the fields themselves. There will always 1,e "boundary-crosser~" who mix fields. Sonletimes we call them innovators, sometililes we say they pollute their field. Later we clailn they enriched it! There are also geniuses who excel in two fields. So forget people ...' Kanupriya: 'I was coming to that. Suppose we say t b t both art and science are ~zrztzlrcmade hlrmun, or t ~ c l t ~ b f l remade by the human mind Forget people-nature and natural syrnnletries provoke both art ; ~ n d science and . technology.' we are going too far. Clearly the kind of trutlls that science a d art seek are different. The very concept of tnlrh differs, right? We can't claim their ends to be even

Across thr Diusporlc World

161

Kanupriya: (backing down n little): ' "Science seeks the ~ t ofhfact; a n gives t n ~ t hto felt fact and imaginary things". I think I read this somewhere. Each is a coherent di5course.' 'Save the earth from this cliscourse business! I'm sure one can show peace and violence are complelnentan/, as long as you make it a presentation topic ancl attach marks t n ; t r y 'You are a Idoody marks-ist-so maylle you can actually do that.' 'I've always maintained this philosophy stuff never got anyone a n ~ h e r e .I can understand its purst~it for pure pleasure. But then it should hc called a hobby p a t ; why call it a field?' '0 yeah! But mathenlaticinns have ~uaintainedthey do maths for pure pleasure and ;lpplying inaths is prostituting it. So why is maths a field?' 'Cause i t permits prostitution! And you and me better not think of application as prostitution Being engineers, application is our meal-ticket, right?' 'At least we do some honest work, -:and 'Illis art fraud really irritates me. Just hype your work, call soci:llites to a 1,ecome :I so-called glamorous party, Ilav-e a launch-and artist. Can't figure out why anyone should pay a lottery lor the lines M F Hussain draws and nothing fix ;in exact copy of it!' 'Now don't say this nloi~il 1'h:lt's precisely the point being debated Yuu being a technologist ;,re ;I polry pinhead when it comes to art.' 'Look, I take thut to I>e a con>pli~nent. I don't believe in self-glorification just because one is sopposed to 1,c able to 'appreciate art" Bunch of psrudos c:ln implru. :mother bunch of Pseudos-not me!' V

Aft

1 L.

for Whose Sake?

as fraud, a hunch of paeudos i n ~ p r e i s i nanother ~ hrlnch of pseudos-~ recc~nizedthe rocahrrIxry, i:sclierls endless piay Of repetitive patterns liad brought us to the place mliere,

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clearly reflected in the mirror of art, was the violent fist of technology. That fist would splinter, if it could, the mirror into a thousand pieces. And yet, my class seemed uncomfortably aware that each one of these pieces could attract to itself the glittering eyes of capital. It was this power of att, frivolous art, to seduce capital that it seemed to me the Tvashtris reiected. Why should the true lahour of the engineer have to compete for monetary gain with useless representation? To these young Tvashtris, the I)usiness of art, even at its most palatable, even in the h:lnds of their favourite artist Escher, was a kind of con game. They who were prepared to range all over the world in search of material success felt allnost a moral revulsion against the unfairness of it all. And so the old Platonic horror of art rephrased itself in the language of the technohrats, privileged spokesmen of the age of late capitalism, who had chosen, so to speak, to he p ~ s h yIndiana loneses rather than passive 'I~~clians'. To which fi~tefulchoice one can only respond by representing for our readers the grim shape of that Tvashtri fist, showing it, as I've have tried to do, over and over, in the scrolling pattern of this hook ...

-COMPUTERS, DREAMS, BOREDOM AND THE SOUL: The Angst of the Engineer

:

'

Outside, the colours of the sky were changing. It was no longer possible to hold classes on the IIT lawns. The April sun was too bright, too cruel. So we remained confined within the sanitized arena of the classroonl-and were bored to distraction. Attendance thinned; the Tvashtris starter1 I unking classes. I knew these symptoms well. They were indi,.ative of mid-tern1 malaise, a slackening of the emotional n ~ - a v ethat holds all social groupings together: mood theek tznhin tha, as my students would've put it. Boredom, I ventured, looking into the uninterested zombie eyes of the few students left in my class, was one of the most potent, the most alienating of emotions. And d o you know what, speaking of boredom, I personally find engineers as boring a social segment as you could locate anywhere in the world. That fellow munching his sanzosa in lonely splendour at, a party in Stanford, who did he krn out to be? A smart engineer from IIT. That silent stranger in T-shirt and jeans

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Technobrat

lounging morosely in the corner, who was he? Yes, right again. So did they agree with this self-description? Perhaps provocation is not a high-minded intellectual strategy, hut I'd noticed that it almost always worked in an IIT classroo~n.As I've remarked earlier, these students were o n auto-pilot for success. They were quite unused to brutal assessments of their personalities, and they reacted as most competitive souls d-with aggression, but with interest as well. Besides, my comment was only half in jest. Boredom was often a reciprocal emotion. If engineers found practically everyone boring, it was more than likely that everyone else found them boring in turn. Certainly, I included myself among that population of non-engineers who'd observed closely the social ineptness-some would call it the 'soullessness'--of engineers. My students woke up. Their self-esteen~had been publicly challenged. Attendance went up, too. In the next class, Amit B. and Pankaj debated the issue. Later, I summarized their arguments for the whole class. Here they are: 'Technologists constitute one of the most boring of social groups in contemporary civilization'

Amit B. (For) Technologists are, by definition, experts; experts tend to think 'ogically'. Logic is boring for the anm junta. Hence technologists are boring.

Pankaj (Against) Consider the IIT engineers. They are the acme of Indian technologists. Yet they organize some of the best. i.e. most interesting, student festivals in the whole country. If they are so boring, how do they manage such a feat?

Being experts, technologists People who produce d o not have much time to interesting objects or

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spend interacting with other members of society. So they could be deficient in social graces, and in their command over discourses. This makes them come across as boring.

technologies have to be interest~ngthemselves, hecause they think interestingly. That is why technologists who produce fascinating new objects for the aa?n junta to use can never be considered horing.

Because technologists deal mainly with machines, they d o not have the same opportunities within their profession for interpersonal relations as say doctors or lawyers might have. This leaves them lacking in social skills, which might make them 'horing' or poor company.

The case of Sooraj Baqatya ( H u m Aapke Hain Kourz) is relevant. IIe used his tech. skills to produce a work of 'art' that thrilled millions. Thi5 in itself makes him interesting.

I was struck by an underlying similarity in the view-points of both Amit B. the Debater and Pankaj the Musician. Each admitted-Amit openly and Pankaj tacitly-that engineers did in fact 'come across' as boring. Amit's move was to try and explain this impression (engineers didn't have time to acquire social graces, they spent much of their time with machines) while Pankaj's was to suggest that the impression was superficial (engineers 'thought' interestingly but found it hard to verbalize their interesting ideas except through their productions-from electrical gadgets to film extravaganzas). Aseem, Traditionalist and Rock Enthugast, had, I remembered, presented a similar viey-point with elegance in his answer to an examination question: 10al. Engineers and technologists are the epitome of

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Technobmt

highly intelligent tool using animals in human cultures. How can the view that they are socially boring or maladjusted he defended? b). 'This is not the age of pamphleteers. It is the age of engineers. The spark plug is mightier than the pen. Democracy will not be saved by inen who talk fluently but by the engineers'. (Lancelot Hogben, Sciericc ,for the Citizen) Why does Hogben think democracy can be saved by inarticulate engineers rather than by fluent and persuasive writers? Do you agree with him? And an extract from kseem's script: The con\lentional image technologists have had of being unsociable creatures is not without reason. The fact is that, being a technologist, one has to devote time to machines, imt~unientsi.e. essentially inaninlate objects which have apparently a dehumanizing effect. 'This is easily seen in the hehaviour patterns of the teachers of the Faculty of fiumanities and Social Sciences, who are gregarious hy nature and love to talk freely compared to a teacher of some Engineering faculty with whom this is certainly not the case. Yet, witness a technologist at his lal7our and you \\rill he convincecl free :ind democratic that lic. possesses a soul-a soul. 'Eacll technological ob1ec.t sepl-csents yeass lost in reclusivi~ so that you k ~ v e;A I~ctterfeel for the woltci around. 'I'luough each of his millions of achievenlents the technologist is trying to conmmuniclte with you. Uncon\.entional indcecl, but ol7jcct of technology how poetically I,eautiful. 121~11 is the teclinologist's way of s:~yinp "I care".'

1

169

~ m i tthe Debater, Pankaj the Musician a n d Aseem, ~ o c kEnthusiast and Traditionalist's combined rhetoric was persuasive. I found myself wondering whether it was not them but I, the stranger from without, who lacked the sensitivity to fathom the hidden poetry in the soul of the technologist. My class after all seemed perfectly with the conclusion that engineers weren't r a l l y boring or soulless. It was just that, as a genus, they were not extroverts. It followed that anyone interested in the subjectivity of engineers woulcl have to work much harder to get at their interior world. How? That was the question-how? If the Tvashtris couldn't or wouldn't talk except 'through' their technologies as Aseem put it, how was I to arrive at their cultural precepts, the embedded presuppositions that guided their social relations, their conduct, their actions? Where was I to seek the soul of the technobrat? In what rarefied regions did his atman wander? Perhaps, I reasoned dully to myself, since my students had consistently claimed that an engineer 'spoke' via objects rather than words, it might be a good idea to study the material universe in which these almost-engineers operated. Le Corbusier, long ago, bniously described a house as 'a machine for living'. Maybe much the same thought applied to institutions, pa~ticularlyinstitutions that produced graduates who made their li\.ing out of machines. We could begin by observing the physical environment of IIT, De!hi-the lush manicured greeh of tl~oselawns that we could no longer use contrasting severely with the drably functional sixties architecture of the I3uildings. In fact, by one of those strange ironies, I'd just recently learnt ~ i i aour ~ IT?. was designed mainly by J.P. Chowdhury, who happeqeci to'be an associate of I-eCorbusier's. m how would we begin to assess the IIT as a 'machine for living'?

-,-

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Computers, Dreams, Boredom and the So~il

171

~

upward Mobility IIT Gate: few in Delhi would fail to recognize tile landmark.

~h~~~ who have gone further and actually visited are quite likely to have walked in through its main foyer That foyer is cool, grey, illlpersonal and clean-a perfect entry-point into a technocratic universe. To its right is a large auditorium; on the left, tucked away, the computer facilities. Between the two, but veering slightly towards the . computer end of things, are the lifts--One of the two of the111 often nlalfunctioning Meant to take perhaps six or seven people at most, they carry many more than that number U P and down, However, this must be true, I Suppose, of almost all lifts in India, s o our predicament is no more nleta~horical in IIT than elsewhere. What's unusual about the IIT lifts is their situational sandwichirlg between the symbolic seminarhall, p l a c e of 'fluent talk', and the zone of computer-activities, powerhouse of the engineer. Then-there is the marble plaque set right next to t11t.m. Given that perhaps the heaviest human traffic in all of IIT, Delhi, goes past these lifts, many entrants into IIT's poltals must have absent-mindedly read its engraved words. They (>earthe legend, 130th in Hindi and in English: COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING tk 'I'ECHNOLOGY

DELHI THIS FOUNDATION STONE WAS LAID BY

HIS ROYAL tlIGHNESS RIE DUKE OF EDINBURGH, K.G. ON THE 27TH JANUARY, 1959. hstory is contained in this tacit inscription The coloni31 heritage of technology in India is evident from the fact that lnore than a decade after the final dissolution of empire, the foundation stone for a technological college here is still being

I

laid by a Royal Highness from Britain. The date tells us that the Duke did the honours a day after Republic Day was celebrated. Perhaps he was in Delhi for the ceremonies; but whether he was or not, it remains the case that we are routinely reminded in IIT by this writing on the wall about the origins of our most treasured technological learning. Gandlli would have noticed the irony. It's all very well to say that nobody reads notices on walls and that, anyway, colonial history is over and done with. My point is that we-and specially the 'IIT boys1--don't need to read the inscription; it had been subconsciously absorbed. It's there in the bones. To get at the psyche of IIT engineers, it's not enough to observe them pottering around among the computer facilities working out spreadsheets, fingering e-mail, mastering FORTRAN and inventing nasty little viruses. Let nle provide the reader with an example-a concrete example would be, I guess, the apt phrase to use in the IIT context. If one fills in an ordinary Travel Allowance (TA) form in IIT, the form informs you about the amount you are to claim if you happen to be travelling by camel (or canal, depending on the version!). It also tells you what the rules are for claiming second-class fare (without meals) on steamers, not to mention the distance travelled by trolley. Which era are we in? It doesn't require much acumen to guess that this form has been handed down practically unchanged from British times. I would not be surprised if the same Macaulay of whom I wrote in the last chapter was also responsible for these travel rules. Our clerks of the Government of independent India have simply added air travel to the list of possible conveyances, but changed little else in the cunrbersolne format of a TA f o no~doubt devised in the ninereenth century. What does u s show? It shows that, despite their flination with computers, h p i t e that gleaming foyer and the coktant talk of efficiency, TIT boys' as much as anyone nurtured in an official

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Institute in our country remain in the grip of a bureaucratic mentality. They have to contend with the regime of the paperchase just as helplessly as any of us. The obfuscatory rites of colonial administration, designed to keep everyone out except for those few who hold the reins, are with us still.. Why have forms like this not been changed to allow greater transparency? It is not only because of instit~itional inertia. The reasons could go deeper. One, so indelible, is the bureaucratic impression on the Indian soul that we appear to have lost the ability even to notice that such forms need drastic changing. Two, demanding silllplifications and/or other changes in 'the system' could well backfire. Some day when the IIT undergraduate is himself a powerful technocrat, Ire could lose the wonderful shielding advantages the system provides for those at top. In short, to make changes in a hierarchical, formally ordered, historically legitinlized universe may be especially disadvantageous for those who constitute the elite. Now, if there are a couple of beliefs on which there seems to be universal agreement, they are that the IITians belong among the elite, and that they are no fools. As future technocrats, withn the IAS or in charge of any of our massive scientific establishments, they've subconsciously absorbed the lessons of history. Complicated rules, backed up by even more complicated forms, can be a source of great and lasting power. Long after the colonizers have left, their language of power remains safely protected inside our best institutions and inside the hearts and minds of the best students produced in independent India. That's why the recent 'abolition' of the 'licence/quota' Raj and the prograinine of liberalization inay not meet the high hopes generated. It is easy to substitute one set of papers with another but ideologies are harder to reverse. Why should the elite care to reframe rules that, on balance, protect thein? If decolonization were so easy, we'd

1

computers, h u m s , Borcdom and the Soul 173 have decolonized long ago, but as Alvares (subtext, Chapter 3) argues, it is precisely anlong those who are trained in cutting-edge technologies that the colonial mentality goes deepest. Let's ask ourselves again-why was it the Duke of Edinburgh who laid the foundation stone of IIT, Delhi? It wasn't just that he was a distinguished friend of India, cousin of Lord Mountbatten, who just happened to be here for the &public Day parade. It was because he was logical~lr!w most appropriate person. The Duke's foundation stone, as I've mentioned before, is placed, with amazing metaphoric felicity, right next to the 117' lifts-which takes us back to the matter of upward mobili~,. upward mobility: a beloved phrase in the lexicon of the IITian, as it was once in that o f the enetgetic colonizer: But what is the current state of the IIT lifts? Short answer: overcrowded, badly maintained, slow. They symbolize, I believe, the nature of governlnental rewards. A technocrat would no doubt rise in government service but the ride would not be particularly cuslry or cornfortable For in India, as in many post-colonial states, the system is simply overburdened. Clearly, then, staying within the system is a bad bet, if meteoric rise is what one is after. . The canny IITian has already worked this one out. Like the earliest colonizing forces in India, the mercenaries, he is m d y to sell his undoubted skills wherever they are most -arded. It follows that there is, and always was, vely little Chance that the average go-ahead IIT graduate would be aoclustic enough to choose to utilize his techno-managerial in low-paid government jobs, so why bother at all to w e with governmental rules? A far smarter and more viable alternative to 'challenging' rules presented itself long ago to the sharp brains of the engineers: namely, removing themselves litemlly, body Joul, from India and its limitations and taking NRI routes

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to America, U.K, Europe. Failing which, the next best thing was to place oneself with a private cotnpany, preferably an internationally based one. A professional recognizes no boundaries, as Ankur the Idealist suggested in the last chapter. Now Ramnik the Philosopher backed him up. Fourteen out of seventeen students in his hostel wing, Ramnik informed me blithely, were planning to leave India; the remaining three would probably d o the IAS. What about our economic progranlme of liberalization and a changed work culture, 1 asked frantically. Wouldn't that act as an incentive for them to stay behind, he with their families, and still make big money? Ramnik was sceptical. That's just another avenue for being able to leave, he said, smiling indulgently at my naivkte. I was assailed by a sudden desperate vision of India as a country of tired old people, parents and grandparents, left behind, while all the motivated young men-and woinedemigrated. And I remembered again Yeats' 'Sailing to Byzantium': That is no country for old men. the young In one another's arms, birds in trees -Those dying generations-at their song, The salmon falls, the mackerel crowded seas... Images of youth and plenty (the young. birds, mackere1 crowded seas) contrast with ilnages of cultural exhaustion in a socieQ' 1 his poem (those dying generations). Were suffering from extreme battle weariness? So nlanY fighw :' ! against bureaucmcy, disease, illiteracy, poverty^ indifferefice, It appeclred the most sensil71enlove in tile world I to sail away from this zone of ~~ttrition as Soon as one Because so many 'educateci' Indians carried permanently in their heads h a t split Yeatsian image of two worlds associate with twG definite locales--a technologized West where PIenrY

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was a natural condition and a depleted India where p o v e q was equally endemic-it wqs easy for them to move without unfamiliarity or regret into that other compartment. %be postcolonial techrzologist is a natu rul mi
(T.M. Rao, B e Statesman) arglles that different ideologies of learning motivate [he Indian and the American educational systems, ~ ~ l ~ - f ~ l l ~ me-learning and all the skills required to l,eat an exacting 'ystem of exalllinations are wonderfully fosrered within tnciian culture, w11ile innovation, practical problem"Iving and getting results On the ground are the hallmarks of success American-style. These dichotolllies are, of course, depressingly f2lllliliar. YOUwill hear the ~entillpntsrepeared, n'ithout reason, in cOnversa[ion after 'sation on Indian versus ~ e s t e r n ~ i f ~ ~ t ~ l ~ ~ , Still~if I'd hoped to provoke Raiiinik the ~hilosop~ler into ndhg the achievements of IIT graduates ahroad, it seemed

I I'd failed. Rarnnik was unperturbed. He said: It doesn't matter if IITians don't rise to the absolute top in h e r i c a . They still get a better deal than they would here. Besides, few think ten years or more ahead to the time when they nlay face problerns in becoming the heads of US companies. That would be unrealistic. IITians just go with the flow, the glamour of emigration to America. It's the done thing. How mesmerizing was the power of stereotypes! We'd witnessed the stereotype phenomenon when I presented those lists drawn up hy mny students of images of the fictional lands called 'India' and 'America'. Now, here they were again. A classical behavioural account presented by Pooja, one of our Choric Conlrnentators, in her examination paper is relevant. Pooja wrote: The typical American anticipates a good beefsteak with pleasure and reacts with revulsion to cabl~age. while this might not be so in Indian Culture. American culture is dominated by certain traits e.g.

1. belief in material success 2. excessive individualism

3. sexual freedom But in India we would say:

1. ahandon personal desire 2 , forget the self

3. commit yourself for a lifetime Pooja's evaluation of 'Indian culture' is positive,, R;~o'sneptive, yet both share the indomitable stereotype: Americ:~ns arc materialists, Indians nlystics. In this situation, hc)u? does one make sense ofithe question: whose version is tn~t'r?How can we arrive at an understanding of the strange forces that drive

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the self-assessment of cultures, not to mention professional groups such as engineers? How does anyone come to hold their particular vision of 'a good society', i.e. primarily one they'd like to live in themselves? These were the ambiguous questions that cropped up each time w e discussed the heady subject of the IIT Diaspora and its implications-sometimes in quite a roundabout fashion ...

The Otherness of Culture; Ramnik's Survey 'A recent survey among Japanese students showed that a high proportion preferred "singlehood" with a conrputer to marriage.' 'Does that explain w h y s o few of us have girlfriends?' 'No it doesn't-because everyone still wants one.' 'Well, it's about what you enjoy more, right?' 'No, it's also what you are trained to enjoy nrore. Ahem, ahem ...ask me, I can think at a nleta-level.' 'Get lost. You're just trained to think you can think at a meta-level. Actually your level is best described as micro! Now this is meta-meta level, right? Want me to go higher?' 'OK. Do you think The Great Super Computer will be able to mimic the all-knowing, all-seeing nature of God so accurately that it will end up replacing divinity?' 'God is a concept, buddhu. I won't be surprised if tlie concept eventually becomes a super computer. Who says God has to be anthropomorphic?' '0 my God. Look at you guys making conlplete sentences and what not. Yaar, Ma'am has still not walked in, so save it up. Rather, crack-up then.' (Ma'am walks in, and he does, umm ...crack-up!)

Famine, Dystopias and La Dolce Vita 'Ma'am', as I'm alarmingly referred to, is on tlie warpath. I don't want to talk about computers-not yet anyway. And I'm not hung up on computers as spouses. Colonization and

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historical truth, that's what I want to discuss. The sighs from my class are audible, but Neeraj the Family Man rises to the occasion, as usual. He asks a fundamental question, familiarly Aristotelian: What goes into the concept of a good society? Why should access to material conlforts, e.g. conforrllity to something like the M E T Index, be included in the definition of a good society? What have computers to do with a good society anyway? The answer seemed simple enough, and it had, apparently, nothing to do with colonization: mens snna in corpore snno. Without basic attention to health care and a rninirnum level of comfort, the body just would not cooperate with the mind. It was unreasonable to expect people to he high-minded and turned on to co~llputerswhen they were racked by mainly curable diseases and worn-out by the rigours of everyday living. In a society where even water (W) was not freely available, let' alone electricity (E), and decent means of transport (T) and telecommunication (T), it seemed a little esoteric to discuss ethical ideals. That was the import of a 'Quality of Life' index, like the WETT. Commonsensically true? Neeraj disagieed. He said: water, electricity, transport and good telecom, you could have all this and still have an inlmoral and wasteful society-a dystopia. Clearly, these were neither necessary nor sufficient conditions for a good society. Not sufficient perhaps, I argued, but necessary? After all, no society where large numbers of children die from n~alnutrition and from preventable disease can fulfil even the basic I i requirements of a good society-wouldn't you agree? What ; about their rights to life? It was a weak position though, and I knew it. Predictably, Neeraj came right back with: NO, the question is: what about their rights to a good life? I said: if you died anyway, there could he no rights, good or bad. As eistotle, who'd meditated long on the question of a good society had written, happiness was the pursuit of an

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entire lifetime. No lifetime, no happiness. No happiness, no good society. Snappy hut unargual>le, right? Try to imagine, I counselled Neeraj, a good society in which everyone was--or believed then~selvesto be-nlortally "happy. Would this not severely distort the very idea of goodness?. Good for whom? And why? I sought thus to Neeraj the Family Man as well as the rest of the Tvashtris, that Aristotle's idea made a certain intuitive sense. Happiness implied a sense of well-being. And in our times it happened that world culture had internalized the impression that some, at least, of this well-being depended on having access to basic technologies: vaccination, electricity, piped water. These amenities had I>ecome so common that our ways of living-for example, blocks of city flats-had been adapted to make space for them. It had become natural for us to think most of the components of the WE= Index as essential to our happiness. They formed a necessary element in the constn~criono f 021r ideas o f happiness. But, yes, I did agree with Neeraj that access to these things alone did not ensure a good society. Consider the case of colonization and the slew of 'beneficial' technologies that it purportedly brought with it. Could we relate, I asked my class, to Neeraj's idea that technologies contributed little to the making of a good society with colonization's i~nponof technology into subject territories? The Tvashtris, the most linear of thinkers, were fl~~nmoxed. What in the world was I going on ahout? Let's go back to natural kinds, I said. Natural kinds exist in the world independent of human creativity. They are entities like mountains, tigers, cactus plants and gold, or events like storms, fires and earthquakes. Subjects of empirical investigation and inductive generalizations, natural kincls, as a mle of thumb, are discovered rather thm invented. Nominal kinds are artifacts like nlonunients, thermos flasks, ernrnents, or processes like steel-smelting, sto~ytellingor

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typing. Ohjects of deductive reasoning, nominal kinds can he analytically reduced to the sum of their parts, being hurnan creations. However, philosophical difficulties arise because there are several areas where the categories are not clear-cut. Kripke, for example-ren~eml>er him?- has argued that since it is not ordinarily possible to tell si~llplyhy looking whether something is, say, truly gold (a natural kind) or not (hence, a possible nominal kind), we need expert knowledge within a community to appeal to in nml)iguous cases. And you yourselves are the exemplars of technological expertise in 'modern India', remember? Okay, agreed the Tvashtris. We've gone over this ground before but what did it have to do with colonization? They didn't see the connection. When I suggested to them that reliable contemporary studies by economists Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze had shown, in effect, that 'expert' accounts by British historians of the Beng:ll Famine of 1889 confused nominal with natucll kinds, they were appalled. The Tvashtris found it impossible to accept that a famine, any famine, could be man-made (a nominal kind) rather than drought created (a natural kind). Here's how the econo~l~ics of it goes, I explained. -The Bengal farmers are forced to sell all their produce to the lnetropolitan centre (Calcutta, the colonial capital) where there is a Ixirgeoning popillation ant1 great demand. Then, when their own food sources grow scarce, they are too poor to afford to buy Ix~ckthe products of their own labour from the city shops. Results: ~llassive debts and large scale st:rrvation. It was not the rains that failed in Bengal, it =:as a man-rnade system. Think of the negative evidence, I pleaded on bet~alfof Sen and Dreze. Bengal lies in the fertile estuary of the Gangetic valley; it is one of India's rice-bon.1~.Not once since Independence have we had a famine in Bengal. Then, how is it that Bengal was constantly riven by famine during the colonial period, with the fanline of 1387 actually accounting for

I:

Computers, Dreams, Boredom and the Soul 181 a death toll of ten million, alnlost a third of Bengal? Conventional colonial historians had no answer to this question, but analyzed in Sen and Dreze's economic fashion, there was suddenly an explanation for the facts. If famines could, in certain historical situations, be conceptualized as a nominal kind caused by exploitative man-made economic systems, it might be easier to see how solutions to problems like that of hunger could be effected hy managing our systems a little better. Nature was always a little too easy to blame; after all, she couldn't talk hack. The British may have believed they were bringing order to India by pianning its markets, its cities, its population, but the fact of the matter was considerably more complicated. For one thing, you could not havk a good society, humming with Aristotelian happiness, when the people in that society remained unconvinced that the measures introduced were in fact cond~~cive to their happiness. Technologies, like all nominal kinds, had to find a receptive space before they could be 'naturalized'. Such a receptive space could hardly be provided in the exploitative context of colonization. A regime under which fanline hecame ende~nicwas not one whose technologies the mass of people could accept without reservation. Nevertheless, as long as official expert histories written I>y the colonizers themselves exploited the nominal/natural kind distinction, it was hard to see exactly why a 'benevolent' colonizing power s o keen on reforming chaotic local systems and bringing in brand new technologies failed to create the 'good colonial society' that they the~nselves envisaged. That was why history and its 'truths' had sometimes to be rewritten. Sen and Dreze's analysis in terms of what muld, loosely, be called 'nominal' and 'natural' kinds helped Precisely here-in our reassessment of the inevitability of \

is sort of economic history showed that technologies of saying 'I care' as Aseem had put it.

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Re-analysis of colonial documents taught us that the truth be Illeans wasn't that Quite often, technologies whereby one pretended to say 'I care' while actually nleming quite the opposite. Remelnber the B~~~ Inldmbara built by ~Saf-ud-Daulain Lucknow in 1784 (mentioned in the first chapter)? Now, that symbol both of resistance to could serve as an natural kind of disasters like famine and nolninal kind oppressions like Colonial rule, it offered another way, perhaps a cultunlly truer way, of saying 'I care' There are into [he mare of understanding, as Asafmany entri us with h s wondrous architectural l a b y f i n h ud-Daula showed bhulbhulaiynr Technologies, in other words, could work as utopias fictiong-fictions that converted actual dysto~ias and vice-versa.. .

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invested in them. Not just that. Technologies were fictions in a nluch purer sense, represente&the power of the human brain to make contributions to the universe. There it i s 4 h e technolo

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in this world of Man and Machines, each is trying to outnce the other, blen are working harder and spending more time kith nlacllines, the Process they are losing some of the basics of One

i

w e had just seen, colonizing cultures potent nlphs, with the colonized through their but perhaps the mediating role of techn"lobr could it be that Aseem the Rock nlore Traditionalist had out his sentimental finger on a vital between technology, morality and imagination? what if technologies were, always, essentially, under as making the statement 'I care'? Every piece of from toasters to computers to atomic reactors-mad silent statement simply by being there.' It was not i"

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producca case of the purest, most distilled, invention-a fiction And Yet it functions as a real, tangi131e thing-nonfiction. As Wittgenstein once saicl, with amazement: 'It stands there, like our life'. Technology inhabits a kind of land) border country between reality and unreality, presenting us with the Contoufi of paradox. Thatk why it now seemed to me no accident that ~ C i e n c e - f i c t i o n ~ ~could ~ h i ~ be h as a md of litenrJ' record of the techno-soul-ajmost inhabited the so-called Twilight Zone of ~ ~ i ~ ~ Ankur the Idealist nodded as if he knew what I and then passed a note on a subtext 1.d recently given [he to Sava~itRay's little vignette of a rol,ot with 'feelings'. Ankur wrote:

lmaghary Universes h the Brain We had arrived, it appeared, at an interesting Point in Our discussions, Technology as fiction, technology as fabulaf technology as the source and subject of some of Our most

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humanit~-enlotions, tolerance, ~ ~ ~ ~ m3chines-though made by hlan-seem to be striving for a more h~manitari:ln approach-that Which is being lost by Man Ray's goryis a perfect in which a robot can appear and quite like a man-an android. He has feelings and emotions and of course the highest level of fficiency. In a world where 'nodling is perfect., Anukul tries to ;lc~iieve perfection and even aaempts to errant humans like the uncle accept 'his' norms, an attitude which is not appreciated. The problem here is with our expectations of the conventional subnlissiveness of achin's, who .lust possess the of i Servants The Uncle \laps not foreseeing possibility of retaliation, but whaf happens? ukul [he. rol3ot effects 'jllsticel by electmcuting offensive and morally imperfect uncle,

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Reading through Ankur's conlment, I was reminded again that twentieth century philosophers froin Heidegger a n d Wittgenstein to Dennett and Searle seem to have found it especially hard to resist looking into the narcissus mirror of machinery. For, technology does seem to hold the mirror up to nature-human nature. The invention of machines which can outdo humans at tasks of 'thinking' while heing quite devoid of affect and feelings has meant that the Frankenstein myth is more powerful than ever. And n o one more than the engineer, who consciously sees himself as bad at expressing feelings, perhaps even at .feeling feelings, is more held in thrall by the myth. Machines form a class of objects that mimic humans at their 111ost rational as well as most irrational or 'inhuman', at their sanest as well as their craziest. Thus, Heidegger described the essence of technology as baffling, impenetrable, threatening, while Wittgenstein discovered curious parallels between the practical routines of meaning-making humans and function-performing machines. More recently, John Searle has forcef~~lly argued that machines might b e vastly more efficient than hunlans, but the semantic, sense-making propensities that constituted a specific human biological endowment simply could not h e reprocluced in machines. The mathenlatician Roger Penrose agrees with Searle in denying consciousness to machines. Conversely, Daniel Dennett and Francis Crick take the provocative stance that human consciousness itself is no more than I3io-mechanics at work-if w e ultimately succeed in unpacking the biological machinery that constitutes each supposedly unique biological 'self', w e might, in theory, one day also manage to mechanically assemble humans. Naturally, few among the Tvashtris, divine creatures, were prepared to concede that they could ever be equalled by machines, bqt this did not stop then1 from getting involvecl in the confused contemporary delxte ahout the nature of the

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human self-a debate we must recognize as being directly fuelled by recent techno-scientific advances in genetics and physics. Chronologically, I think it was around this time that I brought a collection of odds and ends to class, just in order to record my students' reactions to marginalia-boundary discourses. I'd observed, of course, that these smart students of engineering had trouble with information that did not 'fit' the patterns of processing to which they were used. Disorganization really bothered them, and yet they often declared themselves committed to the belief that chaotic behaviour, the ability to make departures from the norm was what made then1 human and what niade humans, in general, 'creative'. So, how would they incorporate my various disparate bits and pieces of text into the world-view of the engineering 'self' that they were slowly beginning to articulate? And what challenges for the engineering mentality might such an exercise in epistemic integration throw up? Among the deliberately disorientating fragments of 'text' I brought to class--drawings of the human brain, a collection of jokes about engineers, a bunch of e-mail 'emoticons' and a couple of advertisements featuring a computer and a 'smart' washing-machine. The human brain, that odd divided organ, had, as my class knew, one rather specific characteristic-it was selfrefexiv+-a mirror unto itself. The species homo sapiens had access to a special tool-language-which enabled it to judge its own behaviour and productions. And modern technologies were perhaps the most ingenious of those productions. Indeed, we'd arrived at a stage of technological innovation where we now able to imagine a set of technologies that might conceivably mimic the human mindhrain. The computer was one such embryonic technology. It threw up, for our class, all sorts of questions of the kind Ankur the- Idealist had raised. \ How would brainy and perfectible humans cope with possibly

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still brainier and even more perfectible machines? n e engineer saw himseIf a 7 'mechanical minded' but what about machines that were 'human-minded' ? I reminded the Tvashtris about our early agreement that the concept of a boundary/boundedness is central to all cultures. I asked them then to consider for a moment a sketch of a transverse section of the brain. Looking at the sketch makes it easier to visualize the by now much attested hypothesis that the brain itself operates in terms of natural Iyundaries, moclules or divisions of labour. Different parts of the brain handle different classes of information, but simultaneously keep watch over, and co~nmunicate with, each other. Two interesting facts for our class: one, the tool-using and language centres in the left brain are adjacent to each other, making dominant right-handedness a crucial feature of human functionality found in no other primate; two, the necessity of attending to boundaries is an evolutionary feature we share with other animal species (tigers, chimps, elephants). Among the first things babies learn to visually recognize are edges and lineshoundaries, those ubiquitous nrarkers of spatial and territorial difference. An interesting evolutionary speculation which follows from all this is: precisely those amazing, self-reflexive, clearly demarcated, linguistic parts of the brain which enable us to invent things are the'bnes that are quite redundant. We could survive without them. After all, animals manage excellently to negotiate the world equipped with qualia sense-impressions alone, without language! So the 'uniquely hriman' selfmonitoring abilities that w e possess are in themselves just a gadget-an extra toy in the \)rain that we just happen to have! In brief, w e could do without our brains. Yet, it was these 'redundant' parts of our hrains that motivated all hiumln culture, and_ resulted in that enclless procluction of nominal kinds that gave particular cultures their specificity.

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All of culture, I atte~npted to persuacle the Tvashtris, could be seen from this point of view as an elaborate construct for the suspension of our fictions. Dennett alllong the consciousness theorists has suggesteel that human beings' sense of 'self is really an illusion, simply sustained by layers of memories stored in a narrative format. Our capacity to invent fictions is what produces in us the feeling that we are unique as a culture: some cultures produce machines as their most effective fictions, other cultures produce ornaments, still others drawings and paintings. Nor, it goes without saying, are these modes of invention exclusive to any one culture. Rather, the point is that our inventions carry the load of o u r comn~urzaldreams-dreams of immortality, of leisure, of superefficiency and so-forth. The HU484 class belonged to a channel-surfing, TV generation. They had no trouble at all grasping the links between technology and dreams of a hetter world. I hegan by showing them two advertisements. The first ad presented several snapshots of 'a good life'. Embedded anlong these luxurious inlpressions was a compilter screen. Now what was a computer doing anlong jacuzzis ancl jaguars? Clearly, we were meant to infer that a conlputer did not signify dreary labour or the work-ethic alone. It stood for a certain Quality of Life corn~llandedby those with 'brains'-the social elite. My IlTians saw this rightaway, bless them! Conlputers were inventions that had value-added. As the new synlbols of an elitist ideolo~y,they representecl aspirations, the myth of a shining future. That is why they were fictions, coruscating with value, and not just clull, old functional objects. The second acl carried the cornpilter myth further. It 'revealecl' to the viewer how an intelligent 'fuzzy-logic' computerised washing machine 'looked at' different clothesduty jeans it regarclecl with the ferocious gaze of a gorilla, delicate lace garments it treated a; gently as a cllilcl. A washing ~nachinewhose computerised logic enabled it to

,see': .j~rclgc':in(I .:lc.t' I . : I ~ I I > I I ~ I I I J , . \\,e~-(, \ire not ~le~111ng \\.it11 \.cry po\vc~-fulfic.tions Ilcrc? 1x1-en if ill1 tlre iclrc~)Ic~gy \\.,IS concc-nlecl in the. fri\.olo~rsfor~li:ri ( j f :1t1 .rci\.erti4c.!ll~-nt.it wolrld I,e toolish I(-, dihnlis:; its ali~irc,.\\;:c \vc,~.c-?)c.lr;g11o\vn t l ~ e'mind of a 111:1c!line';rrlci it \\>;IS clilitc cnclc:rl~ng [ lookccl olicc 111o1.e: ~ t t l c.r~rli~pIec! ~ list i ! ~ lily hancl It s:rid: ic.lec!l<;.gy :uncl tcclinoIc?gy./c~mt~t~c-on~ take c>\.c2rk1c.c-\vo~-k/ jokes-inrc.1-nntion:rl iril~~gcs o f thc. engincer :IS 3 ~ I C - ~ I ~ I . C ~ liternl-~nincleclpragniatist r:itiona]ity---I$ \]cling over-r.:rt~onal.:I fo:-m o f maclness'~netic111citc--r~errx. ~ . i ~ l t ~ ~cocIt.s r : ~ l 01il~terrlationnlconcl~rct/win;;: forgetl. 1 3 ~ i t i t \\.:IS thc thircl c1~1:11tt.r ot tlrc. s e m e t c r . 1 : ~ d ~ i it11 ~it tlw 111:1tcri:rl I hro~r>;htto cl:iss 10s r o t~rtori:~lh n.:rs : 1 1 1 1 1 o h t 11e\.t.1. clisc.~~ssed in stlffiilent detnil, :rnd S O I I I C ~ I I I I ~11ot \. :rt :01, llucll \\.:IS; 1,): this st:lge, lel't to t!le indl\-id~~;rl .stridc>nt'singc.n~~it!.-:IS it now lvill l>c to r'he inc!i\ricl~ralre:ic!er's. j l t t ~ ~ :11l, r \\.11:1t n x s :it stake in niy list \\.:I.< ol;.viwr e n o ~ : g l ~ 1 .\\.anted Ir) effect of tc.c.l~noic?g~\ts :mtl tlieir I)r:iinglimpses into the sirl~)-c~~lturt. cliildl-en-tn:lclllnes. 1':lrti:ll :inel (ins!-stel~iatic' tllcsc glilnl~sch n~iglltbe, I i ~ r tI knew tr)f no conventrc~n~ll methocl to c:ollcl~rct :I sulvep of 'soul'. O n this segment of the caul-sc. \\.c'cl \\.;intecl, :is \LC saic.1 :it the i~eginningof this zl~:iptel-.to go in clt~c'stof the c l i ~ s i \ . ~ soul of thc engineer. O r t o p11t i t in . ~ ~ i o t l Kva).. ~ c r \x.c,'cl encl~.d L I appro:lc.I~ing ~ Ahecn~tllc ~I'r:~ditic~n;rllst : ~ n dI
\\,e'd clelxitetl ttrc cnginrcr'h a s e 4 i i l c n t of 1 1 1 O\\.II 'c.l~a~.ac.tcr'--ic . I l i often \\,czll-clecsr\ ccl im:lgc. : ~ s a cil;lllip~on 1,orc.--anel Iris es]~l:rn~tions f'o~.t h ~ sxecnlirlg 'soul1eshnc.s~'

I,)

\\re'd csa?nlnc.cl t l ~ ccmgincct-',\ 1 > 1 1 ~ . h i ( . a icri\.ll-onlilent ;111cl

his c\.ol~ltionalj.clri\,c to sirc.c.eed ;rncl tliosc: l~l,~ccs-

geograpllic;~l,intcllcct~~al, 1:101al~--to \\.hii.Ii this cl~i\.cIiad Ic,cl I~inl;irlcicccl. \\:e'd s ~ ~ ~ g e h t 13)' e c l i ~ i ~ p l ~ c : it ltli~~i t)tht~~ vnginecr. \vitll 111:; simple* taitll in trc~llllologicnl .sol~~tions to tlle p l o l > l c ~of ~ ~go\.trlllr~g s aoc.icty, n r a s a p p c of :~:ii\~e neo-coloni:~l C)

xx~e'dinterrogatc:d the cngi11cc.r-'svi.\ion of ':I goocl hociery' ancl the im:iginar). ~ ~ ~ l i \ - c .-cl~-c:r~l~s. s\es fiction, jokes :mil ct)nc:capt~r:11 toys-\vl~ic.h g:~\.e 11s :I g l r n ~ ~ l s of e t11c etlgi11cc.l.'~~ l l i r l c lo r tile 'cyliors ~~liel~tality'.

It Tvah :il,out ti111e nolv that t l ~ eengillecrs spcjlie for- rhe~~rxel\~es, I,ut pr.t.cedcd I;.y :I Iegend:rl-). p317er o n '(:on!piiting hfnc11i:lcry and Intelligence' \vithout nrhicl~:(I1 oLrr class-roc~niclisc~~ssions on technology :~ncltllc soul lnigllt ~lc\.c.rhave I ~ e e n .

Keytext: Alan Turing: Almost all s e r i o ~ ~\\.riting:; s o n tllc _r,pcration of 111inci still I?egin n.itli 3n in\.oc;~tionio ,41:rn I ' I I I - ~( c! .~g ~ , Pcnrc)se, Hoclcn, I902 etc. 1, l.t~isis l)ec-dtr\c it l7')./1: I l ( i f ~ t : ~ d c10x6; ~is p~-etty1111.1(.11 incIi~p~~t:rl~le t ! ~ : ~'1.~1ri11g t l~iclt11c fo~~ficl:~tions for I I I I I C ~ of ~ t l ~ ecurrent x o r k in rirtit'ic131 Intelligence. 'l'he Turing 'l'est-not to I>? collf~rhvd\\.it11 tiit. '1'11sing X'l:lchineinvolve :I lockecl i-00111, \\.hicl~ is. of coorsc, one o t tire com~nonest as \\(:I1 :I\ no st i)o\\:el-t~ll11let3pIlors fol- t l l ~ human I I I ~ I I C I . In its o;ig~n:rl tor-n~,thtc Taring 'T'est is I: , y t v i t / ? ~ L : ~ ~ t l ( ; ~ ; / ) ~ ~ ~ -(r)1r?t 1I ~i(i?lgl~t~ t / t ~ ~ cxl>e~-i~l~l .nt desigllt ~l to she\\. that it i 4 , in principle, pos.;il,lt. t o tc.51 ln:rc.llines for ~ I L I I ~ I ; I I ~ like cl!rnlltics ( i f 11ii1:il siillply 1,). I1oliling :I c on\.cl->ationwith them A tlris test 11~1s l x e n erlcllcs.~l>. clisc.~~ssccl. ]]ere is only the 111-iefcstacc.ount of 11. 1'1-escntccl\\-1tl1 a loc.kecl rooni \vl!icl: I I I ~ Ic.ont:rin ~ e~thcr a 11~rrn:inor a c.onrpLr:el- nncl s o ~ u elvay of cornri1unic:~ting with t l ~ i h e inlclc, rf :In ~nterloc:\~tor.c.m corr.ectly guess that s,'he is ;ic.t~i:lllytalkinx to :I niacl~r:lc. ttie colnplrter is

130

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Computers, Dreams, Boredofn und the Soul

deemed to have failed; if s/he cannot, and assuming that the denizen inside the room is in fact a computer, the machine is considered to have passed the Turing Test. Despite the deceptively simple nature of this test, most experts agree that computers are still a long way away from being able to pass it. However, the question is not whether computers are currently sophisticated enough machines. It is whether Turing's test of the mimicking of human communicative abilities is a good test of being human. As I see it, three versions of the Turing Test are: 1. The Ur-Turing Test-I948 2. The Chinese Room-Searle 1986 3. The Party Game of Psychoanalysis-Dennett

1991

In each successive version, the originators of these tests (Turing, Searle, Dennett) attempt to devise ways in which we can probe the human mind through mimicry, pretence and linguistic illusion. What hetter corroborating evidence could there be fo; our thesis in Technobrat that technology in the twentieth century has functioned as fiction, as scintillating fabula, holding enraptured some of the cleverest minds of the millenium? Both Turing's brilliant but lonely life and his death by suicide speak to us of the troubled psychology of modern technological dreams. We return to the theme of the death-wish in a technologized society in our next chapter. Meanwhile, our subtexts:

Subtexts: Roger Penrose: 'Can Robots 6ave This Troubled World? Computation & Consciousness'.

191

Satyajit Ray: 'Anukul the Robot'

Francis Crick: 'You're Nothing Eut a Pack of Neurons'

Ramnik and the Washtris Talk 'Why d o we want to get into this question of whether machines can think? It's not worth the investigation. Will answering it solve the problen~sof mankind? We should just wait and watch. If intelligent conlputers can be built, well and good. .Just specz~lating whether they can or can't is idle pursuit for idle minds. It's time pass.' 'Ma'am, I think the most crucial remark Turing makes is: "Provided it is made clear which are proven facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result". Scientific disasters result because, in our blind rush to "use" science, we have created a world unaware that science does not move from fact to fact. It relies on many unproved conjectures.' Mayank is onto definitions again: 'Ma'am, notice that Turing at the very beginning stumbles over the question of definitions, and conveniently avoids defining both intelligence and machines. I too hold that definitions are best not attempted. Everyone should try to escape them!' 'Wait a minute, ynar. Definitions and speculations are not that important. Ethics is. If the answer is "Yes, we can build smart computers", what are [he ranlifications for humanity? Can computers colonize the world? That's the question I wish Turing had broached.' 'Turing disallows use of biotechnological tools in making a "srna~tmachine". This is problematic! We have turned to nature to design many machines, from wheels to ~ r p l a n e s .What . if we unravel the way the brain processes

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Technobrut

info and mimic that? Genetic algorithms which work the way evolutionary processes do are already in use. In that case the machines we build would be using nature's techniques. After all, we are nothing but complex biochemical reactions, right? A1 we need to do is simulate these and we can have a simulated human on a computer! The magnitude of the task is enorinous but it's not insunnountahle as our own entropy can't be infinite ...so we can't be infinitely ordered!'

Mandeep the Computer Buff 'To what extent is a brain a machine, ancl to what extent is a machine a brain? This is the basic question posed by the computer scientist Terry Winograd. Brains can be defined as machines because they are devices that efficiently perform an array of tasks. However, because of the fact that they are naturally or biologically fonned, and hecause of their increclihle complexity, it is hard to think of brains as machines.' 'Mandeep, co~nplexityis not the measure, intelligence is.' Mandeep: 'Our usual inlpression of machines contains a negative assessment-machines don't think. Only humans (and perhaps animals) think. But the invention of the computer has forcecl us to re-examine the question-what is intelligence? Is a clock intelligent? Is a car intelligent? My controversial answer to this question, based on Winograd isyes. If a clock or car functions as it ought to, accomplishes the tasks it was designed for, it is intelligent. Computers are more intelligent because they can handle more tasks more efficiently. Human being are most intelligent so far because they can handle the most tasks. The point is that intelligence can be regarded as a matter of degree, not of kzrrd. All devices that are capable of process, i.e. moving through a number of stages to achieve an end, are intelligent-that is why an inert $tone is not intelligent hut a clock or a car is intelligent to some extent.'

Computers, Dreams, Boredom and the Soill

193

'Hey, you seem to be confusing intelligence with efficiency! I don't think 'working' is a qualification, it's knowing that one is working that counts. Machines are dictated to by humans. Nothing is decided by them. That's why human beings can feel overworked, exploit other human beings etc. Not machines. Intelligence involves knowledge and feeling, yaar, not just doing things efficiently!' Mandeep: 'I am not confusing intelligence and efficiency. 1 am redefining intelligence not as n quality htit n process. My approach has the advantage that we can break down the mechanics of intelligence into small nodules and study the working of each module separately (e.g. the language module, the memory module, the visual module, etc.). We can then model these functions of the brain in terms of a conlputer sqstem. The comparison of the brain with the computer encourages us to believe that there is no mystery ahout the brain. The brain consists of nuinerous subsystems which interact as a complex system. The computer can be thought of in exactly these terms.' 'I hope after all those discussions on culture, we aren't going to sit here and conclude that differences between a human and computer are practically non-existent-albeit in the future!' 'Well I hope so too, else we might have to study the cultural anthropology of computers! Computers may be not be alive, but they are already smart enough to leap over the chasm between bits and bytes ancl human emotions. Remember the Japanese students I told you about?' 'Back to the Japanese marrying computers! Don't' get obsessed, yaar. By the way, does the computer have a choice in the matter? Okay, okay, I concede. If culture, let's say music, is not out there, I,ut in our I~rains,then maybe humans will start seeing beauty in a random, sequence of zeroes and , ones and computers will begin to love the binary representation of a Beethoven sonata ...It's all a matter of

9

TcjcD~rohrrrl

Cojrp~rltrs, lIr~~trnr\Ilor-cxloirr r i ~ l dtl)ch.Sc;lrl

training. If 1x.e i'an t K l i l l 0111 ~llincls,we can tl-;lin o u r ci!nllllltcr\!' .-Ihis - is g ~ t t i n gs o \ . : I ~ L I ~ film' 'What clicl y o 1 1 cspcx-t. eonc~-i.tc.tol-mt~l:~c' in ;I Iitim:~nitic.h cl:1ssZ' 'hl:~':~~ll. I tllillk \\.e c,:\n I I \ C dl r : ~ n i s to i l i s t i n g t ~ ~ h h c o ~ n i x ~ t uf1-(~11l s 11~1111:111I x l i n s . ( : O I I ~ [ ) L I ~ C clo~i't I\ CI~C':IIIII' hl:lnclc.cp: ' I f y(jll look at I-rcc.nt tc.i.llologized stl~clich-thc ne11ron;tl monitoring of cll-c-:lm activit)'-this may. not l>c. tr-lfc! You cot~lclI-cplicatc. rllc t-1c.crrc ~ n i csisn:ils o1,t:iinccl ;!,I ~ L . . I I ~ I ~ ~ I I I ~ r : ~ i:~cti\,it), n clur-ing ice11 In :I c,onil?t~te~-.' 'L3~lt yell c:l:lll si\.e t I l < , h ~~ ~ ~ ~ s e t l c l o - t l 1 ~ c ' ::I l l ll:l-rllc~1:111 l~" interprc.t:ltion> c;ln ) o u ? ,Recent stucllcs also s11o\v t11:1t ~II.I:.II~IS eleL~l l i l c ) . \ ~ oftc~riin munilnnc ~:llorni:ition 1-:1tlie1.tli;~n in t1cc.p-seatccl r-t.prcs\ccl e ~ i i [ > t i <:IIILI ) ~ ~ sfc*:~~.s, C:o~~~pt~tc.:-s 1.rxil~.<:ILI for ;I r e \ ~ ( ~ ) s k i ~ l g I:ri:tld! Wl1ispc.r: '1 i h ~ n k c.\c.yonc. 1lc.1-c. 11:~ss u m t o o Ili,ln). movies \vitll :lnclro~cl ~n t l ~ c n l , c . 1 . ; ~ ~Iic.>.'rc'cl~.c';~lili~lgl \X1h:lt's the ~-c!e\,:~nce o t all t o cliht~ngt~ibh~ng 1111rr1;1ns froni c o m p ~ l t c r - s /T l i i i \ I ~ ~ : I c I I I c . \ \ \\':lit. \\-:lit, c.:[n't n-c. tis.c' nlaclness.. .\l:~dnt,ss hla',trn. ~rl;iclric.h.\c.Jn I F ~ ~ h c , c l

~ 1

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195

oncsvlf :mil otllers, incl~rcling pc'll~aps plant :tnil animal life. II 1ntlc.h grc.:lti:r tolcr:~ncc 'In this seconcl type o f c~llt~rrt:, for '.:~l)norrn:~l"I,cli:~viot~rscoi~lcl~ ' ~ 1 Is~ Ct C : I I I S ~ these ~ \ . o i ~ l d t,c. seen ;is n:i)-s in \vl,ich o n e ' \ .'on.n" self i manifested. Bc1hri.s \;.ho sjjc*ncl their lives sitting u p in tl~e1,ranches of :I tree, or nrilo I u v e not s p o k e n h)r mi-enty v e x s :tl-r not consiclerec! nlacl in Inclin. l'liey art. r ~ c l ~ ~ s s i t ' iah e d"holy". 'l'lley even represent .I fol-111of scltlloocl ivc- coi~lilnbpirt: to! In the West, I,ecausc tllc co~icej,t of tile self is more tisl~tlyclefinecl. such persons woulcl h e iclentificd \vith 'not-self' 311~1c~c~lnlliittcd n.ith!~ut remorse to :I nlent:~l institution.' Anurag: '\Vith yollr pel.:nission M:I'III;~.I'd like to make nly presentation llo\xr, :IS the cl;ish seems t o I>e clrifti~lginto a delntc. which I can settle ' Back bench conllncnt: '\Xih2t. :Ire )-OII\\uting for. 11s to clap tor you to bcgin? '

I>I-

Yogesh, Choric Listener:

Anurag the Vedic Sage:

Anur;~g: '\Fl~at Yogesll c:~ll< "::t:lf" is really "sotrl". My p r o p o i t i o n i h th:~t w c pohscss 3 .\o~11 th:~t txisth inclc8pcnclent of the I)ocly. At tilt tin~cbo t clc:~th; thi., S O L I ~Iravcs the I)ody ancl 1;i;ly ( o r Inay n o r ! e m e r g e i n allnrhcl. I>ocly. I'ar:c~fiycholo;:ical stt~clie.,hllo\v\ thnr thc.~.:~ 1. cieniific c.\.iclencc for ~rrpc.c?nten:ion. I )on't ;~cccl:tII?). t l l ~ ~ so~n h~.eligiotl:,~ ~ C ) U I I C I S . 'l'lir / ( I L ~ . < a l e ~)c~r,\n:~,sive. , I ' l l l)cgin xvitll :I ; I I I ~ I ~ < !.I'l!c ; : ~ , l)o(!y 1.5 liicc- :I C O I R ~ I I ~ ~ Y that t l ~ e\o111tl\es f i l l - ~ t p\ c l r ! ) c ~ ~I)ut ~ \ . ti^!\ c!i)(:.; not nie,lli t l l c h l>ocl)- i \ r o 13e c ~ o ~ ~ l ~ t ~ \1~11 c . c lit.' sot11. 'i'11;lr \ \ , o ~ ~ l cl)r l j~:\t :is al>st~r.cl:I\ c~l;t11iii1~g 1 1 1 ~ ttllr C O I I I ~ ; ~ I ~t1,x.r L , ~ . I \ i : . l t ~ ~ i ~ i\ \c, i: t~I ~l ! ~ i \ corllputc.rl In\-csri:~ar~c~rl~. i i l t c ; IIC.:[I t i ~ ~ : ~ l I ! - c s ~ ~ c r - i( '~ i I )~ I . i: hi)c c . \ prove 111). 1)oint t11:lt ' > O L I I \ : I I C . 1101 t o IIC ~ : l i \ t : ~ k cfol~ l t11r l~r:li~ls~lllillclh \\ I l l t ~ l l :11i: coc\~:li\ \ I l l 1 I l l < , IX)(l\~:ll?cI clic \\.Il'~ll the 1)0cl? c l ~ c , \ . S t t ~ ~ l1))'i ~ el!)( \ i:!i.\ 111 1 1 1 ~ . I 111tc(I 5 t ~ 1 t \c~ I~o T~\ ' t1l:lt b - i c t i ~ i l \ o t :I(( ~ ( I c ' n ~.,\.iio s, I I ~ I \ ~ I I I ~ I ~ : I I ~~clircl" I~ ;triil I I I V I I ,

I (

96

Technobrat

come back to life", have an accurate recall of the sequence ~fevents after the NDE. 'Records suggest that they actually saw themselves being ,perated on. They described themselves as hovering over their bodies, and also spoke of seeing a shining, white light before they came back into this life. These studies of NDEs were conducted under clinical conditions, and so technical lvidence supports the hypothesis that NDEs capture the noment when the soul is seeking to extricate itself from the oils of its mortal instrument-the body. There are also welldocumented cases where children/adults describe places that they have never been to. They reveal relationships with other families and speak in languages that they could not have normally acquired. 'How is it possible to account for this range of phenomena without postulating an entity such as the soul, which no manmade nominal kind of computer could ever possess? This is an open question, but I can answer it unhesitatingly in a positive fashion. I see no reason why we should reject the age-old Vedic wisdom that we possess an immortal soul until a better explanation for the strange phenomena that I have described presents itself.'

Ramnik: The class concludes, As for us, postcolonial migrants, we are still soul searching and planning to use a computer for a faster search on the world wide web ...

TOOL-USER'S TRICKS: The Cultural Codes Operated by the Engineer

Technology drags in its wake the sense of an ending. Built into the gleaming forms of inachines are reminders of their own obsolescence. Newer and better models must replace the present ones. That is the logic of technology; that is its political economy. Between technofetishism and technoangst is just one short, fatal step. Now that we were into the last days of the term, I could sense another emotion in class-you could call it palpable anxiety, a penumbra of gloom. It wasn't just worry about examinations, though; nor regret for the insignificant passing of HU484. There appeared to be a larger context for the fears now expressed by the Tvashtris-fears about the uncontrollable catastrophes.that a sophisticated involvenlent with technology might impose. The closure of the narrative of Technobrat coincided with the end of a century, a ~llillenniumand in the Indian context, an era. Youthful as they were, my students ,' knew this. That Indian era was the era of Nehruvian policies (circa

200

Tool-tuer's Tricks

Technobrat

1950-1985). Technobrat had begun with a reading of Nehru as its keytext. The keytext for this chapter paints a scenario unimaginably different. It records the philosopher Lyotard's apocalyptic vision of the role technology might conceivably play when the sun finally explodes one day, destroying the solar system. O n that day, Lyotard insists, only machines [nay be able to save humankind. We seem to have travelled a long and unpredictable distance, from nationalist optimism to universal despairalthough whether this counts as progress is hard to determine. Ironically, I rernemher as I write my own worries about talung on the unknown quantity of HU484. Now those worries appeared to have shifted squarely onto the shoulders of my students. Could this weird transfer of mental states be categorized as 'teaching'? I'm not sure that it can, because of course, the loss of self-confidence expressed by my class was by no means unique. It consisted in a-by now rather predictable-psychological effect felt by most people who've had to consider the cultural space technology occupies in contemporary civilization. That technological space appears to grow larger and larger, while they themselves grow progressively smaller, dwarfed by their towering creations. Such a magic-mushroom feeling couldn't be particularly reassuring for the engineering ego, which so relied on a stable representation of the self. The origins of the anxieties voiced by the Tvashtris were not difficult to trace. One obvious place to look was in popular discourse. Those deep dangers of technology that Heiclegger had struggled to identify half a century ago were now part of the commonplace, transnational language of the media. Few IIT students ever had time to read a regular book, so television, newspapers and magazines, constituted their sources of information-and these sources authoritatively declared the world doomed if w e didn't watch it. F o r example, a staple of Tvashtri reading, a recent edition of the Time magazine concluded from findings

201

by evolutionary biologists that we were all, but especially Americans, afflicted with a bad case of '20th Century Blues', caused I>y technological overload.

*

t;

CRCS and microwave ovens have their virtues, but in the everyday course of our highly efficient lives, there are times when something seeins deeply amiss ...we here in America at times get the feeling that modern life isn't what we were designed for. And it isn't. The human mind--our emotions, our wants, our needs-volved in an environment lacking, for example, cellular phones. This...is a theme going back at least to Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents... Much of this t'rouble stems from technology ... The ultimate in isolating technologies is the television ... Relief from W ' s isolating and at times depressing effects may coine from more communal technologies. The inchoate Internet is already famous for knitting congenial souls together ...But at least in its present form, the Net brings no visual (much less tactile) contact, and so doesn't fully gratify the social machinery of our nlinds. More generally, the Net adds to the information overload, whose psychological effects are still unknown, but certainly not wholly benign. (Robert Wright, Time)

3

b I

Among the dangers of technology that Wright is drawing our attention to is, I think, the capacity of a technological society to impose a state of boredom on its citizens. Simply having so many playthings distracts and leads to amnesia ahout the most basic play routines that hunlans nlinds are progranlnled for-namely, playlng with other members of the species It's this sort of play we ultimately requlre to stimulate us to want to survive, reaching terminal state5 of boredom othemise.

202

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Technobrat

Extending Wright's argument in Technohmt I'd say that incentives to self-destruct are not only to he found among the bored beneficiaries of leisure societies but also among those professional classes in any society whose self-definition consists in their dealings with machines. ~ngineersform one such paradigm class. To state the thesis in its crudest formengineers identified with their autonomous machines more than they bonded interactively with fellow rne~nbersof the human species. When I said to my Tvashtris: The hero in George Bernard Shaw's play A r m s and the Mall is insulted by the heroine in the following words: 'You're not a man, you're a' machine', they conceded what they called the 'humour' of the utterance, hut failed to see where exactly the 'insult' lay ... I tried again. For their Minor I, I set them the following examination question: 8a). We all know the definition of an expert as 'someone who knows Illore and more about less and less'. Sinlilarly, culture can be defined as 'the freedom not to be free' ancl technology as 'the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it'. Would the upheat image of the 'technologist as an expert' in our culture be affected by such negative definitions? Negative definitions? My cl:~ss knew not what I meant. They remained staunchly ;idamant that cultural engagement was not for them. As technological 'experts', their self-definition consisted in thinking of themselves as pragmatists, not humanists. Serendipito~lsly,an-end-of-year survey confil-lncd their perception. The survey across sevel.al countries polled citizens on their interests (sports, travel, environnlental issues etc.) It then went on to categorize people as 'hun~anists', 'pragmatists' and ~technologists'. While India had alllong the lowest proportion of 'hurnanists' in its population as compared to other

Toof-user's Trick

203

countries, what is interesting is that the broad divisions for India are not too dissimilar to those for the US, but are very different for those of west Europe where the proportion of 'humanists' is very high... (Iizdia Todgy)

1;

k

~f we went back to our general classroo~nagreement that, as elite engineers, my students served as prototypes of desirable members of the Indian middle class and that the aspirations of such a middle-class were always directed towards 'making it' in America rather in Europe, then we-could now make a more colnplex connection behveen Wright's analysis of a technocratic Anlerica poised on the brink of alienated selfdestruction and the denial of their own 'hutnanist' potential among those most aclnlired by the Indian middle-class-that is, students of engineering at the IITs. One prediction from the close episternic fit hetween the mind-sets of the US citizen and the Indian middle-class found by the Indin Today survey would be, for example, that the moods-self-destn~ctive or otherwise-af the [IS puhlic woulcl be reflected in some manner :inlong an ideal middle-class group such as the Tvashtris and Iiibhus nurtured in the seclusion of the IITs. Tvashtris eqt~alledMicroserfi across LZ causeway o f cultures. In other words, given 'Indian' conditions but 'American' ideology, the self that an 117' engineer might choose to choke off was perhaps not his highly evaluated ph.y.~ical heir% but those internal channels of m7otio?zaI cittachment that are regarded as the sources of the human soul. Self-destruction, in short, comes in more bmnds than one and the privileged engineers of II'T h:id, apparently, clisccwered their own nlethods of coping with the horedonn of a inec$anizecl ~iniverse.

Some did so I,y dropping cngincering the moment they kfi IIT for n~mageinentpositions 111:~th:irdly rderred at a11 to

204

Tool-user's Tricks

Tech~zobrat

their technical training. Some dissociated themselves from concerns conlpletely, adopting that familiar cellular, self-contained attitude. They single-mindedly attended to their own needs and those of their immediate family despite living in the very ol3viously fraught context of India. Still others espoused simplistic political solutions, while many left for that mythical America where they could, so to speak, function without the strain of 'humanist' involvement. Such are the ways of divinity. Whatever the strategy, inost of my Tvashtris admitted towards the end of our days together in the capsule of IIU484 that a socially committed engineer was a bit of a psychological anomaly. Most Tvashtris were, as I'd come to realize, unabashed technological determinists. They believed that technological advancement resulted inevitably in social betterment. Reading Gandhi, Nandy and others may have done something to destabilize this firmly held belief but it was, on balance, nly students' fall-back position. Was there a sort of contradiction here. 1 enquired nastily. Technologies they held to be socially beneficial hut tech?zologists were perceived as socially uninvolved. How come? Again, we could extend Wright's position here. In evolutionary terms, we might say that the mess has kecn around far longer than the order. Engineers niight well fashion themselves as loathing disorder and delirious in the neat embrace of perfect, predictable machines, b u t the complex technologies that they have been trained to love and honour were the products of an industrial revolution only three centuries old. While humans have Ixen rml users for millennia, modern technologies and their dazzling benefits were so new that any intelligent ohserver woultl be entirely justified in regarding them as still as not entirely trustwonhy. Mistrust-that was the keyword that unlocked the Bluebeard's chamber of 20th Century Blues. My class were

',

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i.

205

model citizens of a Post-20th-Century New World, off to Dallas, Delaware and Dartmouth in a jiffy, and yet they were being devoured by the eroding .fantasies o f mistrust. This mistrust was not to be confused with the robust doubt and scepticism that sustained the Enlightenment. The scientific doubt of Enlightenment philosophy went hand-in-hand with faith in science and its bounties-a historical inheritance that was reflected in the calm confidence projected by Nehn~vian socialism, where political process innocently held hands with technological progress. Mistrust was a new and troubling virus characteristic of something called a 'postmodern' environment-mistrust of bureaucracy, mistrust of politics, mistrust of technology. Unlike simple tools, the nouveau technological 'extensions of the self had a new set of properties. They could blow up in the faces of their handlers. The IIT engineers were quite clever enough to realize this. As those closest to the new technologies, they could he the first victims of their own Frankenstein's monsters. -Hence their curiously anomalous attitude-faith in technological 'progress' combined with selfpreserving detachment from that very progress. In machines and mechanics, in biotechnological advances, they saw mirrored human dreams of immortality and eternal bliss and leisure, but all round them was the cruel, uncivil social scenario of India, offering contradictory information about our apparently infinite tolerance of dystopias. Under the circumstances, psychological retreat from the problem was the only smart move. And the IIT engineer, epitome of the Indian middle classes, was nothing if not smart. Inheritor of a cultural tradition where uairagya (detachment) was a much touted virtue, he was a Tvashtri, or at the very least a Ribhu, a divine being. Hence, old-style Nehruvian socialist humanism was out, while each one for himself was definitely in-and the ~Gotardianapocalypse no longer a wild fantasy.

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Tool-user's Tricks 207 A) Recycling Enterprise: India has a great recycling culture, in which everything from linguistic units (aaste-aaste, idharudhnr, kuch-kuch etc.) to souls (the doctrine of re-incarnation, avatars) are, so to speak, reused. The lllaterials of the whole universe are visualized as reusable. This methodology of conservation extends also to our retooling of technologies, so that on the Indian market it is quite common to get 'duplicate' versions of 'hrand-name' fans, blenders and various other electronic gadgets. Recycling is a philosophy in India, not just an answer to extreme poverty. Inheritors of an anti-throwaway, potentially eco-friendly set of cultural habits, we had a different model of cultural expertise to offer the 'consumerist' societies of the West. B) Artisan Teclinologies: Apart from possessing, on paper at any rate, the much advertised strengths of the third largest technologically trained personnel in the worlcl, w e had a very rich and variegated tradition of artisanship. Few countries could rnatch India in the range of her textile or crafts. The country possessed enviahle expertise in traditional technologies as diverse a s steel-smelting a n d stone-cutting. T h e homogenization of cultural tastes and preferences that had overtaken the richer countries of the North, h:ld not yet taken over India. Pankaj the Musician, Vivek the Environmentalist, Neeraj the Family Man and Vishwan~pcand Raj the Gandhians all insisted that w e did not need sophisticated nuclear power plants and other such devices for 'a good society'. If w e could make ch1~lhasthat worked, electrical lines that functioned, these woulcl constitute a very I)ig step towards a civil society. And here the engineers coulcl learn valual,le lessons from our artisans rather than vice-versa! So this 'strength' incorporated anti-metropolitan snobbery as well. It meant that w e need not proceed lemming-like towards 'l~ig'teclinologies.

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Political-Pluralism and India's Strengths Of the 'passing' of the Nehluvian ern, the writer Salnlan Rushdie has commented: The India that came into being in 1947 was an India of which the three planks, llroadly speaking, were s e c h r i s m , democracy and socialism. Now there seems to be a weakening of the democr:ltic impulse . . .the growth of religious extremism ...represents a real threat to the secular principles of this nation. One can hear people talking about the need to rewrite the Constitution, to desecularise it. And then, of course, in the economic sphere, the change in economic structure with the arrival of free-market econornies [is] very dramatic. All these things seem to he changing the country so fundamentally that one could say that the country which came into being in 1947 is being transformed into something else. More censorship, Illore extremism, more co~npetition-looked at in this fashion, one could see the reasons for moral despair. Rushdie, an acute commentator, cloes not p;lint t!le picture of a liberal society. Indeed, his main thesis is that econonlic liberalization is very likely at the cost of political liberalism, not to mention socio-cultural liberation. But how would the a-political Tvasht~.is,whose sense OF history 11s well as social commitment are for the most p:lrt cleliber:~tely attenuated, react to Rushclie's grim assessment? Simplc-they did so by confidently listing .Indi:l's Strengths', her capacity to survive as :I country despite traum:ly endured. It felt pompous ancl official, this list of .strengtlls that w e produced in HIJ484. Still, alw:~ys ;I hopeless optimist, 1 regarded it a3 a sign of engagement o n the part of the Tlrashtris. IIere is our list, neatly nlphabetizetl as usl~al:

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C) Traditional Transliiission ~ & h n i ~ u e sHow : does information travel in a predominantly oral culture? While

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India has organized knowledge textually for three thousand years, it has simultaneously preserved high quality mnemonic traditions of recitation. This is a nation of indefatigable talkers, of rhetoricians. Perhaps this fact should be recognized as one of India's greatest strengths in an age of mass communication through multi-media electronics. Village and small town India have evolved, through centuries of formal 'illiteracy', methods that have kept information circulating at high rates of efficiency, without the feature of alienation that mass dissemination of information often brings about. Conventions such as those of adda (intellectual conversation involving elements of gossip as well as the exercise of aesthetic and moral judgements) afford valuable sources of social integration. Our traditions of quick oral empathy may yet stand us in good stead as w e strive to understand threats to world culture in the technologically dominated scenarios of the twenty-first century. Cruising cyberspace will be relatively easy for those culturally skilled in conversational navigation. D) Crisis Management: This sub-continent has had its share of both natural and nominal kind disasters-tloods, droughts, earthquakes, riots, major accidents like Bhopal, even the plague in Surat. Yet the ramshackle official structures of bureaucracy which w e cannot usually rely on always rise magnificently to the occasion in times of crisis. What this reveals is that somewhere there are still resources within the system, within the Indian people, to bootstrap ourselves into conditions of living with greater dignity and less despair. E) Complex Pluralism: The Islamic, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Parsee, Adivasi religious traditions in this country have historically shown great inventiveness in incorporating and acknowledging 'other' points of view. Welconling strangers, and even strangeness, have been part of the mythology to wQich various overlays of custom in India have subscribed. This d e e p syncretism has b e e n widely

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acknowledged as the foundation of the strong and sustained democracy that characterizes the nlodern Indian state. There is no denying that India is by anyone's standards perhaps the most coinplicated of countries-multilingual and bicultural in the most fornlative ways. It seems possible that the technologization of culture likely to overtake the world in the twenty-first century will need to draw on exactly these complex skills of hi-culturalism, w h e n q e o p l e and nations begin to communicate across invisible, hut real, linguistic and cultural boundaries. Our technologically trained personnel is not merely quantitatively the third largest in the world, it is qualitatively attuned to coping with several languages and cultural idioms. Definitely, this counts as a historical strength that India could build on. The tower of Babel in the Bible could not h e erected because, as w e know, its builders-shall w e call them engineers?-spoke no comnlon language. India, however, seems to have lived, even thrived, on a Babel of languages for many centuries.Gndian engineers, as a subset of the Indian populace in general, lust therefore have managed the problems of Babel and still learnt to build. That is a sign of hope.

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Okay, if that was a list of strengths, what about weaknesses? To which one could reply that weakness has been the central motif in Tcchnobrat. The whole hook is a barometer of weakness, unmentionable areas of dark fears and stormy disagreements. Consider the vexed matter of sex and gender, for example, subjects on which the Tvashtris maintained a studied silence through most of HU484. Well, sex had to be out perhaps. It would be unrealistic to expect a frank discussion of sex in a class of forty-fiue, but I did try to smuggle in gender, artenlpting to reassure the ernharrassed Tvashtris with the conlfo~tingstatement: Sex is biological but

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gender is cultural. Gender is constructed or created via markers such as forms of dress and address, proper names, norms of behaviour, ways of speech etc. If technology is influenced by--or influences-notions of gender within cultures, it is quite appropriate to discuss it in class, I declared as firmly as I could. Once we did get on to gender, though, I found it generated more heat than light. Partly this was because of numerical imbalance and the presumptions that went with it. Our class, as I've mentioned before, had only three female>four, if you counted me-and everyone assumed that it was the business of Pooja, Sonu, Kanupriya and myself to defend women's rights while the rest of the class presented arguments to show why women in any culture deserved what they got. Examples:

Neeraj the Family Man: Women are better at the Humanities subjects. They do not in general possess analytic ability. Why can w e not accept that women have a central role to play in the family and leave it at that? After all, this is a crucial role in any culture. Why shouldn't women be content with it?

Mayank the Zen Master: Women shouldn't complain. If they were as good as men, they'd d o as well.

Sachin, Choric Commentator: My grandmother ruled the home and my grandfather never interfered. So women are all-powerful in some spheres of activity.

Vikas, Champion of Male Rights: If women are so concerned about rights, they should first

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show the way by not asking for reserved seats on buses! Others offered a gamut of similarly consoling thoughts. At first I was amused by this intransigence on the part of my male majoritarian class, hut it takes no genius to realize that it is also cause for alarm. For, insensitivity towards gender forms a larger pattern consistent with Tvashtri attitudes towards all the disenfranchised-the 'backwards' w h o sought reservations, the poor, the disabled. This precisely was the middle-class culture of indifference to which engineers as a species were heirs in action. The bottom-line was: anyone WIIO hadn'f 'made it' belonged to the categoly of the undeserving. They had failed to compete. I have to admit that I found this form of unselfconsciously expressed social Darnrinism both fascinating and repugnant at once, and tried over and over to counter it by reiterating the self-evident. India, arguably, is the most blatant exa~npleof a country where the numbers of women in all states (except Kerala) are significantly less than the numbers of men. This imbalance was culturally created. It was the result of systematic discrimination against wornenmalnutrition, infanticide (sometimes via fancy technological methods of sex-determination such as amniocentesis), and every variety of deprivation. The statistics spoke for themselves. But my class remained, as far as I could see, wholly unmoved. As in the case of the 'backwards', they were prepared to concede that individual women who'd succeeded were fine, but gender as a whole, they maintained, has become an issue only because of the whining of women-and not because of the prejudice of a patriarchal society. Of the three women in my class, Sonu was the most upset by the callousness with which gender issues were dismissed by my class. To her I gave Londa Schlebinger's i%e Mind has no Sex which unearths th; 'suppressed' historical contrilmtion of women to the enterprise of rnodern Western

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science. Later, Sonu based her essay on the arguments in this work. Predictably, there were no takers for her ideological position o n gender--or mine. Indeed, the atmosphere in class during Sonu's presentation was quite acrimonious, if not actually hostile.

Sonu the Feminist 'Gender prejudice haunts us, well at least me, even today. In the so-called advanced cultures, women were excluded from University positions and honours until well into the twentieth century. Two well-known examples in 20th century science include Marie Curie, who failed to be elected to the French Academy of Sciences; and Lisa Meitner, whose work was fundamental in the description of nuclear fission, yet the Nobel prize in physics went only to Otto Hahn, her partner. Hahn compounded the crime by not standing u p for Meitner. 'A great deal of energy was expended on the pseudoscience of craniology throughout the nineteenth century to show that women possessed smaller brains than men. Scientific facts were turned and twisted to maintain the prejudice against women. Earlier, when women were supposed to have smaller skulls, it was inferred that they were not capable of rigorous thought. Later, when Sommering and Ackermann showed that women have relatively larger skulls than men, it was concluded that women resemble children whose skulls are also large relative to their body size! 'That there were only a very small number of extraordinary women in world history proved that nature had not really equipped wolnen for intellectual activity! With the suffragette movement and the fight for wolnen to enter the delnocratic process, the intellectual rights of women were defended by philosophel-activists like Condorcet, who argued that if only a few women were exception~lthe same held true of men, and if women were hampered in their work by childbirth. men were equally hampered by diseases such as gout.

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'Awareness of the rights of women was helped by these arguments, but if w e look around us w e still find gross abuse of women in our own society. The job markets are still heavily weighted against women-with qualified women engineers being less en~ployablethan their male counterparts. AS long as these and similar situations are widely observable, there will be a role for feminist movements withn every c~lture-Western, Indian or Ndebele.' Whew! The class is impressed, but Sonu's arguments still leave the Tvashtris cold. .. Vikas: 'Feminism seems to me to be based o n an inferiority-complex. As far as oppression is concerned, most of it is female-sponsored. Wouldn't it be more fruitful if women took up the cause of cleaning up the society and rearing better families instead of cribbing?' Neeraj: 'Sonu, you are opposed to women staying within the confines of the home. But it is: i) necessary for any society to have children ii) only women can bear children iii) a mother is much more attached to her child because she has been nurturing the child within her womb for nine months; among mammals, anyway, the females care for the offspring iv if women don't remain at home the child suffers V) these women's roles can't be taken over by men because of their physical inability to bear children For all these reasons, the betterment of society demands that women must remain withn the confines of the home. Don't You agree?' Dhiraj: 'Women think differently from men. They are much more emotional and sensitive and less mathematical. JEE results show that the number of girls qualifying is not Proportional to the number of girls appearing, as .compared to boys. Girls are inherently poor at mathematics.' \It was as if my 'soulless' class of male engineers,

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trained to deny affect, had a mental blind-spot when it came to 'women's intelligence'. A woman could never h e a 'real' Tvashtri. She lacked in herself the 'seed' of divinity. Here was evidence of the ancient macho prejudice of the Rigveda once again in the most ~rlodernof Indian classrooms at the end of the twentieth centuqy. Yes, there was cause for depression. We'd had debates o n the cultural inadequacy of intelligence tests and everyone had agreed with Stephen J. Gould that the whole idea of 'low I.Q.' among certain racessay, the black-was fundamentally flawed, but when it came to women, the notion that women were intended for different tasks by nature and therefore 'less brainy' did not seem odd to my class at all. I pointed out to the Tvashtris, en pmsant, that ours was one of the few cultures in the world where common women's names such as Bindu and Rekha equalled geometrical abstractions. Where else, I asked, would you come across women called Point and Line? And if women embodied nlathenlatics in their very persons surely they could make good mathematicians? But this frivoloi~sargurrrent was treated with the supercilious contempt it deserved-an apt example of unanalytic thinking by 3 woman! Well, unanalytic it may have been, but I think I had a Point, if not actually a Line! So did Sonu, but no one was interested. Whenever my class did deign to discuss the contribution of women to 'Indian' culture, it was in terms of women's capacity to endure the unendurable-dowry-deaths, abuse, illiteracyand still remain 'virtuous', the unassailable centre of home and family. This was the famous quality of sahanshcc.lata (endurance) that typified Indian women. India emer-ged primarily as 'Mother India' in the eyes of my students, even in this last technologized quarter of the twentieth centurywith all that.rhis imagery implied (see answers to the question on the goddess Durga in the next chapter).

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Cultural Relativism: From the sacred to the secret: Technohrat is a 'secrets revealed' and 'futurology' book in the sense that it presents an anatomy of that rarely studied species--the third-world engineer-who is very likely to man the cyberspace classrooms of the twentieth century. The HU484 classroom, I have argued, could be seen in some ways as the microcosm of a middle-class Indian 'mind' attuned the 'American dream'. Now, towards the end of my days w i t h that classroon~,I was ready to place our chaotic deliberations within a more theoretical perspective. This perspective is known-and often feared-as 'cultural relativism'. Early on in our course, Ramnik the Philosopher had asked me a question. How can we presume, Ra~nnikhad queried, to judge the custor~lsor actions of members of 'other' cultures if we haven't internalized their feelings and attitudes? And if they are truly 'other' can we ever internalize their thoughts? Well, that of course was the exact question which cultural relativists from Edward Sapir to Benjamin Lee Whod to Willard Quine to Donald Davidson had battled with, so I was quite ready to launch into my derivation of the tenets of cultural relativism without further ado. Rather than tell it in my own words, though, here are Raninik's class notes from my lecture:

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Class Notes o n Cultural Relativism 'Cultural relativism' can be summed up, according to RBN, as the following 'concatenation of hypotheses': 1. The view that one takes on a matter is a perspective from within the linguistic 'world' of one's own culture. 2. There is no Archimedean point-of-view from wllich cultures can be compared or absolutely evaluated. Every human being belongs 'inside'; we are gll prisoners of some culture or the other. 3. Absolute cultural judgnlents are impossible.

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4. 'Reality' itself is a cultural construct, Furthermore, anything whlch can be conatnlcted (put together) can be deconstructed (pulled apart). Example: names for colours. There is a hierarchy here among the world's languages, ranging from 11 colour terms to just 2--dark and light. Upon analysis or de-construction, such naming systems can be seen as unconscious linguistic and cultural 'decisions' taken by different comnlunities. Another example: a community like the Inuit are believed to possess over 60 names for what we would just be able to call 'snow' because of the strong relationship that exists between cultures and context of use-i.e., 'reality' and language. But we must ask further--could the belief about the numerous Inuit words for snow itself be a exoticizing social construct imposed on that community from the outside? 5. There exist no absolute truths either. Rather, what we see as 'truth' is relative to the semantic systems of the languages (natural languages as well as logical a n d mathematical languages) we use. Without the medium of linguistic signs, with which we construct propositions about the world, we could after all, have no statements of 'truth'. In effect, the 'strong hypotheses' of one's culture serve for truths. This restriction applies as much to the 'universal truths' of modern science as to our other cultural beliefs. The beliefsystems and practices of 'science' are not set apart from or specially privileged over those of ethics, aesthetics, epit1;ymetics and other 'value-laden' systems. 6. 'Rationality' is a cultural constnlct too. If it is understoorl as sets of dovetailing entailments, presuppositions, anrl implicatures, then even something as strong as an entailment (every proposition is derived fro111 some previously nssurned set of truthful premises), depends for its 'truths' on cultureinternal beliefs. Thus, some proposition may I,e absolutely consistent relative to other propositions in the culture, Iwt incoherent e r absurd when placed within the belief system:^) of another culture.

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Technically speaking, that is, implicature (a statement can imply what it actually does not say, and what it implies is only to be understood fully if one has knowledge of the cultural context) and presupposition (the propositions one assumes to be true in understanding the meaning of any statement), will vary greatly from cultures, altering the truthvalue of statements so as to only allow very rough translations between languages. For example, calling somehody an 'owl' will have very different presuppositions and implicatures in Hindi and English. Thus the same man if described as an 'owl' will be thought to be wise and bookish in English and a fool in Hindi! 7. ~elf-criticismis always difficult because we hold as truths the strong hypotheses of our culture and are unable to question these foundational premises. Therefore, when viewed from outside by denizens of another culture, an individual can suffer from what looks like a case of 'false consciousness'. *

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Weak Cultural Relativism While these seven features constitute a strong(er) statement of cultural relativism, such 'strong relativism' leaves little scope for cross cultural comparisons or judgments because it 'locks' us within the world-view of our culture. If we logically extend the tenets bf =ultural Relativlsrn to an extreme, then even individuals within a culture would end u p solipsistically coinmunicating only with themselves. Therefore, on t h i s ' c s we adopt a more dilute, weak(er) form of Cultural Relativism, which says that that the languages we use influence hut do not determine our uiezo 'of the zuorld and our truths. Weak Cultural Relativism grants some value to our judgments of 'other' cultures, as long as the views of those within the culture are recorded. In Weak Cultural Relativism a dialogue between cultures and tranSlation hetween languages is an enriching possibility.

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Principles of Charity, Trust and Mistrust Ramnik's class notes outline almost word-for-word the main features of a 'cultural relativist' perspective as I presented it to the Tvashtris and Ribhus. To his notes, I shall only add two other pieces of conceptual apparatus that I also laid out in class-Donald Davidson's 'principle of charity' and nly own related 'principle of tnlst'. Davidson's idea is that, even when somebody says something you entirely fail to understand, you are unlikely, if you have been brought up as a normal member of a human linguistic community, to dismiss his utterance as meaningless. Applying a 'principle of charity' you are likely to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must have meant something sensible, you say to yourself, although I may not have understood what he meant. I understand Davidson as saying that we are not naturally inclined a species to h e strong cultural relativists, because if we were we'd give up on the 'charity principle'. We'd say, well, my language and world view are clearly different from this other person's-why should I waste lny time trying to interpret his words? But, o n the contrary, we almost always try to make sense out of other people's words and assume that they share the same mental universes as ourselves. Although w e cannot ever look inside others' heads or make out what they are thinking, w e are inclined to assume that other people are fundamentally the 'same as us'. This 'principle of charity' that we extend to other humans, however culturally remote fro111 us, is evidence that by nature w e are all weak, rather than strong, culttiral relativists. Like Davidson's charity principle, my 'principle of tnlst' is also derivecl fro111 olxervation of community psychology. The fact is, I suggest, that most of us d o not g o out into the world and ver~fymost of the things we are tolcl. We d o not go out and check 6 r ourselves whether the world is in fact round,

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or whether that solid talde in front of us is really made up of tiny particles whizzing :~l>outin mostly ernpty space. We leave these matter to Kripke's 'experts'. Despite facts like these being tnlly counter-intuitive and not at all confirmed by our immediate sense impressions, we still accept them as 'scientifically', 'objectively' tnle. Why? Why on earth? Well, because they are given to us by sources which we tmst, sources in which we have utter faith. In other words, we apply the 'principle of trust' to some of our most basic propositional beliefs, and the groups in which we choose to place our trust are almost wholly decided by the cultures in which we happen to find ourselves, or as Heidegger would put it, into xhlch we are 'thrown'. Since members of human communities, without exception, seem to live by 'principles of tnlst' I ~ u tthe authorities that they appeal to (religious. leaders, scientists, magicians, politicians, kinsfolk) may vary wildly from culture to culturethis makes us, definitely, cultural relativists of some sort or the other. Here, then, is,an entry point into the contradiction that troubles my class. As late 20th centuty technological beings, they are the postmodenz ilzheritors o f pathological

mistrust, hut socio-biology has ,fur millennia trrzezed indiuidzrals ulithitz arty culture i12 deep traditions of' trust. That was what was tearing them apart-the foundational quarrel between sociol>iologically nlotivated tnlst and the pragmatics of postmodernist mistn~st. As usual, my class looks ~nistn~stful; as usual, they are bored. But I can't give up now-I'm onto a hypothesis! I try desperately to interest them I>y illustrating lny 'principle of trust' with a 'text' that clcmonstrates the converse corollary of this principle. Namely, if facts are brought before you that d o not square with your Insic propositions of belief, you are likely to reject them out of hand. This was the relevant line of text in question.

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Principles of Charity, Trust and Mistrust Ramnik's class notes outline al~llostword-for-word the main features of a 'cultural relativist' perspective as I presented it to the Tvashtris and Ribhus. To his notes, I shall only add two other pieces of conceptual apparatus that I also laid out in class-Donald Davidson's 'principle of charity' and my own related 'principle of trust'. Davidson's idea is that, even when somebody says something you entirely fail to understand, you are unlikely, if you have been brought up as a normal meml>er of a human linguistic community, to dismiss his utterance as meaningless. Applying a 'principle of charity' you are likely to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must have meant something sensible, you say to yourself, although I may not have understood what he meant. I understand Davidson as saying that we are not naturally inclined a species to b e strong cultural relativists, because if we were we'd give up o n the 'charity principle'. We'd say, well, my language and world view are clearly different from this other person's-why should 1 waste my time trying to interpret his words? But, on the contrary, we almost always try to make sense out of other people's words and assume that they share the same mental universes as ourselves. Although we cannot ever look inside others' heads or make out what they are thinking, we are inclined to assume that other people are fundamentally the 'same as us'. This 'principle of charity' that we extend to other humans, however culturally remote from us, is evidence that l>y nature we are all weak, rather than strong, cultural relativists. Like Davidson's charity principle, my 'principle of trust' is also derived from observation of community psychology. The fact is, I suggest, that most of us d o not go out into the world and verify most o f the things we are told. We d o not go out and check fzr ourselves whether the world is in fact round, '

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Tool-user's Trick 219 or whether that solid tal>le in front of us is really n~acleup of tiny particles whizzing ahout in mostly empty space. We leave these matter to Kripke's 'experts'. Despite facts like these being tnily counter-intuitive and not at rtll confirmed hy our immediate sense impressions, we still accept them as 'scientifically', 'objectively' true. Why? Why on earth? Well, because they are given to us by sources which we trust, sources in which w e have utter faith. In other words, we apply the 'principle of tnlst' to some of our most basic propositional beliefs, and the groups in which we choose to place our trust are almost wholly decided by the cultures in which we happen to find ourselves, or as Heidegger would put it, into which we are 'thrown'. Since members of human con~munities,without exception, seem to live by 'principles of trust' hut the authorities that they appeal to (religious. leaders, scientists, magicians, politicians, kinsfolk) may vary wildly from culture to culturethis makes us, definitely, cultural relativists of some sort or the other. Here, then, is,an entry point into the contradiction that troubles my class. As late 20th celztury technological beings, they arc the postmodeni inheritors of pathological mistrust, hut socio-biology has Jor tllillennia t r a i ~ l e d individuals within ntl.v culture ill deep traditions qf. trust. That was what was tearing them apart-the foundational quarrel between sociobiologically motivated trust and the pragmatics of postmodernist mistrust. As usual, my class looks mistrustful; as usual, they are bored. But I can't give up now-I'm onto a hypothesis! I try desperately to interest them I>y illustrating 11ly 'principle of trust' with a 'text' that demonstrates the converse corollary of this principle. Namely, if facts are l>rought hefore you that d o not square with your basic propositions of belief, you are likely to reject them out of hand. This was the relevant line of text in question.

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7 C u l h l r c 01-03 1 4 . 0 0 - 1 6 . 0 0

WS 205 Here's 3 cI:~hsic example, I said to the .I'vashtris> of the analytic clifferencc I)et\veen 'tnlth' : ~ n d'error'. 1,et's concentrate o n the t).pist's t.1-rnr: 7 inste:~d of N . We ~ o ~ explain ~ l d this error in one of m o 1 ~ 3 ~;I)s w : e coi11cI appeal to our knon-leclge of keyboarcls llncl conjecture that since & and i 7 31-u I)oth o n the same key, tlie typist simply forgot to press the space Ixlr. Hence tlie error, c:~us:llly ; ~ c c o u r ~ r efor d 11); a preniise of huni:~n f:illil)ility + the ar1,itr:ll-y s t ~ . c ~ c t r ~ p~ .r:o~ pl e ~ t i ~of s keyboards; o r n.e coulcl 17) treat tlie error as posses5ing 3 deeper, 'true' nunlerologic~~l ~ n c : ~ n i n gWhy'! ! \rXrell, let's look at the evic1enc.e. Reductively a d d 484: = 7. Recluctively acid 01+03+14.00+10.00:= 7. Kecluctivcly ndcl 205: = 7. Add ;ill the 0's in the line: = 7. Adcl ;111 the first c:~pitals tl+1~+N+'I'+C+W+S: = 7. Add tlie letters in the worcl <;I :I,'lXKE: = 7 . Kecluctively atlcl ;dl letters except Clil.?'l~lRE, including the m i s s ~ n sN. They = 7. .I'he Tv3511tris \\.ere ~.evit:~li~ed. T I I c ~loved srlnls. I contini~ccl: hcre nre : ~ t least 7 numero111gic:il ' k ~ c t s ' to explain the typist's el-ror. 15ec:~tlse of the \v:I!. tllc. I ~ L I I ~ I ~~lclcl C ' ~ LIII! ~ those with f:~ithin nu111c1-ologywoulcl s:~), that there i5 ~ i i o r c to the whole I>us~nessthan s i n ~ p l ccoiliciclcncc. Insteatl, tlie n u ~ n h e r 7 is o f speciz~l import t o tlle Ill.'iH-i course. l o r e x a ~ n p l e : your all-iniportant hllnol- I Ilxa~ninations were c o n c l ~ ~ c t eod n rhe 7th of April; then, 1'i.e jt~st ot~tlinccl for yo^^ 7 tenets of ' c ~ ~ l t u r ar~1ati\;is1li, l ant1 so o n . If n.c :lcllnit thesc- k1ct5 aa 'el-ic1enc.e' then t l ~ e error n.e f11.st spotte(l might n o longer rv~nain a simple error. I t \~otllcl I ) e c o ~ n r

221

re\.elatory. It n.ould I>e 'spe:tking'. telling you sonlething! My cl:rss, unclerstancl:~hly.lookcel superior. N:~t~lr:iI!y,they did not s u l ~ s c r i l ~toe such nu~iierolo,oic;~l nonsense! h c l yet. I suggesteel, there was nothing mol-c intrinsic:~lly :~l)surcI in beliexring th:~t the \vorld o f numI)crs ~ v a s'spe:~king' t o rls, than Bruno L:~toiir's notion that Sature 'spoke' to scientists t s the belief th;~t the through their Ialwratov i n s t ~ x ~ l i ~ c n(71solicl table in front of us \sr;~s I:~rgcly 111acle of emptiness. The app1ic:ltion of my ul~icluitous 'principle of trust' s i n ~ p l y depenclecl o n the Ixsic propositions ~ v h i c h our culturcs happened to give u s . . After all, in the 17th century, even s o great a scientist as Newton, was caught LIP in numerology ancl 't~xpk:~ining'the universe in terms of Bil)lical numerals. In hi5 \vorlcl view. there w a s nothing inconsistent l x t w e e n the practice of gootl science ancl a total belief in n~lmerology.Newton's c ~ ~ l t ~ ~ was simply c!ifferent relat~ve to OLIGS-so h e 'took o n tnlst' beliefs that n o w seem to L I ~al>surcl a n d the converse lvould probably Ilc tnle as well! So, the sln:~ll example of the irnport:lnce o f the numl>er 7 to the 1111484 course sho\vecl that o u r notlons of rational l~elief:mcl 'scientific thought' were the~nselvzshasccl o n relativistic c\~ltur:~lpresuppositions that were suhject to change 130th historic;~lly and from culture to culture. T h e Tvashtris looked b e ~ n u s e dancl fell ,silent; hut perhaps they n.ere just usccl to giving in to what K:~mnik c:~lls the 'voice of :l~~thority'. ..

Ramnik on Suicide The firht 'voice of a ~ ~ t h o r i t yt l' ~ : ~I t heal-tl :II 11'1- W:IS at the 'Welcome Class'. The \loice t~11kc.dot :I pedagogic methocl(11ogy which it cl:limetl w : ~ s the only n,ny t o get : ~ - r n : ~ x i m ~ ~ output frorn a sruclcnt. In onc line. c11-1vethe stuclcnt as hard 3 s you can.

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'Wh:ir if tlic. sttlclcnt c.:~ri't take !t:" 1 protesteel. '\Xrell, si~ic.iilesa1.c normal \\.lle:i ' i t c.0mc.s l o ac,iiie\.ing high standa::ls of excc.!lc.ncc. I t h:ij11-rc.n,~ at ::I1 thy l>cst piLtc.es, incli~ciingI[T.' I rcnlemlxr jllcclging not to take "17 :1r1y ~ ( > L I ~ C\ 'i . I i t ? ~ . instnlction callle 2t lllis ~'~c'(~~Ic'IIc').. s o t ;I ;1lecige 1 colllcl l i \ ' ~ up I i t I i i n i t c c l i e tiic::clcs ciur-ing njy st:!)i in 'Iiigll Achic.velilent 'l'c-irito~y'. l'l?nnl;tl~ll>~, the n~nx nlethoclol:)gy n:as pcrsori,~lto the c~n~r-ler of t l ~ cvoici.. it? 'Look, it ;IS hisly lnean of the g t ~ yto tali< I ~ k etll;:t i n tlle Welconlc Cl:iss, biit confess it, tloesr~'t a11 evolution clc.i.~llunc1t.r strcss? I'tl lovcz to he \ . c ~ yseriti alloi~tthe \\.liolc- thing. \Ve l i i ~ ts c n t i m ~ ~ nnron't h gei LIS : I I ~ ) ~ \ . I ~ C I - Ci.:~n't llo[;e io at tlic' cuttiilg cclgr of technol(ig). nnel 1;ot t c ~ l11s sh:~sp~ic.ss' '13ckriur h~rtelr nmt k ~ r rj,rrcrn hl:1y:1111
Mayank the Zen Master 'hlarx and Engels :II.~:ililportant f i p ~ r e sin the c . t ~ l t c ~ ~ .I~istor). ;~l of the: modern \STcst. O n e o f the l n a ~ n elements of t l ~ r "cupit;~li.it"systcrn that Mrrsx ancl I-hgels ;:n:~i)-ze is >o~nt>thil:j: tlicy c:~ll"l:ll>oi~r".1-allour-~t11:tt I \ thy c,ap:tcit)' to tl.:~nst'osr!i n:lture or create nc,\\. pl~ocluctsI>!. "acting i11,cin" cIr "\\.orkill:! or]" n~~tiire--isst.~:n 1)y 1:npels :fi 3 i ~ ~ i i c ! ~ ,~' lell~y ~ m : ~ allill!\. n'' It nr:1s t l i i h cap:lcit): to t:rkc :~c.tiorli r ~osclcr not just to L~.Y(' to c h ~ r ~ /onc's ~ q e t w \ 2 i r ~ ~ n n ~that c . n t c\,olt~tion:~ril). tli,\tin~:i~i\lic!~i. in I:ng(rl>' vlelv, niali I'1mu a p e . ,fie.ing : ~ l ) l c to c h ; ~ n g c t h e e n v i ~ - o n l ~ ~ e11;1ci llt t \ w ~ conseq~rences-:ii h u ~ n a n sg r c \ \ irlcre~~sing more sc)phisticarccl in the "i:c of tools" and 17) tllc 1111111:111171-alnc l ~ . ~ - e l o l ~rltc: ccl c:~pacitynot nicrcly t r c.h:lnge, ~ exploit tllc cnvisonnient I > I 11 I ( 1 r f l e c t o n tlic l ~ t ~ n i asclationsliip n \ \ . ~ t hit \\~or-lcItll:tt 111111:;111~

T'uol-~(.ic~r:s Picks

22.3

t h e m e l v i s s h:lcl clec.isi\~cl!. ;~ctcxcl o n . In otlicr \\r(~rcls,]lllln:Ln inl:igin:lti\-cx xnil et11ic.al c.;~l>:~!>ilitics , ~ I . Y \ Y :IS tile cc)ncy,>t (,f. lall(>ill-l7ec:lflle 1 l l O l - c ~:Illel Illol~r colll[>lcx.~ VOICC: '\\.ll)' ~llOtllcl\\'e I7c ~nti.fc.tc.cl111 h[;lrs Engel,\ o n 1~1l~!iH.i? Llasks ancl :II gqrl.\ kc hlrri~.c,i7ritrl ~,yrrrli l"vlar-;~nk. (n.i(I, cligriit~s)'11I:/iH.i \ h o ~ ~ l Iiclp cl (1s elc\.elop a pr:~ctic:~l:~gc-n(l:~ f'or .ic.tlon I I: sl10111cl t c c l ~ n o l o ~ i s ;t~, ~c t responsil~ly Lvithin their. c.t~ltt~~-e(s).' \ S ' l l ; ~ t kind of n ~ e n t : ~ l attitilcfe 11oulcl thy), c.11ltiv:itc.s 11o\\- ! I : I \ , ~tlic). drvelopcll such a t t i t u d e in thc. past! lI1111i.i11 1)eirl~s;ire f ; ~ rtoo pJe:~se~l with thelllst.l\-cs for ;L11 tllc \\rl.c)rigIc',tson lVh,ltcver n l i ~ l l t the "rigllt" mental :~ttit~lrles, cer?:~inly ;I f : l t ~ ~ o is~~sl f - c ~ o ~ ~ ~ p l : ~ like yours is not to Ilc. recorilmerlclccI!. No\\ cihviousij- t l u t \\.:I:, p r ~ \ . o c i ~ t i vWe, ~ . . 11;~rd W O I . ~ ~ I . S of t l ~ i .fiht dcgree...conl111:1c-c~111! ,\l;iy:~nli\\.clulcl st~re!y11;1\.etc, defend this! I l e dicl-only the n.ay he clicl rt ~.ilt.clliis :111cliencc all tlie nlc~r-c ... Mayank: (in fi1I1flo1i.j 'It is .I fornlicl:!lj!e t:~skto con\.incc. a partiall). intelligent s!stcrn stlch :ts :In Ililman I>~,lng:~l,c>,rt :my fact \vhic.11 rllc \!.sreln is preclisl)c~rcl t o :-yjcct For instance, n.e contini~e !o r~\~er-cniphaizc. those n,onderful processes of' iliiagin,~t~on : ~ n dcor:tcl7r~1:1liz:1t1c,r1in tile Iltinlan brain :IS l;cin:: prcuof c ~ the f si~pl.c~ilc c-ontrol mankinci everrises over 11s rllvirc~nr~~clli, clcsl)ite (Ilc src.c~)ncl-i~y-second rc.lninclel. served 17). nat~il-~: (~1f i t clctrstation (11 Iirrr~l:~n nc.ti\-l~it.,s. 'The \.ic.\i. t l i ; ~ t I ~ t ~ ~ i i a:Ir-e n s tlie nlost intelligent (11 Ii\;ing k i n g s ji~stI > ~ L . : I ~ I S C [lie), c':~r) I ~ ~ : I I ) I ~ llleir) L ~ ~h :~I~~r ~ c - o t ~ n c to li~igh their I~criefit is ol~lt.ction:~l>le 'l'llc, f : ~ c t 111;1t n.r <.:in sill2 o r make I)uilcIings or- nc.apons, or clc.te~.rii~r!e t t ~ cc.otll.se of othc4s 01-ganisnls' li\.e\ ciocs not 111akt. ( 1 5 I-icsr I t is ilrlfhil- :tncl alXuld to cornp:ll-c \ . v r ~cliffc.~-~nt tl~ings--s:~y;I I ~ o o k; ~ n t l;I Saucep;~n. 'hla):l)c. t-iool;s all: r l ~ ch:1Il1n:11-kso f intcllc~c~r:~:~l p ~ ~ r s ~l111t lit 1~00ks:II.C n ( ~l)~ c t t ~ t11:1r1 .s S ; I L I C Y ~ : L I II> ~ C ( . : I I I , S ~ ) . c ) ~ Ic:1111lotcook O n tliclii. I)ogs clicl ! ~ o t;.re;~tc. c . o ~ i i p l ~ t iI I .~ ~ C . L. I I S C tl1e1.e 1 n o

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Technobrat

225

requirement for such complexity in their world. In actuality, man complicated things for himself by acquiring all sorts of unnecessary skills. Then he started taking pride in all this extra fuss, praising himself for so called "development"! But alterations in organismic activity are just mechanisms for coping with situations w e are presented with. So our range of abilities are themselves of no merit. Just as we discard h n g s if they loose their utility (like a broken saucepan) or if they hurt us (like a blasphemous book), in the same way unless we prove continually to be serviceable, we will be discarded by nature.' Silence.

~eriously,yaar, w e are all running scared, aren't we? I remember being terrified when I first heard that the sun would die out in many billion years. Imagine! But I was six at that time!' 'Are you suggesting w e should not debate this at all because it's not going to kill us tomorrow?' 'Look I'm not suggesting anything, okay. You keep dreaming of suggestive language, man. Too many Hindi film lyrics in your head! Chup kar, Ma'am kzcch board par likh rahi hai. Diagram lagta hai.'

Ramnik

We had been discussing the axial civilizations of the world around five B.C. when there was a roughly equal distribution of population (25 million each) amongst the following civilizations:

Class Notes: Of Roots, Tools and Pedigrees

'Are w e the partially intelligent systems that Mayank is referring to? Environmentalist critiques of technology were OK, but thts was critiquing all our endeavours unless they helped us survive in a basic evolutionary sense. Along these "conserve the earth" lines, it was easy to argue against all human enterprise. 'Mayank, who are we deluding? We've been o n this planet a near-zero fraction of its age. The earth has survived many catastrophes. It's surely going to survive us too. It is we who are endangered-not the environment, not the earth! Someone articulates the confused look on many faces. 'There is no sense of belonging today-the feeling that this is our land and these are our trees. Today we think we are technologically advanced and we no longer need to respect nature. The truth is that we are far from knowing how nature works and what the place is of each organis111 in the scheme of things. We ought to be awed by nature but we are not. We must not think of ourselves as extraordinary creatures. We are a link in the evolutionary chain and though above other creatures, far froin perfect!' 'ShabaSh! You are far from perfect, man, we all agree. I After all, Ma'am says self-criticism is the ainl of ~ ~ 4 8 4 .

L:. -

Greek Scandinavian Indian Chinese Middle Eastern North AfricadEgyptian From the rough blackboard diagram I drew for the Tvashtris at the time, it was apparent that Greek civilization was in touch with most other cultures of the time and as a result, borrowed a lot from them. India too had contacts with the Chinese, Middle Eastern and Greek cultures. So what we describe today as 'independent' cultures were really the result of a chaotic welter of to-ing and fro-ing, of borrowing. Interestingly, too, a culture (the Anglo-Saxon) that was most 'marginal' then is the most dominant today. How did this happen, and how does this 'ancient'history' relate to a stage sfill older-pre-history?

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We could state our hypothesis thus: Prehistory is the story of migration and separation while history is the record of chaotic patterns of culhlral interchange. Ergo, if chaos is what huinan cultures want to comlxtt, savagery should be more typical of history than of pe-his to^. This may he counterintuitive k ~ itt is the conclusion at which we seem to have arrived. Prehistory is about settlements; history about subjugation. 1) In terms of sheer-time span 'history' cannot hold a candle to 'prehistory'. The period covered Ily the historical records of humankind goes back only ahout 10,000 years at most, while 'prehistory' stretches luck to at least a 100,000 (Homo sapien.c-Neanderthal) and perhaps to as nli~ch as 400,000 years ago ( A . Afarer~.si+Lucy/Eve). Charles Darnrin once remarked of the human past that it revealed 'a pedigree of prodigious length'. Perceptually, the paradox is that we seen1 to have a,fbreshortened o r telescoped view qfprehistory, giving it much less imaginative space than history. This is perhaps inevitalAe because our information i bout pre-history is limited ancl diminishing everyday. For instance, if the Narnxada Valley in Madhya Pradesh is submerged I>y a big dam project in the offing we shall lose forever any knowleclge of the oldest prehistoric settlement in lnclia (Homo crectu.c300,000 to 100,600 BC). 2 ) Why is the notion of prehisto~yat nll import~ntfor us on HU484, if G e hold such a necessarily impoverisl~edpicture of it? Answer: a) Most human cultllres are curious ahout their ancestry wanting to tr:lce it back as far as possible, wllether to gods or apes. I>) Studying early humans might help us to understand those cognitive as xx~ellas practical strategies that enabled our species to survi\ie anc! form co~liplexcultural groups c) The study of prehistory is also useful when art: consider questions like-how far hack can we push thc longstanding links between technology and human culture:' 3 ) The story of history is also that of culture. By which I

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mean that the notion of 'history' seeins to presuppose a differentiation of cultures ( I n d i a n , Chinese, Mayan, Scandinavian, Greek etc.). A siillilar connection cannot be m a d e , h o w e v e r , b e t w e e n prehistory a n d c z ~ l t r ~ r ~ ~ d$ferentiation, because nre d o not usually grant to prehistorical humans the kind of self-reflexive awareness needed to construct historical records for generations not yet in existence. Prehistory designates a period during which there were technological innovations, but n o 'history', no icleas about separate 'cultures', or indeed 'science' in the sense that we understand these terms today. 4) Imagining the prehistoric ~nindsetis incalculably difficult for us. What on earth might the world of prehistoric (wo-) man 11ur.e looked like? In order ro eng:lge with this question, we have read an extract from William Golding's novel 7he Inheritors, in which he reconstructs the perceptual and e~notionalworlds of prehistoric beings. The confrontation that Golding stages Ixtween Neanclerthals and Homo srzpiens could be read as the clash of two world-views as well as two sets of technologies, one less anil :he other inore 'advanced'. The result, as mre all know, is that the Ncandert:lals were wiped out. Rut how does this portrayal gel1 with O L I ~thesis that prehistoric culturcs wrre intrinsically less savage? Is there, perhaps, anotlier nloral to I,e iderred fron; Golding's staging of pre-histor); for our contemporary civilization wherc there is oncc more a c1:ish Ixt'rveen technologically sophisticateel and technoiogica!ly si~nplecliltt~res?Or is it too naive to relate our future to that far tlistant past? These rc:main open q~iestions. End of class notes.

Keytext: Jean Francois Lyotard: When the S Z LE.wp1oclc.s. ~ Re:ld in the lighr-or clarkncss+f our discourse. throughout 7i.chlzohrn:. Lyotard's nlillcnnial prophesies ahout 11unl:lnity and ~ c c l ~ h o aeons l o ~ ~ from now shoultl speak clircctly to c.ve1-y rvacler...

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Subtexts:

abstractions like love. As RBN said, self-reflexive awareness wasn't necessary for survival. In fact it could have hampered us I->yconsuming time which could be spent on more practical jobs! ' 'Denying the role of intellectual labour in evolution may be problematic but couldn't we easily neglect, say, the fine arts? Surely a beautiful painting can't provide information useful for the survival of the system. Mechanisms in the brain for appreciating art and beauty seem useless to me.' 'Maybe the importance that we give to beauty in art is really a social phenomenon, totally wasteful in the context of the "survival system", whose only aim is to ensure survival by passing on useful information. Art is then a blunder, a waste!'

Donna Harway 'Manifesto for Cyborgs' on t h e interdependence of humans and machines. 'Post-modern' culture is for Haraway itself a cyborg fornlation "a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism [that is1...ambiguously natural and crafted."

Stephen Jay Gould: The Mismeasure of Man o n sociobiology and the development of 'scientific' hypotheses.

Donald ~ i v i d s ~ n :

Dhiraj and Abhay, Choric Commentators:

'On the Vely Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' concerning cultural relativism and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis which proposes that it is our languages and cultures that define the contours of 'reality' as we see it.

'Yaar, one would expect that humans would progress towards more intelligertt forms, following the line of develop~llent from dinosaurs to apes and to man. But gloomy predictions of a dystopic society of the future, mourning the passing of love and humanity, belie our expectations! Are we to believe that the trait of cold-blooded rol>otic logic will carry the survivors of our race into the future? Can we infer that the more highly we evolve, the closer we approach the nonliving? If the answer is yes, then w e have no reason to be proud of our brains.' 'But if w e regard humans as mere information processing machines whose primary aim is to pass infor~nationon for survival, then maybe emotions of love, humanity, etc., have a lesser role to perfornl than we attribute to them. In that case, dystopias of t_he kind you talk ahout may be utopias.' 'Well, man as an animal did not need to dwell on

229

t

'We have some comments on art and technology in prehistory. Surprisingly, the earlier Paleolithic (and Mesolithic?) civilizations seemed to have produced "art" (i.e. cave paintings, carvings) rich with magic and ritual resonance, while the later Neolithic culture was distinguished by a functional orientation, and less given to "wondering" at nature. Could this be evidence for Golding's thesis of the triumph in prehistory of more technological, goal-driven cultures?' Aseem: 'Can you really differentiate so sharply between "functional" (Neolithic) and "artistic" (Paleolithic) cultures? After all, weren't the cave paintings functional in the same sense as an anatomical drawing is functional in medicine though it may, independently, possess aesthetic appeal as well?' Amit: 'Surely, in prehistory, you cannot make distinctions between science, art and technology. In any case, "science" meaning speculative and reflexive cognitive abilities must logically have preceded both "art" and "tool making".' Ranlnik: 'Looks like w e are cohpleting a circle here. To me, the development of tools is strongly linked to concepts of

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power-both social power and power over nature. Tools seem, not only ontologically, but intuitively, to precede scientific speculation. They are the lnanifestations of the will to power. Tools to Dhiraj and Ahhay represent a pragmatic outlook which they claim helped certain prehistoric races to flourish. As far as I'm concerned, both the will to power ancl the pragmatic outlook are half-witted4angerously so!' Neeraj: 'But d o we all agree that we have advanced from being savage tribals to what we are today? In that case we have to attribute this advancement to something?

contemporary civilization. As participants in the global culture of consumerism, where we have heen trained to avidly consume anything and everything, including images of real and imagined violence through media intervention, we in India too share in this brutalization of culture. I think that there is a very real continuity between the motives, both selfish and altruistic, that "primitive" or tribal communities display(ed) ancl our own. However, tribal cultures were able 'to curb their innate selfishness because of their deep awe of nature.' 'God NO! Not "nature" again!' Dhiraj: 'Yes, there is a cultural continuity. To go back to Sonu's presentation, from the earliest times, gender was culturally differentiated. Women were nttirecl differently from Inen even in prehistoric times. They wore "more" clothing. Young boys wore "tooth" waisthancls when they went hunting, hut there is little evidence that young girls did so. Magic ancl ritual had the greatest importance in prehistoric times, ancl if these are consiclcred aspects of "culture" (in which other domain could we sensibly place them?) then it follows that prehistoric societies displayed elements of cultural practice that we recognize today.' Mayank: 'Could it be that the development of aesthetic sensibilities ancl gender differentiation went hand-in-hand in prehisto~y?For example, women dressed differently from men (prehistoric fashion consciousness?) and their "looking good" led to further ancl further refinements of hurnan aesthetic sensibility?'

Amit the Debater: 'I don't agree at all. The tribal' cultures that are considered savage are no more barbaric than our own ancl lnay be considerably less so. One of the main reasons why savagery is associated with trihal cultures is that these are hunting cultures w h o have apparently no more civilized ways of protecting themselves from their enemies than l>y killing them. But technologically aclvancecl modern cultures like those of the West indulge in the saine orgies of killing and de~nonizationof the "other" that we accuse tribal societies of. And because the scale of killing in tedlnological societies runs into millions, and encourages the dehumanizing "pushbutton" nlentality, the bn~talityof nod ern society is far greater than that of any trihal community.' Neeraj: 'I guess if tril~alcommunities were given access to technological wcaponry they would use it a> hea~~lessly as US.'

Aseem the Traditionalist and Rock Enthusiast (supporting Amit):

O n the Silent Savagery of Culture

'I don" think so. 'fhe tribal ethic llas an innate respect for its

l l other but it does not seek to destroy "other"; it n ~ a y ~ k ithe the culture of its enemy as completely ;tnd carelessly as

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While the classroom talk of my clisafkctecl Tvashtris thus literally skirted the questions of gender, Sushi1 the Silent One wrote a n essay for me, apropos of'nothing in particular, but simply to elnphasize that:

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Techtzobrat

Human language is unique not only in its complexity but also in the fact that it differs from one culture to another. While chimpanzees raised in zoos as well as those that live in the wild, use the same repertoire of about 300 sounds, humans have developed over 3000 languages. Humans communicate non-verbally too. Facial expressions, eye contact and other body signs carry significant measures of information. The interpretations of these cues seem to be culture-specific. Recent studies in psychology have however revealed that at least some facial expressions are biological rather than cultural products. Sushil's thoughts on non-verbal comnlunication revealed his own psychological preference for quietist attitudes but they did more. They made me aware of a curious fact. In our class, issues of culture always seemed to tunz into issues of biology. For example: Neeraj the Fanlily man had asked more than once in class: Is the notion of culture and community confined to human societies? Can animals, plants, the natural world, (machines?) also have their "own" cultures? And Amit the Debater and Aseem the traditionalist had argued vehemently, a Iu Richard Dworkin's The Sevish Gene that human cultural achievements were all to be explained through one consistent psychological attitude adopted by all human societies-namely, selfishness. Radheyshyam, Choric Commentator, had likewise suggested that 'implicit acceptance' rather than questioning was the hall-mark of 'being cultured': 'A cultured person is one who implicitly accepts all the beliefs, traditions and institutions of the culture within which he/she belongs. Such belief is what wins a human cultural acceptance'. Even altn~ism, then, was a form-of selfishness. 1-Iuman ci~lturewas as 'red in tooth and claw' as any 'natural' group of wild beasts.

As far as I could see, these disparate views all added up to one rather alarming thought. Culture was, in the cyborg world-view of engineers, not a civil or civilizing force but a savage enforcement of rules and laws no different from those in the animal kingdom. Success and even the notion of 'being cultured' depended, as Radheyshyam put it, on accepting the rules without question. How had we amved so naturally at this pessimistic conclusion? I recalled that we had begun our discussions on HU484 with some of Bruno Latour's observations on how scientists 'talked' to nature through their instruments and experimental apparatus. Sometimes Nature answered--or the scientists' questions were put right. appeared tc-if Sometimes she (a gendered subject?) 'chose' to remain silent, adopting Sushil-like tactics, but Western science's communal project was always the same-to engage in a dialogue with Nature so as to tease out her 'secrets'. How did Nature rule her infinite kingdom? What were the hidden laws she used to control her satraps? In general, modern Western science was held to have been spectacularly successful in eliciting answers to these questions from Dame Nature, as 'she' is known-with the resultant bonus that her riches .could be used for the benefit of humans. Learning nature's laws constituted another way to 'tame' Nature and harness her powers. Knowledge thus was male power over female nature, to reapply ~oucaLlt'sphrase. Crucial to science were the attitudinal premises upon which its dialogue with Nature was based. Nature was an antagonist, a major gender adversary. The processes of civilization involved a great effort at keeping nature, potentially a dangerous enemy, down, while at the same time 'colonizing' her kingdom and garnering her products. Here then, in Western science, was a purely instrumentalist view of Nature, the great '(m)other'. And if engineer/technologists even more that 'pure' scientists, were the inheritors of that pragmatist

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Tool-user's Trick 235 o n them, survived. Others were killed, or succumbed to the death-wish that Wright had described. Persistent as background mdiation, the silent inessage of all cultures, was for my engineers: Suivive, 3s best you can, the hrutal assaults of culture. For history has shown from the earliest times that tools were used to kill and subdue as well as produce 'culture'.-art and value. Similarly, machines today are dual-purpose in the most advanceci of human societies. The cost of pursuing the technological vision of 'a good society' has to he paid in terms of the destruction of solne of the more vulnerable parts of nature as well as culture. No free lunches, so to speak. I recognized in these formulations yet another version of capitalism's savage agenda. Ilespite my ineffechlal rhetoric, it was one my c1as.s appeared wholeheartedly to endorse. Nqt a chccrful perspective: cult~ire,Inore chaotic than nature, had to h e subjected to el-en mo1.e draconian laws, since it destroyed one psychologically even more n~thlessly than Nature could one's physical 'self'. Ancl the last paradox, wafting in o n the FM radio waves, favourite transnational music-station of the Tvashtris: Culture is self-destructive and its weapon is technology, therefore nzi.sin~.st lechnokogx yet technologists, magicians of the future, !nay he the ones who, in the last Lyotardian resort, save culture from its ancient . enemy, nature, therefore tnist ~cch~zologists.. Distorted in memory ancl amplified by context, as in wavering water, a linc from 7hc lVr~.stc!a~zdc,arue rippling back to me: T h i s i.< thc-8 zuu~ln ck~~ss ends.,.

Technobrut

'colonizing', 'male' tradition, then perhaps their view of culture as a savage, wholly con~petitive,environnlent I>egan to make sociobiological sense. What were the laws of culture, though? From the first days of our course, w e had tended to see culture as far more chaotic and 'lawless' than nature. Social science was far more fallible than natural science. So when I heard the Nobel Laureate Ilya Prigorgine suggest in Delhi in 1995 that all of human culture can be viewed as a set of non-linear processes where order was constantly being formed out of disorder, his words struck an immediate chord. As I understood the implications of Prigogine's argument, he was suggesting that, at some level, perhaps the quantum level of ~nicroscopic matter, nature was chaotic and non-linear, uncontrolla\~le. Culture, however, was unpredictable in a much more obvious macroscopic way; culture, according to Prigogine, presented us with constaqtly bifurcating paths and we kept having to make quick decisions based o n incomplete information. This ability to work o n the basis of always incomplete infortnation might be what accounted for the special features of human subjectivity, human crehtivity. Creativity and its relation to a disordered universe w e had discussed often, but what our class might have wanted to ask Prigogine was this: might this uncontrollnhility, this proliferation o f c u l t t ~ ~ -choices ~iI and cz~ltllrat materials also accoutzt ,for human cruelty? The Tvashtris, it was hecorning worryingly evident to nie in these last days o f class, certainly seelnecl to think so. In the emergent xriew from the HlJ484 clmsroom, culture was not the warm comforting meciium which the human organism had designed for itself. Human Ixings did not so much survive in their cultures as su~vivetheir culture. The world of culture, like the untamed wol-lcl of nature, ~ n a d erepeated assaults u$on the human indivitlual. Those who could withstand the tough competitive demands their culture made

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The Pay is Good A [lass of thirty student engineers, Sixteen years old, disliked by all the staff. Hearing about them at the interview And told to rule them with a rod of iron,

I tried my best but found I could not laugh. He might be wrong, but I, no raw recruit, Had found a proverb in a classroom war: 'The peaceful sheriff proves that he can shoot Before he throws his gunbelt on the floor. A month or so of broi r l l y self-distrust, And then the morvqnt ,dme. I reached the door (So this was it. Fight, tor love of Kell. Show them who's boss-there's no going back-you must)And flung it open on the tore of hell. Somehow it worked. And they will never know

By what dissimulation it was done; Or how the fuse of terror blasted out (,,rage

enough to master thirty-one:

- Richard Kell

EXAMINING ELDORADO: The Technologist as Problem Solver

Cyberspace is where the future is imagined. Dreamland located at the nexus b e b e e n the biological and the mechanical, it is the utopia where many IITiar~srnight choose ideally to situate thernselves. Once, I casually discussed with a band of Tvashtris the construction of a robot who would bear their own selfimage. I I o w would such a being think, react, speak? Well, first th~ngsfirst, s a d one of the Ribhus, an admirably sceptical 'backward'. If he operated within the IIT, this robot would be certain not to greet yo11 with a conventional 'Hello, how are you? or a polite numaste. Instead, he'd stick out his jointed arm afid enquire 'Hi, and what's your CGPA?'. Cumulative Grade Point Average-it would be a mistake to underestimate the effect that this scale of academic competition has on the psyche of an IITian. It literally drives him, keeps him on course. Once again, I recall the etymology of the word 'cybernetics'. Steersmaq, kybemetcs. Even the few credits allotted to the Humanities courses mattered because thev contributed to the CGPA of a Tvashtri. That

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Technobrut

is why I've thought it important to include in Technobrat some bits from the examination rituals of the Tvashtris and Ribhus, much as the anthropologist Verrier Elwin once collected a huge archive of tribal Gond riddles as a guide to the Gond mental constitution. Examinations were, after all, a k h d of riddle solving and the Tvashtris absolutely shone at this sort of activity. They . were in their true element in a cyberspace examination hall. I watched them with their heads down, absorbed in getting through the linguistic maze I'd set up for them. I knew that the Tvashtris and Ribhus abhorred long questions above all. Many had been brought u p in the belief that it was a 'waste of time' to read a novel. Such waywardness could endanger the very concept of success in the eyes of a Tvashtri. There was even an apocryphal story of how a student in IIT, Delhi, had been 'caught' reading a novel in our library and hauled u p before 'the authorities'. Not that I believed the story of course, but ~t was undeniable that for several Tvashtris reading long pieces of prose just for the pleasdre of it was not approved practice. It could send one hurtling down th6 primrose path to hell. Eldorado, the golden city whose mirage beckoned every true Tvashtri, would vanish into the mists of oblivion if they read recklessly. He is possessed of abundant wealth, the Rigveda had said. I'd add that,'in my experience, the Tvashtri was also possessed by the vision of abundant wealth. However, I knew something else as well. Under examination conditions most Tvashtris and Ribhus would very likely set aside their prejudices against reading since the only way to competitive success was to beaver their way through the question paper. I therefore took a cemin perverse pleasure in setting them truly complicated questions. I'd become conscious of the long question as a strategy for getting technologists to unwind when I was invited a few years ago to read my poetry o n a course called 'Technology

and Con~munication'at the University of Washington at Seattle. As I read, I noticed that, seated as they were behind co~nputers, the faces of the students in the class were barely visible. It seemed I read to an expanse of screens. The experience remains in my memory impressive but also slightly eerie. Anyhow, afterwards I saw the question that had been set on one of my poems. Here it is: '

English 271Aa: Vanishing Texts Essay Assignment: Public Communication and Aesthetic Representation Assignment Description and Task How d o contemporary creative writers/artists represent technology in their work?

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First, you should narrow the topic to one or two authors/producers that w e discuss this week: 1) the poet Rukmini Bhaya Nair, who read her poems on technology and nature this Wednesday in class; 2) the producers of the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape 3) the short story writer, Douglas Coupland, author of Microserlfs or 4 ) the short story writer Joyce Carol Oates, author of 'Where are you Going, Where have you Been?'. Again the main point of your essay should be to explain how one of these authors/artists represents technology. For example, does Rukrnini Bhaya Nair's poem 'Computer' make an argument against technology? If so, how? How.. d o the nonlogical (e.g. connotative, denotative, metaphoric) elements in the poem combine to form a positive or semi-

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Technobrat positive or negative portrayal of the computer? Or, with respect to Sex, Lies atid Videotape, how does the artist argue for or against technology? Do the characters communicate better with technology? Worse? What sorts of technological devices function in what sort of ways in the movie?

Suddenly, I'd metamorphosed into a classroon~suh-text myself! I'd hardly been aware that my poem could function as a 'critique of technology' hut there it was-data for analysis as well as for self-analysis. I found the titles of the other works with which mine had been grouped intriguing. Did Microserf really = Tvashtri? Perhaps it was a matter of cultural difference that my microserfs, if that's what they were, didn't appear very forthcoming on the subject of either sex or lies, but Technobrat could certainly be thought of as a kind of videotape on which were captured images of the Tvashtris at their business of 'conlmunicating with technology'. Where are you going; zuhere have you beerz, queried Joyce Carol Oates. It was a cluestion I'd often wanted to ask my heavenly Tvashtris. Sometilnes I saw myself rattling along in that battered old Third World invention-the three-wheeler, while my students whizzed passed me on the electronic highways in supermobiles. They were heacled of course for the Americas. Witnessing my own poetry analyzed in an American classroom jolted me again into a realization of how potent was the presence of America in our own classroom. I t wasalways there, haunting the future of the IITian. No wonder the IIT appeared a permanent fount of diaspora. Westward ho! Odd, but it was experiences like being turned into a subtext o n technology in an American university that emboldened me. Like the teacher who'd set the Seattle paper, I too wanted my students to consider 'nonlogical' aspect of a text, to admit

Examining EIdorado

that real thought and feelings might he sunlmoned u p by a quite fictional rendition. I too wanted to push the Tvashtris towards self-criticism. Consider Question Three below. It was deliberately set to test my class's reading of history. During the infamous Emergency declared I3y Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1975, a part of the Constitution of India was rewritten. In the new version, the phrase 'fundamental duties' was added to the clause on the 'fundamental rights' of citizens. But did a single Tvashtri out of my class of forty-five know this? It turned out not. They were of course just babies at the time, if born at all, but I did think that there was more to the business than mere neo-natal ignorance. The whole notion of fundamental duties seemed more appealing to the inindset of a Tvashtri than fundamental rights. It was not by accident that there were no disruptive bodies called Students' Unions in the IITs. The Tvashtris were attuned to the soldier culture of duty-boundedness, not to the mass culture of revolution. n e i r k t20t to reason zuhy, their's but to do and die. The Tennysonian ideal of unquestioning obedience made sense to the Tvashtris and Rihhus. It fittecl in with their stern work-ethic, that selfsame cyborgian ethic that saw novel-reading as a waste of time. Paradoxically, though, this was also the reason why, however much it went against the grain, the IITian Tvashtris would, like thoroughbreds, obediently course through any obstacle course I designed for them during the two-hour period of the Major examination. He ptrts strength into the legs qf a horse, said the Ri'veda. From 1947, through the years of the Emergency, to 1997, the fiftieth year after independence when Technobrat would appear, the Indian state had nurtured within the temple walls of lIT, those ancient inheritors of contemporary cyberspace--the Tvashtris and the Ribhus. They were primed to solve >ny problem in the world as long as it was in the noble cause of improving ,

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244 Technobrut theil- CGPA-including co~iiing 111-;tvely to grips n.itll m y octopus-:trnled qr~estions.

EXAMINATIONS HU484

Claude Al\lares, author of Homo 1:(ahel; says that alternnti\rc technologics require 'sumivnl engineers' \Yh:tt d o you think Alvares me:rns Ily the phrase 'silrvi\ral engineer'? Is s j h e a real engineer? What sort of siti~ationscall for the skills of s c ~ c ha n individu:~l?

Answers to Question 1: The Survival Engineer as Homo Sapiens Vishwarupe the Gantlhian: A sunliv21 engineer is a person w h o Ixlongs to a society having linlited nle:Ins a n d rescxlrces. He is o n e w h o adapts to his predicanient of having restricted means I>y finding simple. cost-cffectix-e 2nd yet ingenious solutions t o the e \ , c ~ y d n y prol)lcms Ile h c e s . I t is saicl that nd\:rrsi!y ]>rings orlt the l)est in a I I T . ~ ~1'erh:lps . this is what s e p a m t e a survi\7al c3nglneerfrom his co11nterp:rrt in the west. I h e S L I I ~ : ~ \ - L Iengineer ~ is an engineer wit11 a holistic, the sun,ival enginvc-r to humane :lppro:~ch. Avares cont~-:~sts the engincvr o f the indcrstri;rlizetI \\,or-ltl. wllo e~nl,oclics an attitucle of consunlcrisn~.l l e sparvns artiticial n e e d tltnt le:ltl to ;I waste of n:~tl~l.:tlresources and their sul>sczquent cln7intlling. He enil>odies all :trlthsopocentric outlook as :lgainst thc bincentric appl-onch of the strn.iva1 engineer. This mrtkcs the survival engineer morc cco-fi.ientlly 2nd in s i t ~ ~ ~ l t i rof' ~ns shortage ancl ;~dvcrsit)-.nlc,re resilient than tlic crigiriccr f1o111 the W'est 7

Sreedhar, Inclianist: A s u ~ v i \ ~ cnginecr' al is cancel-net1 with the 111-c'scrv;ttion of-lift.

ant1 in l ) ~ ~ i l t l i n11:lrmon); g l>ct\\.ecn n u n a n d nat11l.e. T h e engineer from tlie industrializecl n;~tionsn.ho is consk~ntly engagcd in a confrontation with n;lture is thus opposed t o thc sun~ivalengineer ancl A1v:lres oppnses him 1,ecar~se h e ; ~ c t s for the good of fcw inclividuals rnther than thc w-hole of humanity.

Akhil the Pragmatist: The term 'sun~ivalengineer' I-ekl-s to the poclr ancl weak sections of a scjciety w h o tIcspite being at a clis2cl\l:lntage from the. 'survival o f the fittest' vien,point, stuvive l ~ y engineering n-nys in which to e n c l ~ ~ i - e . In spc:iking of 'the logic of appropriate tccllnolo&~' Alvares is trying to conr.ince the rcacler that the I~asic; ~ i mis to live and let live. T h e technologies v - c t :tre curl-ently i ~ s i n gclo not g o along wit11 this :iilll. If e v e n o n e used tccl~nologiesth:lt were appropriate then a lot more people coulci h e :r lot happier, using the tecl~nologyof s~~rviv;rl 2nd leading cleaner, healthier :lnd 11:lppicr lives. 0 f coLlrse tliis is a irtopian \;ision.

Mayank the Zen blaster:

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The survi\,al engineers o f ,4l\.a1.csare not necessa~-ilyengineel-s, and it is not nccessar)' fix t l i v ~ ~TO r I>e \-c:-sed in the n~ctliocl of science. Fol-, tli? are:ts in whicll they oper:lte tlon't permit the lclrtc~ryof concltrctirlg Ieis~~reI>experiments t o t ~ ~ l f tile il whims xncl k ~ n c i eof p;\iilperetl people. 'l'llcy are cancel-nccl instead rvith tlic' cl~rcstiori ot cxistence, n.ith figlltirig the onslaughts o f nat111-eo r ester.rl;~lh(>stile fol-tcs 'l'l~ey: ~ r cthe Ones that cntcr to thc. 111ostl>asic ncc-ds foi- existenc:t.. Alv:~rcs uses c\,iclcnce fl-o~ii de\-elopecl coantl.ies to demonstl-ate that i~itc-lestin cicatirig niorc lrrllilane technoiog?,

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&umini?zg Eldorudo

Technobrut

coincides across cultures. Even in these countries, all people are not well off or sheltered. There are no paradises, and there too the over-indulgence of a few creates prohlems for the rest. Sensible people over there also realize that there is a fallout from the indiscriminate use of technology. Unfortunatel-g, the voices of such people are often drowned.

Anwers to Question 2: Humans and Machines

~ankajthe Musician:

Question 2 There are two great complementary fears that arise from technological determinism*-i) that human beings will become so dependent on machines such as computers that they will become machine-like themselves, i.e. elnotionally alienated and unable to .communicate with their fellow beings, and conversely, ii) that machines will become so intelligent that they will usurp the place of human beings and become their ultimate masters. In order to forestall these scenarios, the science writer, Isaac Asimov, suggested the three rules below for robot society. My task for you in this is to write three parallel rules for human societies in order to prevent the effects feared. Think about the rules you formulate in terms of human versus robot 'culture'. Asimou's rules for robots: The First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or through inaction allow a human being to come to harm. The Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with The First Law. The Third Law: A robot nlust protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

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Technological determinism is the helief that the machine of 'progress' cannot be stopped or resisted, just as developrllent in 'science' is quite inevitable.

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Those who have read Asimov would find the situation outlined very similar to that in Solaria, one of the outer space worlds. In Solaria, people have almost totally stopped seeing each other. Having genetically rllanipulated themselves into hermaphrodites, they no longer need each other. Solarians live on sprawling estates, managed totally by robots, with the robot/hunlan ratio being 10000 : 1. It could be said that the emotional changes or alienation of humans in 'Solaria' took place because of the total dependence on robots. It is against t h s background, that I have thought of the following rules: 1. Do not depend at all on intelligent machines that walk (read: robots). 2. Meet at least one human everyday.

Dhiraj, Choric Commentator:

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1. All human beings must marry at least once (love is one thing which can take a Inan amJay from machines and give vent to his emotions, letting him share his feelings). 2. All humans must speak a minimum of 200 sentences every day at their place of work (communication will bring a man who is on the path to becoming a machine back to the World of humans). 3. All humans must visit the various recreational centres built by the state every week. ( t h s is to ensure that people get doses of human enjoyment and d&'t spend all their free time on machines).

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Mayank the Zen Master: 1. No human shall work on a machine for more than 1 hour at a stretch and 10 hours in total, every 24 hours, always ensuring the presence of some others in his working vicinity. 2. Every human shall perform certain sacred duties everyday lrke bathing, eating three meals of whlch at least one should be cooked by oneself, appreciating nature, laughing heartily, practising hobbia, saying hello to passe~sbyand sleeping at least 6 hours. These amount to following the h i c tenets of hu11~anity. 3. Every human shall consciously be aware of the whereabouts of his\her family members, protecting them from bad influences and harm.

1. Hunlan beings shall only use machines to solve

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What, if any, could be the connection between these duties and the characteristics of a 'cultured person' as we fonnulated them in class? If you were to re-alphabetize these duties in order of priority, whlch do you thlnk would be most important and which least, and why! Is there, in your view anything specifically 'Indian' about these duties?

Answers to Question 3: Culture and Nation

Question 3. Some of thCFundamenta1 Dutics of a Citizen are defined in the following extract from the Indian Constitution.

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a) to abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem; b) to cherish and follow the noble ideals that inspired our freedom struggle; c) to uphold the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India; d) to render national service when called for; e) to promote harmony and the spirit of brotherhood among all Indians; and renounce practices derogatory to the dignity of women; 0 to preserve the rich heritage of our composite culture; g) to protect and improve the natural environment including forests, lakes and wild life and to have compassion for living creatures; h) to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of enquiry and reform; i) to safeguard public property and to abjure violence; j) to strive towards excellence in all spheres of individual and collective activity so that the nation constantly rises to higher levels of endeavour and achievement

Aseem, Traditionalist and Rock Enthusiast: problems which involve a lot of tedious calculations. All interpretative jobs shall be done by human beings, though they could use some aid from machines. , 2. Human beings shall always have the right to turn off the machine's power source as and when they feel like it. The machine will not have an independent power source. The final push-button must always be in the hand of the human being 3. A human being shall communicate with the machine only on an intellectual platform and not an emotional one. It is truly a momentous task to define rules for human beings. I mean, it is easy to do so for the robots hecause they have been created by us. However, to provide a set of rules for as complete entity as a human being is extraordinarily difficult if not outright impossible. There cannot be parallel sets of rules for robots and humans ever.

Examining Eldorado

The 42nd Amendment Act (1976) has incorporated into the Constitution a new chapter on Fundamental Duties. The Duties of an Indian citizen thus enshrined, include:

Abhay, Choric Listener: ;

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A person who strictly obeys all these duties is an ideal citizen.

Ezarntrzing Eldomdo 250

Technobut

Yet there has to be flexibility in definition, because it is not possible to measure or decide how much a person should do so that he qualifies as having oheyed the given n~les. Cultural relativism is the name of the game. A soldier from a defence background is bound to have to pay more attention to duties a), c) and d) in order to be called a good citizen among his fellow mates. But this may not so with me and my friends. The question of a cultured person is a separate one. There is no absolute definition of a cultured person either. A cultured person is one who safeguards and respects the ideas and beliefs of his own culture, which may not be isonlorphic with a citizen's duties.

Anurag the Vedic Sage: Here, a person is supposed to act in ways good for the society at large although some personal loss nlay be involved. A cultufed person ought to be unselfish and must help everyone grow and not just himself. It is in this context that these duties are set up. The last duty j) promotes greed and jealousy whereas others promote brotherhood and sacrifice. Therefore, duty j), although appearing good, is not good since it has very bad consequences. With this tendency, one can't follow other duties or be a cultured person. In my view, the last duty is least important.

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Pankaj the Musician: A cultured person is one who is responsible towards society, is accepted by society and is aware of the aesthetic productiom in his culture. In this perspective almost all the fundamental duties attempt to reconstruct a cultured person. Duty (el is probably the most important as it attempts to satisfy two traits of a cultured person: acceptability and responsibility. Not only does it give a special mention to women, it renounces practices derogatory to the dignity of a women. The way a women is treated in a culture is a marker of how cultured the people of that society are. All along w e have been taking culture as largely a mental notion rather than a physical one. We have also been leaving out any other living being other than huinans from this discussion. I strongly feel that a discussion on culture should include a discussion on other living beings and in general the environment. Each culture has a pretty specific attitude towards its environment. An individual is modelled by ths value ori-entation. He interacts very intensively with other species when he domesticates them. The point I would accord least significance for a culture person is point (b). We have .already lost most of the deals of our freedom struggle and yet w e don't call ourselves any less cultured than most of the people of that time. I feel that this is an indication of the fact that we don't think that preserving all ideas of the freedom stn~ggleis important for h cultured person.

Question 4.

Akhil the Pragmatist: If these duties were to be re-alphabetized in order of priority, I feel that the duty (e) would be the first. This is because no person can be called cultured if he does not have a feeling of brotherhood towards others and does not respect the dignity of yomen. Even oul. holy scriptures emphasize the dignity of women when they say: 'The gods reside in a place where women are respected'.

A partial picture of growth in the WETT index (from the 1995 Manoranla Yearbook for India) is provided below. Based on your scrutiny of these figures, which parameters of development among those listed would you prioritize until the year 2000, and why? What effects will the growth you prescribe in these areas of hasic te&nology have, d o you think, on 'Indian' culture as a whole?

Exurnitzing Elcioracio

Paved Roads: (in kms)

254446

324758

623998

759764

56762

59777

61240

75333

1970/75

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1970

Electricity Production (in millions of kwh) Rail Road Tracks (in kms)

Telephone Mainlines (number of connections) Drinking Water (population with access) Urban Rural Sanitation (population with access) Urban Rural

1465000 2275530

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industrialized nations, it is grossly inadequate for the Indian conditions where 70% of the population still lives in the villages. OF what use is electricity and a telephone line to a man who does not have 3 roof over his head and can barely look after his daily food requirements? True, a country can subsidize facilities for the poor only if it has the resources. And the lnoney required can only be generated by enhancing trade. And trade will burgeon only if basic infrastructural support exists. So the basic amenities have to he provided. 'l'hough it is difficult to define 'basic amenities', they can be roughly categorized as:1) Food and Drinking Water 2) Healthcare 3) Housing 4) Employment 5) Sanitation

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Dhiraj, Choric Commentator: 17%

18%

4 2% 77% 31%

73% 86%

7%

14% 44% 03yo

27% OlYo

69%

Answers to Question 4: Technology and Developmental Needs

Vishwarupe the Gandhian The entire concept of the WETT index is an elitist o n e file four factors it takes into consideration are basically for an urban socieq and do not include rural requircn~ents.While this way of quantihing developnlent may be suitable for

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In order of priority: Sanitation: is placed above drinking water because the population having access to it is very small at present. Bad sanitation can cause all sorts of diseases and epidemics. Yet, the degree of openness in the villages will no doubt be reduced after the village folk become accustomed to their new facilities. They will begin to feel ashamed when someone catches them in the act of squatting in the fields! Drinking Water:: Water is the most important commodity required by man. When we lay down pipelines in a village, the well culture of a village will disappear. People won't meet each other at the well. Currently the theme of a boy teasing a girl at a village well is quite common in stories, motion pictures and minds. This will he flushed out! We will no longer understand this sort of a cult~rre. Paved Road: The villagers need roads for better tnnspon to their ack to big hospitals and to pmvide mobility in an

1 ~ .

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Technobrat

Examining Eldomdo

emergency This will do away with the tradtiowl t~uIIock,horn and cunel cuts.Motorcycles, etc. d start zooming into the a g e s . Our image of 'the Indian vdage' will lxcome altered. Electricity: This is a comfort which villagers should not be deprived of. They should have fans and electric bulbs and electric motors at their wells. As a result, they will no longer be entirely dependent on the rains, but will be able to irrigate their crops using tube wells and electric motors. Railroad tracks and telephone lines: These would not be too useful in a village, hence this is given lowest priority. In a village distances are limited and telephone lines would lead to an even greater isolation than in cities.

Electricity is again an essential extension these days. personally, however, I wotlld grade it lowest because I feel it conforms more to the human desire for comfort. It is not a need like potable water.

Sreedhar the Indianist: The order of priority of the parameters until the year 2000 are as follows:- 1) Sanitation, 2 ) Drinking water, 3) Electricity, 4) Paved roads, 5 ) Rail road tracks, 6 ) Telephone lnainlines Development in these areas will improve the standard of living of the people, but tension will also invade our lives. With the development of telecommunications face-to-face interaction will be dramatically reduced, giving rise to a n artificial environment of contact. This will lead to changes in the values of people. They will tend to become independent and segregated, each one fighting his own battle. The structure of the family will fail and pmple will rely more on machines. We will only get closer and closer to the western paradignl of development, making our lives more prone to stress and internal conflicts leading to unhappiness and making us feel unworthy. The human being all over the world will become a sort of machine, playing with machines, living with machines and working with machines.

Ankur the Idealist: Prioritization would be done on two bases: 1) needs and desires 2) changes in technology While prioritizing, w e have to come hack to the question of defining 'development'. Is it the greatest good of the greatest number? If 1 subscribe to this view, then the totally essential needs of drinking water and sanitation will be my key points. But politically, concentrating on these alone is impractical. Drinking water and sanitation are essentials, s o the impact of this o n culture will be major. People with access to these facilities will be able to emerge from sub-human conditions into a space where there is the possibility of sustained cultural progress Transportation and telecom, though not as basic a need, have become essential extensions of the people who have become used to these means of comn~unication.These in effect promote tolerance, by allowing easy Contact with others and prompting w a wider concept of community living. One's community no longer exists just within a fixed radius. This is the ideal culture of the global village.

255

Question 5.

r

In Hindu iconography, the mother goddess Durga is often pictured as ten-armed (dashamhhuja). In seven out of her ten hands she standarclly holds the following ohjeccs: i) a shell (shankha), ii) a wheel (chakm), iii) a club (gadn), I\-> a trident (trishuo, v) a chopper ( k h a ~ d ,vi) a bowiarrow (few-dhanush), vii) a lotus (kamao. O n e hand is raised in benediction, but two of her hands ara still free. From this, my questions to you are: if you were to place two current technological inventions in Durga's hands (for

256

Technohat

Manoj, Choric Listener::

example: a mixi or a computer or an atomic bomb), which two objects would you choose, and how would you explain to Durga their usefulness? Could you persuade her to discard or substitute some of the objects she has been holding o n to for such a long time? What arguments would you utilize to accomplish your aim of 'modernizing' Durga? Remember, you have to enter into the world view of Durga, and also try to understand the cultural significance of the things she is holding. You may, if you wish, write the answer to this question in the form of a dialogue between yourself and Durga.

Two things which should be included are a nuclear bomb and a computer. A conversation with Durga: Me: Include a nuclear bomb and a computer in your hands. Durga: No, I shun them. Me: Why? Durga: Because they'll make society worse. Me: But our society has become more sophisticated. We have nuclear bombs for our safety and computers to make work easier. Why don't you consider these things signs of development? Durga: No, this is not a sign of development but the signature of destruction. Me: HOW? Durga: Unlike your nuclear bomb, with my arm I kill only had men/women, and not innocent people. Your computer is worse. It renders people inactive. Also this will decrease their respect for me. They will only reinember me in times of trouble, otherwise forget me. I don't want the computer or the nuclear bomb, hut I certainly want to free the innocent and the helpless. I want my hands free to spread love and friendship on earth.

Answers to Question 5: Tradition and Modernity; War and Peace Sandeep the Indianist: I would remove the club, shell and tn'shul and give Durga the power to release enough water to rural areas--clouds corning out of her hands and going into different parts of the world when there is a shortage of water. In place of the shell, I'd give her a CD player.

Dinesh Nalli, Indianist: Why d o your have that bow and arrow in your hand? Remove them; they have lost their importance. Also, the shell in your hand causes too much energy loss. At present w e have microphones, recorders (digital, you know). So you can use your energy for more constructive purposes than hlowing a conch-shell! For protection, automatic missile technology will do. In your free hands, I propose a computer and a AK-47. I also suggest you throw away all those junky trishuls, gudas etc. and embrace new, advanced technology e.g. gizmos, telephones, walkmans.

Sachin the Modest IITian: There are mro root prol~lems in society today. One is population; the other is pollution. If Mother Durga is the one who solves prohlems ( d t ~ k hbari?li>then two things which I would give her (surprisingly not lligl~tech) are a contraceptive and a tree. The population problem is the root of many other problems. Poverty, corruption, unc~llployment,etc. appear to be grave prol~lemsin themselves t ~ allt these problems arise out of the problem of population. Our country especially is !

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Technobrat

sitting on the mouth of a volcano which can erupt at any time. India is essentially a young society with a large population of young people. Unless we show sorne foresight we are destined for an disastrous explosion. I would present these arguments to Durga and pray to her to save her country from disaster. The second problem is pollution. Mindless degradation of the environment is leading us to a point where total catastrophe is in the offing. Automobiles, industries, etc. are pumping harmful gases into ihe atmosphere. Uncontrolled deforestation and blatant abuse of resources has not helped the situation. I'd give Durga a tree!

Rakesh, Choric Listener: I would like to give Durga an AK-47 and an atoll1 l ~ o m b The . AK-47 is a very accurate and light device to kill enemies and demons. The at0111 bomb will make it very easy for her to demolish the earth. I would pe~suadeher to discard the lotus that she has k e n holding I x a u s e it has no significance in toclay's world. D u r g ~\yas supposed to clefencl nlanlund. Yet now in this crime-stricken world anybody a n he rnurclerecl at any point of time. In our culture, nrorrlen were not brave enough to fight for their rights. To remove their fear anel to increase their confidence, Durga catne into the picture. It is quite an irony that at the same time that we worship one woman, we distress others.

Sonu the Feminist: Me: Maa, you are the protector of the hum:~n race ancl the destroyer of demons. In the modern corltext, wt1e11 the technological inventions have reached dizqing heights, you should also try to moclernize yourself and equip yoursclf with state-of-the-art technology. I would suggest you hold an atomic

259 bomb in one hand to act as a deterrent for the mischief makers. Maa: Oh my faithful worshipper, I d o not understand your highly technical discourse. Could you explain what an atom bomb is? Me: Hey Mata! An atom bomb is more lethal than all of the weapons combined that you hold in your hands. It can destroy the demons twenty times over. It would also equip the female and the feminine with unimaginable and invincible shakti or power. Maa: Good, my child! What d o you suggest for my other hand? Me: Maa, acquire a cellular phone! With the help of this gadget, you would be easily accessible to all your followers and worshippers. ,411 that your followers have to d o is dial your number and they can b e directly connected to you. What is more, you would not have to he beside your telephone all day. You could move around while messages kept coming in. Maa: Wow! This is a wonderful item you've suggested. What about the lotus? Me: No hlaa, the lotus should not be done away with. It signifies that a beautiful flower can grow in a dirty world. But you could replace your shell with an electronic siren, which is louder than the shell and more efficient since less energy is expended in sounding it! That is it, Maa. Othelwise, you are just perfect. h a m i n i n g Eldorudo

Gyanesh, ~ndianist : Hand No. Present Holding 1 2

3

shell wheel club trishul chopper

Proposed Holding electric bell sharp blade an electric shocker missile, AK-47 telepost device

Eun~tli~zi?l~ I:'l(.or(~do

20 1

Himangshu , Moclest IITian:

Yogesh I3., Indianist: The differt.nt tllings in r1urg:l's llancls symiiolize the iliffc.~-cnt lllodes of n wolllan. A pcrfcct Xolnni7 ~lcrcls:\I1 those things to klce :my kind of s~tu:ltiorl.Yet the \\-orld h:~s cllallgcd :anel tile definiticl~lo f an idea1 woman ,iLlo~1lclI,e ~noclifled.\X'c neecl to 1llocic.rn1ze 1)llrg:l. I . She sllo(ild h:~ve t~etterti~lltingequipment. 2. She sho~lldnot t ~ exc.atecl on a lion I I ~ ~ ~ I I S tod:~y\ C woman doesn't necct an), one to g~1:lrcl her. Durga s h o ~ ~ l c l have a inore modernized vchiclc. 3. She should Ii;~ve:I renlotc. instru~llenL to con\.ey ancl get messages from others. 4. She shou!cl 11:lve a I ~ o o k in hcr IianJ representirig wonlan's ecluc~~rion. lnciclentally, I tllilik even ten i1:incls in:~ciequnte for ;I model-n xvoman w h o is pcifectly c c l ~ ~ ra ol inan,

Vivek the Environmentalist: When w e Ilavt. n o one :(-, turn to n.e tt11.t1 rc-, gocl. I t is to1 tin15 p u r p o t . t l l : ~ writers ~ ;111tl I ~ ~ L I s ~ I - : I p!i.ri~r.ired ~(~I-~ illirga c ~the\i clicl. 'She \.:~~.ious we:lpon< In 1ne1Iiancls--tile tn.chtli thc c.li11). the c l i o p p ~ r t!le , I>o\v'\:\rrow itre ;ill ~ n e a n tt o 11el11 her S:LYV 11~1rnans. The kri~,rt~l is .;~111po.~ecl t c s ~ ~ n ~ l ~ olilk l i z ea n d ti][. shell to announsc :In illll~o~-tant c\.t.tlt--!-,cl.ll:~ps \ic-toiy o r ~ l l c . start of war. 'l'he tn.o r:iost i ~ l ~ l ~ o r t tlllnp a n t slle could pl.c,\c~lr her follo\~:erswith :~rcelcctr~citl.ancl if-;lter,if she h:~sto p ~ - o ~ c , ( . t 1 1 ~ 1 - hnllo\vers in limes of trol~l~le she wol~lclncccl 111~1(.11Ii1ol.c. potent -ixreajIons tl1:in the olcl f ; l ~ l ~ ~ o nones c c l hllc holcls.

In o n e hnncl I would like L)i~rgnto holcl :I conlputer :111tl in the otller 3 ~nlibsileor the AK-.I-. The conlpurcr n.ill inspire pvople to develop n scientific nttit~lcletonards life. I t \\rill also inspire the intellectual class of soc~cty to strive tow:~rcls excellence. In Ilcr other 11:ttld she \\.c,ultl hold a nlissile cautioning us :111(111t the harlnf~ll enkcts of this technology. The ot~jectsthat Di~rgnis holcling :Ire not i~setlan), more to fight mars. 'The real power tod:~): 1s in the ln~lndsof edi~c:~tion. For e x a ~ n p l e if, a nroln:ln is edl~cntecl:~nclholcls a goncl p o t in the governnlent then \vho can oppress her? These s h o ~ ~ l c l he ol~jects in Durga's Iiands like l ~ n o k s ancl electronic t).penr~-itersclcp~ctingthis pon,c.r of liter:~c!-.

First Step, Last S t o p

That cyl~ernctic steerslnan, tlie T\xshtri. 1-lroceeds directly towards his destination clistr3ctecl 11): nothing. Navig:~ting the rough svas of the exaniinations nritli self-possessior~,l>(iok in hancl, hc appear to d(1c.k witlloi~tfail in Eltiortldo. Perha~)sit is in his nature; perhaps Durga, n o 1ne:ln di\.inity herself, s city. 'l'hc. C:C;I'A I : I L ,is ~ . won :I[ I:~st. guides llilll 10 h ~ golden Aa someone n.11~)wntcllccl a w l ~ o l eshiplo:~cl o f Ril~llusand Tvashtris succ~esafully chug their way tlu-o!.~gll tllv choppy waters of nl) c~oussc.1 n.:Is i~riprcssecl.Only. ;I niggling W O I - I ~ remained. WIIJ) (lid so n~alijj of' [ / I O I L ~ i ~ ~ l 10 t i t p/cace 11ti AK-4 7 it2 1171 T; ( j i ~to t g o o11t into thc L ~ ~ I I - l cinl , thc Ixst st3gc.s of 111,. ~)i~t~lic:ltion 1it~1'11. there \\.:IS :I special visitor to IncIi:~. IIr \\,:15 tllc: I
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Technobrat

bed recovering from war wounds, was constructed to face the threat of Nazi Germany. It was not a weapon for aggression. It was a means of securing peace. ..my kontribution towards saving my country's sovereignty and integrity. I was born in a farmer's family. Had there been no World war, I would have designed some agricultural tool for the benefit of humanity. General Kalashnikov's rifle, it is clear, belongs in the realm of myth. It is a symbolic weapon, built by a son of the soil rather than a professional soldier. Yet, it was able to combat the powers of the Nazis. Dreams of nationhood and universal peace are associated with it and history harnessed to legend through it. It could be likened to an ancient 'fertility rite' tool. Violent as it is, it signals progress. Kalashnikov himself is an archetypal Tvashtri, who accepts that the violence inherent in technology is the price to be paid for peace There could be no more appropriate weapon for a modernizing Tvashtri to place in the hands of Durga than Kalashnikov's AK-47. He shatpens the iron axe of Brahamanaspati and forges the golden thunderbolts of Indra ...all worlds are his...

Inquiring about HU484 ...we were asked to contribute, t o say what we felt should be included. Thereupon besan a

-

journey ...in which 45 intelligent 'machines' attempted to outdo each other in terms of ideas, questions and answers. I n spite of many activities taking place in Delhi University and the city, the average IlTian would be too conscientious to bunk class and go and have 'fun'. Higher education, a permanent iob, higher salary, better perks-every

step in the IlTian's lifetime is totally

success oriented. Meanwhile, enioyment goes missing from the IITian's life.

I s o m e t i m e s w o n d e r w h a t h e gains instead. H a v e w e completed o u r t r a n s i t i o n t o machines o r can w e s t i l l feel?

- Ankur

I

t

I '

Amazingly, we go about our lives in this world where science and technology enjoy prime importance, with a wholly confused conception of science. It is because of this confusion that we are surprised, often unpleasantly, at what science does to us. We are willing to place any amount of f a ~ t hin technology. The hard fact is that most of the to-be-engineers graduate from IIT, without coming across any speculative writing whatsoever on technology, and then as technocrats, make policy decisions with this attitude, or rather, with this ignorance. In m y view, education in t h e philosophy o f technology a n d i t s c u l t u r a l h i s t o r y should b e a r e q u i r e m e n t f o r e v e r y s t u d e n t i n t h i s a g e o f technology. In the HU484 classroom, I got an insight into the working of a technologist's brain when confronted with a critique of his subject. With all the voices that this book has been able to capture owing to its unique structure, it should offer a view of what lies behind the three lelters-IIT.

- Ramnik

TAKING The Present Tense of the Young Technologist

Ankur the Idealist's Narrative ks a student: 'Heard of her? 'No' was the reply. I was in a fix. I had to choose a Humanities 'good grade' course and just couldn't lay my hands on one. To top it all, none of my usually dependable seniors could recall any Rukmini Bhaya Nair in the Humanities ~ e ~ a k m e n t . Anyway, I decided to take the risk. I could always change to another course if it turned out to be one of those difficult-cum-boring courses. O n to our first tutorial. Late by around 15 minutes-had actually forgotten the classroom number. But reaching there, the class was empty. 'Cool man. Good beginning', I thought, immediately liking the course contents and obviously the cool teacher. I started on my way hack, looking for some of my 'late coming' to-be-technologists comrades bat sighting none. N o - Yes there was one, jogging towards me. 'Loan', no ways. I

&(

266

Technobrat

was already hard off on the daily tea and cigarette. I quickly removed my only fifty-n~peenote from the top pocket of my shirt to the depths of one of my faded jeans' pockets. 'Come on to the fields', he told me. The fields? Before I could inquire into which teams were on, he continued, 'our introductory class is over there'. Well, if you want to hear of something weird you've got one here. God knows why classroom, blackboards and also the l~ackl~enches were nlade. Anyway, maybe it is something to do with the technicalities of sport-tennis being my favourite: 'Should I get my racquet', I wonder. Reaching the fields, there seemed to be no hectic or 'sporty' activity. In fact, everybody seemed to be reading some distributed sheets of paper. 'Never seen my classmates being so serious', I think. I quickly grab a sheet and start reading. Hmm, interesting-ancient ways of keeping time. Ceitainly couldn't be any of the course material. Well, just to get us interested, I supposed, so that we got to like the horing parts too. No ways! If we are to hear and not sleep during classquite rare though-the teaching had better be interesting. We were asked to coinrnent on the sheets that had been handed over. Again, hard to say much, except that already mentioned. To Ma'am's credit, desplte our bewilclerment at her unconventional methods, she did conle up with interesting points reg~rdingcolonization, its indirect influence on the colonization of technology, about the present use of hourglasses-the 'hourglass figure concept'-aah! Inquiring about the course-its basic aim and general contents, we were asked to contribute, to say what we felt should be included. Here I knew, grades or no grades, I couldn't change to another course. A course which permitted me the space to think and that too of relevant as well as unusual concepts, of things and facts that we might not get to know elsewheie. \

! I

Takitzg Attendance

267

Well, thereupon began a journey, a journey of original thought in which forty-five intelligent 'machines' each attempted to outdo the other in terms of ideas, questions and answers. The course was certainly not a boring 'theoretical' one-and from an engineer this counts as a compliment! We had constant real life examples to deal with, from issues of the Namada Dam Project, to the concept of NDEs (Near Death Experiences) to questions about the 'reality' of epic literature.

R a m n i k the Philosopher's Perspective The intention was never to round off a story-it was to start up a conversation, said Ma'am. Rut as the long conversational snake begins to coil and wind, it is time to see the overall shape that has emerged, beyond the length wise extension of the dialogue. Even perhaps more important than the examination of this shape is an examination of the tree around which the snake has wound itself-an examination of the assumptions, the ground on whlch thdse debates were conducted. Time it is to say a few things in conclusion, not to conclude the debate but to adjourn this session of discussion, and to acknowledge the open ends where the discussion cannot be adjourned, at least not by us alone. So where is this dialogue set? This dialogue is set in a world that has seen modern science for almost three centuries, and not viewed it passively, but lived with science, at times lived by science and even for science. It is a world that has also witnessed a critique of modern science, ~nostlyas an academic endeavour, sometimes for the purpose of antiscience propaganda but only rarely to develop a public understanding of science. And even when an effort has been made to advance such understanding. among the populace, the zeal has been a fraction of that which has promoted science as THE ideology.

208

7i.c-hrlohrcit

.[.h e \ . ~ j c e sr1l:it proc-l;~irii sc.ience t11e M e s i a h 1i:lve h t l l l !lot I>ec.~)lllt.Iloarae, I ~ L tile) I ~ :11-e IIO\\. ~i~ixec! \\'it11 tile \.oices o f crl\~iro~~n~crit:~lists, n , i t l ~sc.sc.:~~r~ing headline4 a l > o ~ tthe ir-rcvc~rsil>lecl:~lnage clonc to the e;~sth,\v1t11 \\-:irnings : I ~ > O L I ~ tile : ~ p : ~ t l i eI.:ice t ~ ~ . tl1.1t 5c.ienc.r is CI-c.:ltinga n d \\.it11 the vc~)iccs o f 4oc-r:il clisa:ltibLic.tion :tg:~inst trchnology. 13ut the voicc: t1i:it is too soft. :ind uniort~lnatclyso, i c ~ n etllat <,:in ecli~c:~te the perfornliera of' scienc,c a l ~ o u t theil- ~4cconcl n ; ~ t ~ ~ r e ' - - - t h e person:ilit)r of s c ~ e n c e:inJ tecllnology. \~11ich goeb I>e).oncl the :~uthorit:i~-ian ':ill ,yc>c)d.s i g o r o ~ ~f:~c,t < , I>asecl, ~~nl)i:isrcl roacl t ' I ' I I T I i ~ n a g ea s \veil ; I \ the ':)I1 I>ncl, t).~-:innic.al. dcmonic :~ncl FA1.Sl:' 1nl:lge. hlissing is a \70icc- that pl-ompts LI view ot scicncc a4 :I ilurnan cr'~ft :ind lulriian art, not tlic ~;~c.I.osanct trutti cxrl therc, I>ut the Baco~li.~n 'lal>ollr . ~ n dhandicraft of the Iirinlarl ~ u i n d ' ,a 3 111111ianac.tivit~-:rkirn to other h ~ l n i a n : ~ i t i \ , i t i c , h hencr c;llling t;)r :In integr.;.itccl per,spccti\.c o n Iiuri~anc : ~ ~ l t u ~ . r i n t c g r ~ ~ t i nour g tcclinologic, O L I I . tc.c.linologic_al :~~tr.H~c,ts, O(II scientrfic l>eliefs into the n-t.13 o f our c , ~ ~ l t u rIn e . tllc ~,ontcxf1 !i the ( 4 0 c:llled) de\x.loping \vorld. \\,l~cre2 s t r ~ ~ g g i\ l c still o i l to rnodernizc I)!. tl~ro\\~ing out n:iti\ e tecllnologies aricl : ~ c l o ~ > t r ~ ~ g newer sccluc:tivt: \\.ebtern o n e \ tliis vc~)ic,rt>ecori~csr v e n feyl)l(:iFor her?. the rffo17 is t o inculc:~tc. 'a he-ientific, ter~ipc:~',:i 5itu:ition in \ ~ t l r c l the ~ criticjuc: i>F scicncc ;~ncl tt.cl~~lolo;:) ol)\~iorislytirid4 nc) plac.e. .Anid \x.or![i-iv~cly,rlle pr-iorit) 14 te~lchingscience, not te:ic.l~~r~g r t l ~ o i i fsc,ic~lc.c. Ani:iz~~igIy, \vr g o :11>011t 0 ~ 1 1 -11\.c>in t l i i h \\o~.lcl\ \ ~ I I < ~ P 4ci~nc.e'~nc!ttxcl~rlolog)~ enjoy 1111r1iciniI>oltnncc n.itli a v\.lic ! l l \ c o n f ~ ~ s rconc.c>ptror-L ti of ~cictncc.It 1 5 f > e c ; i ~ ~otw t h r ~c . o r ~ I ~ i ~ ~ ; o ! ~ that wc. : I I C surprnsecl, often r1r1plc:i4,1ntly. at n-Inat c i c . ! i i ( . c1oe.s to (I:;. i2ncl ~t 1s I)C.C.LIIISC. of' t l i i y corih~>i(.!ri th,it n,c el!, i - l : . t ask r n o u g l ~c [ u e t i o r ~ \t~ctort.\\.c start I I ~ ~ ;I I t I~ ~~ ~ l i r i o l ?LC og~~. simply turn to t e c l ~ n o l o g )t~o .~c,lvrLIII our ~ I U I ) I C I I I > :111cl : ! I # . \\,ilIing to pl:ic,t. +illy : ~ r ~ i o ~of' ~ i I':i~tll it in t e ~ . l ~ r l o l o ~ y \Yrlicn tec,hr~olog\,kiils ( I , , \vc. look tor tlic l ~ u m , ~cn' l i - , ) l -

fi4klll# / I l t ~ ? l d ~ l l c c ! 2(19

t11:lt C : I L I ~ C C ~ the c:it:lhlroptle, not rc2alizing th~iterror i l 7 ~ l i l t into sc,iencc at its he:i~t,l - l ~ c . i t ~ i a t i o nia riot only ~inCc>l-r~lr~atc. it ; ~ l s op:~r;~cIoxi~:~I. 1.01. tile L I P I I -ofI ~ s e i e r ~ c ris qil~\tior1ing, a n d yet ivitli :)I1 o r l r ~clio0111igin 111c. S'ic.t~nlvi:in .scientific temper', \vc. :ire un:~l>leto c1rlestlorl scienc,e itself. 'rhis is tlie situation th:~t 111ori\.atcsllle to pnrric,ip:~te in ~ r ;is a l>ook: to clisp1:iy the rringe of presenting o ~ cli:ilog~lcs questions t l u t nevcl to Ile :~skecl,and sonirtinies. prysent 0 ~ 1 1 ans\\.el-s to then1 13ut it is not 4 ( 1 i ~ i i [ x ) ~ l a tni )t :in,swer. 111ese q ~ ~ e s t i oa ns ~t is to ie:ilize that 11lej' nlrl\t I ) ? :iskc.ci. I f tllis text c,:irn a c l l ~ t ~this c encl, i t \\,ill I>c re\\-:u-d e n n ~ i ~ lfor n :my amoLrnt 01~- effort.

Ankur the Idealist Continues his Narrative As a n 1lI'i:~n: 'II'T', thsrc Icttcrs. \\rhic.li inspire : I \ Y ~ . II? the eyes of ,. many. I 11e in\titution, pcciallxccl in tcclinoiogizing and machining rraw I > s ; ~ i nt o c.on,stt.uct thei~~selve,\ in tlie nlannrr Jawahal-1x1 Sehru liacl concel>ti~ali~ecl-tl~e future ancl 1eg:lcy of India. Cnlikc other Ill's. IIT, Dellli, I \ I>a.;ccl right in the rrliddlc of the c,it)-, pr-c1\.icling :11nple oppor-tunit). for- it to have close interact~on\\.it11 !)c,llii [.ni\.c1-4it\..I'n)~n< o c ~ , i lto~ t:iking part in festiv:ll o i . c.\.c;l Il~i\-ingII f a n i o ~ ~~oc,l< .; I),ind, I 1 1 I > e l h ~Ii:ls it all. So tlicl 117'ian\ :ir-? con\iclvr-re! f':~lnoi~.; snol>s, perhaps thinking too ~nilclii l t tllc~ilsel\.c.\;~r!cl too littit. trf ot11cl-i. ,. Ihi4 i ,I li~i\c~onceptioli I \ \ . ~ ~ ~ i l11hc: c l t c , c~le:ir In s ~ > i t e0 1 'the g e r i i ~U.(IIRI' ~ :~tt:~cIietIto the I I T I > I . ~ I I ~ Inc>br . of rls ;IS? hard n,or-kcr-,\.1 ~ 1 1 1 - t l ~ s~ o: ~ .I I ~ L I cC o~ ~ ~ t ; i c~ tl t 1 1I~oc!ks.1:11>s:IIICL machine4 : ~ n t lor11c.r 'logic:l19 frirncls ;inel tlir 1,lc.t t l ~ i t111 spite of various o l > l x ) ~ . [ u n i t itoc p;cr-tlcip,itc only tc\v o f L I ~ac.t~~all). take t11r111,111:ikr 111r I - ~ O ~ II II I~I : :I III ~ ( ~ 1 ~ 1 1 t ;cI.I I ~ r n t ~ - o \ . eA~I tI . allcgatio~iIlkr ll:iarli'4 13igincc.r~0-cacl. IIl'i:inbi c ~ r r lI>e tlic nlost hol-ins people 111 thy \\ orltl' sct L I S t t i ~ ~ i k r n gIf. tIlc\e technologists : I ~ C s ~ ~ p p o ~toe dI)c the. ep~toriic of c~.eativit).

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and imagination, why are they so uncommunicative, s o uncreative, so anti-fun loving? The last two years in school education and the usual three in college, are, I feel, the main formative years in a personality. This is the time when a student usually mingles with the opposite sex, begins to 'socialize' and to top it all, starts taking his own decisions. The three years in college, are a 'ball'. The student is usually ragged, so as to have a healthy spirit and to feel part of his college fraternity. During these three magical years, he takes part in endless college activities, joins numerous student clubs from Shakespeare to sports, and has his or her share of flirting. Such a 'broad' education imparted to a 'willing to learn' student can really help him not only to improve his personality but also his curriculum vitae. On the other hand, an 'IIT-aspiring' school student, spends most of his spare time not with his friends but with problenls and formulae, in order to get through the dreaded Joint Entrance Examination (the exam conducted by the IIT for entry into its Bachelor's programme). Even if he is successful in clearing the examination and getting the department of his choice, he has to spend endless hours completing tutorials, attending lectures and tinkering with machines. In hls spare time, this 'half machine' is usually listening to music or having 'open heart sessions' with his fellow half machines, wondering when the four years of his undergraduate education will come to an end. In spite of many activities taking place in Delhi University and the city in general, the average IlTian would be too conscientious to bunk class and go and have 'fun', the definition of which has been redefined ever since he got into the IIT studying fever. And well, it all doesn't end here ... Higher education, usually in engineering and management, is the next stop, in India or abroad. Work experience. A permanent job. A better job. Higher salary, better perks. Every step in the IITian's lifetime is totally success oriented.

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Meanwhile, the outgoing personality, enjoyment and many other things which are associated with a normal collegegoer's life go missing from the IITian's. I sometimes wonder what he gains instead.

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Ramnik the Philosopher Develops his Argument: Our 'questions concerning technology' were asked within a class-room of a leading institute of technology situated in the developing world: a setting only too apt for such a dialogue. The Indian Institutes of Technology impart knowledge at the cutting edge of technology. They pick u p only the best trained students in the physical sciences by screening applicants through a twelve hour long entrance exam, and then train them for excellence in technology. Many IIT students also become policy makers, technocrats. The location of the lITs is no less interesting: India, virtually a paradox in itself. A place where I>ullock carts and BMWs compete for space on the same road, where wood fire is used to cook in one house, and a microwave oven in the next, where two ways of reaching the heavens coexist: the indigenously made ASLV rockets and the mystical methods that can take you anjwhere in the universe. A country where notwithstanding its long history and list of contributions to science, attitude and temperament remain non-scientific and beliefs ancl behaviour are untouched by 'the scientific rationale'. A country with a multitude of faiths, age old philosophies and ways of life, a lakd of rich history and culture, still striving to become part of the new world order, to develop, to 'modernize' its technologies and perhaps even its culture. 'India' is a space where questions concerning science and technology assume prime relevance as decisions long contemplated have to be taken NOW, and where the strength of existing culture, existing attitudes 1; of sc~chmagnitude that it is bound to clash with any new ideology or new system. A:

Technohrat As a member of the HU484 class and then as a co-author of Technohrat, I got a chance to learn about the viewpoints and attitudes of my classmates, and even observe changes in these attitudes as the course progressed. Thoroughly trained in the method of science, and going to be technocrats in the India of the near future, they formed an excellent sample for observing the 'confused' mindset I've talked about. Initially, and mostly due to the way science is taught, each mind in the class sought an answer, THE answer, to questions raised, and the uneasiness and dissatisfaction at learning that no such unique answer existed was only too apparent. The discussion that followed when the concept of cultural re1,ativism was introduced to the class is a case in point. 'The idea that there exists no Archimedean point from which cultures can be viewed, judged and comparecl was the less controversial, albeit novel, idea. After some exenlplification by RBN, it did achieve a good degree of agreement. But the idea that reality itself is a cultural construct was just too eccentric to float a r o 6 d i Z Z o n 1 with'&t causing thunder wherever it went. Following upon .years of knowing the truths and also the ways to reach them (the scientific method) what was all this? Surely, scientific truths have to be immune from all those problems of entailment, implicature and presupposition that RBN talked about even if cultural judgments are not! After all, science is based on observ:ltions, not opinionb, and it is rigorous and proven, so reality is what science tells it to be! The same attitude when carried over to tecllnology takes the shape of technological determinism. And we hegin to grant to technology the power to take decisions for us. Wc begin to see ourselves powerless in its face. X'e forget that the dynamic of technology is not internal to it. If our thinking centres on the effects of technology on society, we will think in terms of hop/ we can best adapt ourselves to the changing technology, taking technological change as a given and our 272

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social actions as passive responses We will not then even try to consciously shape our technologies and thereby our future. It is not my intention to subscribe to a social determination thesis about technology. I am aware that factors like exisring technological systems, previous technologies and economic factors amongst many others decide what new technologies will look like. I only want that we remember WE are one of those factors, that society has the power to shape technology. The fear that technology will progress on its own inevitably creating all those dreadful robots and deadly weapons is born out of such a dismissal of the human agency behind technology. It is this fear that makes us passively accept even the not-so-appropriate technologies. Also, we then look upon technology not as a part of culture, but as something that impinges on culture from the outside. 1 consider this an impaired, inadequate, even deceptive perspective. This illusion of the divergence of technologies from culture served as our motivation to explore the technologies 'of prehistoric, historical as well as present times in the HU484 classroom. Our effort was to examine technologies from a cultural and often ethical perspective. Consumerism, money, desires, technological utopias entered the discussion here, but later led to an even mor important point-the confusion between means and ends. It seems that we are increasingly adapting our ends to suit technological means. Add to this the influence that advertising via the mass media enjoys today, and we have a society driven by materialistic desire. RBN calls this the mangta hai culture! On its own, this may not be bad but the desires helled are such as cannot be supported for every one of the billions of people on this small planet. Then we have large scale dissatisfaction, an$ the utopia for some

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in the industrialized u-orlcl for a11 of h ~ ~ r n ; ~ n i t y . Does this mean that sc,me will al~vaysh;~vemore t1i:ln the others, and the resources of thy ~ : I I - tEll1 h ~~necltl:lllyinto thc hands of its inll:il,itants? It is tloul>tt'ul that egalitari:tn distril>ution can he :~tt:~ined.Yet, the I>:~rden of the h ~ r r n f r ~ l effects of wastefully esploiting the> cnl.th must I,e shareci equally by all irrespective of out d ~ r e c t invol\.ement in destn~ctive:iction. 'T'hat is the irorly.

Ankur's Narrative Thread Unwinds a Little More: As a student co-author: Got to write a conclusion of round three t h o ~ ~ s a n t l words. It's pretty 1~1teat night whcn I pick u p nly pen and jot down a few points. I think. staring at the !,lank sheets o f paper. thc stark white walls, the small print of the newspapel...T.N. Seshan, the Chief Election (;o~nmissioner.. Senlinar 011 India in 2020. What ~ ~ o u lit dI,e like? Can w e sol\,e oIir ~llr~ltif:~ceted problenls and emerge winnr:rs! C:ln Indi:~ ~1nsh:lckle itself from its chains ancl rihe? To ~ ~ p p r o a cthese h cl~lestions,\ve have to :~nalyze'India' as a whole, its tryst with clcstiny, it> ~ ~ ~array 1 s t o f traditions, : ~ n dof co~~rse-technologies, 1 would like to start nit11 Inellan Fiction. 'l7h? cl~:lngin: landscapes of life-pol~tics, geog~.:lphy, hunger, lo\.e-are explicitly reflected in cul-rent literature. As Anita Desai s21y.

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If we were to re:td large chunks of Indian writing in order to ,o:~ther fresll impressions, o n e th:it woulcl sorely strike us is the underly~ng~lnityof the scene-:I unity th:~t Iwlics the fissiparousness and monotony. \Yrhy d o all Indian u.ritcrs clescrihc a landscape with the stock feature> of :I nl:ln,go grove, 3 river b a n k , c ~ ~ t t lr:ming e di14t :1Io11g :I village path, a village \\)ell, :~ncla c-rescent moon)

We could go further and say that every lnother w e nlcet is self-sacrificing and hardworking, every father stern and authoritarian, every money-lender cruel and vicious, every peasant ignorant and . stanling. T o make such statements is to make sweeping generalizations hut ... when w e look around w e d o not find all that lnnny exceptions.

There is little doul>t ahout India's plural heritage---cultural, religious and :~cademic.But the ~llainproblem is that most of it is still undiscovered. For example, in the field of medicine, India has offered many a soiution, very often in a religious garb. From Ayurveda to Yunani to the Gaud's sardine (a falnous cure for a s t h n ~ : ~the , dose heing a fish to I>e swallowed whole--offered only in IIyderal>acl!)-these odd sciences are many. Apparently, it is I>elieved by the people w h o offer these cures that commercialization of their science m~ould render their medicines ineffective. Obvious here is a connection between religion : ~ n d medicine or 'science' waiting to b e 'discoverccl'. With s o little done in the tield of cultural studies, it remains to I3c seen wh3t w e nl;tke of these c o n ~ p l e x interconrlcctions Ixtween religion ancl hcicnce. Our lack of underst:lnding of this situation has certainly acted as an impeclin?ent to India's developing an indepenclent 'tradition' in nlodern science. A connected :lnd wirlely hcld lnclian I,clief is in the rehirth of tlie soul. 1, myself am a su-ong I~elicverIn the power of the nrincl, which 1 f~c.1i,s 1111an~nicd 'the soul'. ?l'he mincl 1 feel can bc c1:lsaificd in two parts-the conscious p:lrt (which is readily ;ivailahle to u?;) and the unc.onscious part (wllicli we get a senbe o f in dre:lm\, ~ ~ n c l ehypnosis r ant1 so forth). 1 have heard ancl knon-n of v : ~ r i o ~ instances ~s whcn a person says something v~hile,sIceping \vhich turns out to I>e tlue.

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When intuitions turn out to be amazingly true, they make us think about the existence of something more, something which w e have not been able to appreciate. If w e admit this, our materialistic life and goals would suddenly become meaningless. O u r 'self' is that part of our mind left undiscovered, a n d our life is a journey towards its understanding. The following lines from Zen and the Art o f Motorcycle Maintainance capture this feeling of mine. I quote: Since all knowledge comes from the sensory impressions and since there's no sensory impression o f substance itself, it follows logically that there is no knowledge of substance. It's just something w e imagine. It's entirely w i t h our own minds. The idea that there's something out there giving off the properties w e perceive is just another of those common sense notions sinlilar to the common sense notion children have that the earth is flat and parallel lines never meet. Secondly, if one starts with the premise that all our knowledge comes to us through our senses, one must ask, from what sense data is our knowledge of causation received? In other words, what is the scientific empirical basis of causation itself? Hume's answer is 'None'. There's no evidence for causation in our sensations. Like substance, it's just something w e imagine when one thing repeatedly follows another. It has no real existence in the world we observe. If one accepts the premise that all knowledge comes to us through our senses, Hume says, then one logically concludes that both 'Nature' and 'Natures laws' are creations of our own imagination. AS Pirsig kne?, this sort of view of the relation between 'mind' and 'nature' is familiar in India as maya. unfortunately

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we've not had enough institutions that make sure of the continuity of knowledge, and the regeneration of 'mind' (and senses) through the centuries. There could be another cultural angle to this-the characterization of the 'self in terms of different professions and the resulting discrimination based o n 'the caste system'. And talking of caste, how can one, even now, characterize a person according to his birth? This relates in fact to the more contemporary question of the criteria that should be used to fix salaries in different professions today e.g. a company manager, in relation to his one-time college professor. Ultimately both are important for 'sustainable development'. We talk of globalism and 'uniting all the people of the globe and here in India people themselves stand divided. India has laws against child marriage and dowry, and also has a substantial number of highly successful women at the top in virtually every profession-politics, law, business, civil service, medicine and science. And yet female infanticide is still practised and some have no qual~nsabout hurning a bride for not bringing in enough dowry. How long will it take to completely remove the shackles of sorne of our hated 'traditions', one wonders. Why is that most Indians work by age-old conventions rather than by reason? A fact about the Indian is that from childhood he is

forced to d o things in the name of family tradition-whether reasonable or not-under excessive 'elder' pressure. He is not I provided any living and thinking space and when he is, ! ; ultimately, the change is too sudden, and he finds himself ,, mentally and ethically dead. Reason no longer seems reasonable to him. And let me tell you this is true not only of rural India but most Indian homes across the length and breath of India-in every one of its states. Tradition rules in .our culture, yet practically everyone agrees that, as of now, there are fe; uniformities, standards and therefore absolutely authoritative laws in India. Although

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w e are one country, it seems in~possibleto categorize national rules and duties or frame concepts of development that everyone accepts. The development of one section of society is usually at the cost of another. I wonder if an idealistic democracy is possible at all in India, or will it cause stagnation? Does a modern democracy have to have, almost as a , ! prerequisite, a quick paced, liberalized economy? And is such I an initiative fair to the thousands of indigenous manufacturers who would not be able to survive competition with the mighty MNCs? Can we live by the 'survival of the fittest' ideal of outright capitalism? Is it not possible that by laying more stress on quality and indigenous entrepreneurship, the 'Indian' product can emerge a winner--economically as well as ideologically? But the initial patterns emerging after liberalization d o not appear encouraging. The sellout of major Indian companies like Thums Up (an aerated drink company bought u p by Coke) and Kwality (an ice cream company taken over by Walls) show how we have not been strong or wily enough to withstand con~petition. In India, too, we talk of World Summits and Global Interests and of the future of our planet-4he Earth. We have the same aspirations as others. Is the country w e are born in, then, simply a sort of caste (of mind) to which we owe blind allegiance? And given ths, is there any need for strict nationality barriers? Is it not just luck which decides whether we have to survive an African famine or live luxuriously in some New York apartment? The simplest answer would seem to beadministration and government by the majority of people. In two words: world democracy. But then why have such systems, espoused the world over, apparently caused the present anomalous extremes of rich and poor countries? My dream would be a united model, and a stronger and structured United Nations as the central governing authority, weaker international barriers and equitable distribution of resources. Andperhaps the best exa~npleof this nlodel, could

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be our country, India. Each part of the country is very different in !ems of heritage, language and traditions; but as a nation, India's modem self image ideally reflects a single theme of peace and development.

Ramnik Sustains his Philosophical Position:

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From Ankur's dream of peace, I- move on to a scenario of antagonism and carnage. Modern science has always seen nature as an antagonist, it has fought against nature and tried to harness, control it. But the dream of total control of nature has been challenged in the face of the unpredictability that science has shown is built into nature. A worse realization is that w e don't even have full control over technology of our own making, let alone have control over nature. Biotechnology, in particular, is an area where the weakness of science shows up blatantly. For, biotechnology is an extreme attempt-an attempt to control life. We expect to make new life forms by changing DNA. These life forms will he ones we know little about. They have the potential to be disastrous for all of nature. Risk is inherent in what w e are attempting to do. Life has intelligence of its own, it responds and reacts to its surroundings. We have no clue as to what its behaviour might turn out to be by looking at its DNA; hence, we cannot unproblematically expect to control its behaviour. Yet w e continue to introduce new varieties of crops-mutated v a r i e t i e ~ a c hyear-which could turn out to harm other life forms or destroy the fertility of the soil. We cannot even predict how co~nparatively simple technologies like irrigation may eventually harm the ecology. Yet we are now directly interfering with a very complex ecosystem. Obviously, w e cannot predict the consequences. an we implement safety measures? But we are dealing here ith a threshold technology where ignorance goes hand in and with knowledge. How can we find antidotes to disasters .when w e cannot even be sure that they exist? We are trying

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to d o in fr\v ).c';II.s 1~ll:itnatrlre tlid ovvr ncsons. :rnd n.it!l

knowleclge and :lttirutlcb that arcs clnly :I f t ~ wl~r~nclr-eel yt7:lr-\ old. Arcxn't we. t11c.n o \ 7 c ~ - - , ~ t t c m [ )r t1 1~r ~ ~ control g of nati1l.c. i ~ n l c s 5tllc-re i.; ;I pul,lic untiy!-,st:rncling :~l)outtllc. Issues, jut! inf'osnl~ngpcaople is of no ubc.. Wc clo conlc acrosi provoc:~!i\-:. :!~ticles In newbprlpcrs arltl magazines :ll>or~tI>ic.~tetllnolofiic.II mc:rhods for ~ntlrlcin;: prtxgn:1ncy :mcl prodrlcing clorlcs. Wl111~: thrse senr? a s Ilazasd nr:1r.nlng.s, tllv unclcrly-in8 : ~ n dclccpe! issue c o n c c ~ n ~ i nrhr g n:tr\lrc of tecl~nologygets 1;lissvcl ollr l'he cr~ticlue c:f sc,icnce and tcclinoiogy 1 ~ 1 . snot ~(.:~ll:i gained 3 p o p ~ l ~ footing st I ~ r l t> o ~ i l ctx~;lrn.o~-tls II:I\.c I > c c . o ~ i ! . : p o p ~ ~ l u l'Environmclit .. I:riendl?,' is of corlrse o n e of thrn:. :!nothcr is 'Appropr~lrteTcc.hnol(~g);'hlilrly pc.oplc have 1le:tic.i thcsc phrases, ilncl witllout really k n o n i n g what i t ts, suppcjlr allything th:~t carr1t.s tllc- ljr:~rlcl r:lg of :ipj>rcil)l.iate tc~chnc>log;, Very of'ten, h o n e \ ~ e l . the , sllpport thc-1- e.-stc:n(l t c ':~ppropri:rt,: tecilnolo,gy ia in the ,in:rpprol>ri:~te' bpirit of tccllnologi~.;il ortllodoxy. -, 1 ec.llnolo~ica1O I tllotloxy, ;IS L;ingclon Winner defines ir, c o ~ ~ l p r i s ethe s view rll:it the things lilen 111:1kc>;Ire ~ ~ n d tllt.:i er :firm control : ~ n dth;~t tcc.llnolc~giei xrc. nc.l~r!.al. .I'l;ey .irt. /silnply tools that (.:I:I 1x2 ~ ~ s ( , oc ln c L \ C I ~ or- tlle ot11c1-:trlcl 1 1 : ~ Ixnefit or hal-111they bring clepends on 11o\\,1lic.n use 111t.liL technologics arc, Ix.st juclgecl rlcco~.cl~ngto a n c.~iterio!l < , ! cfl'icic~~cy:i.ca. inpot-to-orlfj>iit ~ ~ l c . ; ~ i i i ~of- c stllc rysokllcc., employccl in a given cipcr:~tio~~, -1'hls f(:ml nf tcc.hnoloaic.al orttloclo:iy \\.as \.my\.icil>lc I ; ? our cli~ss-I-oo~n.-?'lie Il:~rcl F.~cr is tti:~t I I I O S ~ of rllv 1 0 - I ? : : engineerb ~ I - ~ ~ L I : 1'1.o11l I ~ c IIT n1tl10~1tc(1111irlg :tcros:, '!I>.,. speculiiti~e \lZriring \s,l~atsoc\.c.r 01; tcclinology. ;~ncl tl~,:i; as technocr-ats, nl:tke ~x:hlicy clc.cisions ; ~ l > ( ~ ltlle it (l(.plo);!i~~~rit anci dt.\.cloplnent of rc.chnology \bit11 [Ills ;~ttitl~eIc,.i r:lthcr \virh tllis Ignr~ranc?. I r l lily \,]en- ccl~ic:ition in tlrc philosophy of tcctinr~logy:111cli t \ c.ultural lli4t01y st 1o~11(1 I:!.' I

a rcq11i1-e~ncnt for c-vc~ybtuclenr in tllis age of technology. Of 311 c!~ltur:li i s s l ~ e x)rllrllow, , i.\,s~~es concerning ~c-nt1c.r often ~.;ltcll attvntion c ~ ~ b l l yI:or this r c ~ ~ s o nI ). L I ~ not this c science reason alone, I :In) gl:!cl tll:lt tlie gcncier c r i t i q ~ ~of has clcvt-l(>pc2dn,cll. \Wc: had a cll:~ncc. tc-) cliscilsi sorne o f thesr I S S L I ~ S ,cp~.c.i:~lly in the Indi;lri c-orltcxt \vherc wonlen arc C I I ~ C . I . I I I t~ l ~ cfii'ld of tectlnology :I[ ;in inel-eabing pace. (Intc.restit~gI).. 11.1' 1)eltli \v:ls the \it? for clc.vclop~llentc ~ f:I

that it sl~r)\\istccirnologics arc t ~ o l~ic)rt/r[rl.I'hc)i are not jubt thing.$ th:lt can [he u c c l ttlc way w e \v:lnt t o ilse thcni, I , L I ~ l~atllcrposseis spc:c1:11({lralitic., lh:~t:Ire ;I h n c t i o n not only of the soc.iet!; In \\.hlcll tlley itre 1)l;rc.ccl I)ut : ~ l s oof :tttril,ures they acqrlil-e t l ~ ~ r i r ltheir g design :ulcI nl3niitactul-ing. It is :I!.;(]111)' (y>inir)n tll,it s o ~ ~ ~ c t i ngcnclcr ~ e s ~.\suc.s get enr:inglcc! in cxa#gc.l-arecl i.lai~nst 1 ~ 1 t chvert .~ttc.ntion Iron] morc Ilil1lclrt:lnt isst1c.5 coricc.rnin
Ankur the I c l e a l i s t now Signs off from TechnoOrcrt : A co~lc.lu.;ron L I I I ~lit) ~ t:r]k 0:'111:. I > ( i ( : I i :-e'\,c rvl-ltlc.ll t o ~ c . t h c r woulcl I)? 1-(-:1!1y \ti-:lngc, ~ s . o ~ ~ li r ~ ; i'5~ '!:11. l ' t tilt-11

'rt~cl)oo!i For- I ) C I I I ; I I ) . \ tlic f11-5t I I I I ~ C ~111 7 ~ ~ ~ ~ 1 ~ 1 ~ 1\tx, 1 1 1 ~II:I\T~ 1 l . atte~nptc~tl t o c i u e t ~ o nh( Iillc. c.c~r~\.c.:l!~o~l;;i i i i c . . ~ h ;:I. \.ivn i in :I i d I I c o t t i i r ~I I ~ I t 1 t 1 1 t tile Gancll~i~~ri, 111eY ~ ~ I I : - I I \ ~: It r:l ~I .~l s, o fo1t11.,\r>cI \\-t'vc I ~ : I I - I I ~ tIl:~t a conclusive ;ln\\\.c.r i \ I~;tr-clIyoc~\sil>!c.\\,l~il.l:c~.e~o f tilcsc pnsitic~nsc)rlcA ; ~ c l o l ) t \ 'l'he ipccif~c(~~.c.ir~i~st;lnc.c.. 01. sitl~:itiorl,\ are o h ~ . ~ o r ~c\ l~y~ t ~ c'1'1115 . i ~ l .I > J r ~ c \ \ p e s ~ p e ~ ~ t101i \ c LI:, \vIlo are ilscd t o clca!lrl:,r in 5c.ic.ntlf'ic. g c . r l c . ~ . : r l ~ ~ : ~ t ~ c l ~ l . \ -

) ~ ~

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~t many places, we have tried to c1llestion the concept of technologic:~l progress. Especially in the field of hiotechnology, techniques like amniocentesis and DNA branding could make us lose our humanity nncl make us more like machines, even though these may seem the neecl and the procluct of us technologists ourselves. With 'reason' clominating most of our decisions, it is not hard to confess that enlotions like love, ernpathy and respect have little value or even meaning anymore for us. Growing up in a distrustful worlcl, we have started lacking something essential-a touch of humanity. I wonder why w e talk of things like lil~eralization anel economy and even of employment when w e can't even guarantee clean drinking water to every person. It is certainly strange how a faminerich and a fashion-rich society can live together on the same world. Is it that we don't care? Have we completed our transition to machines or can we still feel? In this inconchlsive conclusion, I have attempted to present certain features and problems that 'typify' India in her fiftieth year after independence, which I believe should he discusseel again when India rraches 2020. For this we need a clear ancl promising vision of the kind of worlcl in which we would bc both proud and satisfied to live. Presently, we think our top priorities relate only to the econo~nicsof the country. Econorllic 'growth' is to us a symbol of power and developn~ent.Yet continuing along similar iines all the way to 2020 woulci lead us to disrlster. Pollution would've reachecl i~nhearahleli~tiits; resources like clean air and w:lter will have become even scarcer. Violence will reach the highest levels (with the o1,vious use of high tech), while values, attitudes ancl ethics would've found n new low. I am not being pessimistic alsout this, but really, really realistic. Instead Gf thinlung big, we shoulcl mol3ilize our resot~ices, and achieve a 'recoveralde' ancl 'recycling' hased cultllre

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rather than the present consumption based 'throwaway1 culture. Managers with not only skills, hut artitucles. values and ethics should he at a premium. The responsil~ilityfor appropriate technology, education and a sustainable culture should be assumecl globally. The 'think globally, act locally' slogan, though overused, still seems to me worth recycling! As our voices quieten now. we in both confidence and anxiety, await a response to our efforts on this novel project,, in which we have 'churned the great wheels of thought'. Indeed, I hope that this conventional phrase that' I have chosen to end with will be noticed. For churning or nznnthan is, as RBN says, both a gendered and m);thological image in Indian culture. And nzntithnrr is surely also an ecologically sound procedure in the context of global dair)..-Farnling and food production policies as we rethink them today . . .

And Ramnik t h e Philosopher Adds t h e Last Word: I

I

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i

Carrying on with Ankur's manthan image, Technobrat gives us a flavour of the discussions that went on in the HU484 classroom. In this classroom, I learnt not just a subject, but also got nn insight into the working of a technologist's hrain (including my own1 when confronted with a critique of his subject, his bread and butter. With all the voices that the book has been able to capture owing to its unique structure, it should provide insights to the interested sociologist, and offer a view of what lies behincl those three letters-IIT. The direct voice, clialogue forntat we've adopted will, I hope, help overcome the distance tIxtt technologists, ancl especially II'Tians, seem to maintain 1.1-on1'the rrst'. Most of all, I woulcl like the I ~ o o kto initiate a pi~hliccli:llog~iet l u t c:ln develop a Inore historically sophisticated, c u l t t ~ r a l understancling of science anti tcchnolhgy. Let LIS keep the fire of' science bilrning. Let us figllt tlar.kncss, I,ut let us not dismiss otber sources of light, othcr thottgl~tand l~eliefsystmls.

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Let us use technologically devised sources of light, but nc~t he SO dazzled by them that we cannot see anything outside the s h iling ~ ring of scientific 'truths'. Let us get warmth from the fire, but not burn our feet, nor the planet we have placed our feelI on ....

humanity power over matt The physicist chose the wheel, which humanity power over space. The mathematician chose the alpha

The mystic chose the thermos bottle.

'1

'Why the thermos bottle?' the others asked. 'Because the thermos keeps hot liquids hot in

%

winter and cold liquids cold in summer.' 'Yes - so what?' 'Think about it,' said the mystic reverently. 'That little bottle - h o w does it know?'

MAHADEW SPEAKS OUT OF THE PAST TO

THE FUTURE: '0 Engineer of t h e World, I've Run Till You Cried Halt...'

What's it all been about, Technobrat? I notice something peculiar about my account of the Tvashtris when I read through the nine chapters before this ultimate one. There is not a single physical description of any denizen of IIT anywhere in the book. Who wears square black-rimmed spectacles, who has a lock of hair transecting his forehead at the place where his third eye could be hidden, who has a gangling walk, a favourite backpack, a red pullover with streaks of yellow, a disgusting pair of green braces-nothing. For a book aimed at a quasi-anthropological representation of that rarely studied species-the technologist-surely this is a signal failure. That facelessness of the engineer on which I'd remarked in nly first chapter seems to I,e borne out by the i flatness of my depiction. Is no roundness, then, no human indentation, possible in

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a characterization of that divine being, the Tvashtri? My sense of it, as I've said, is that the narrative of human heroism and villainy, post-Enlightenment, ha5 firmly attached itself to the high drama of science. So it is not surprising that public interest in the psyche of the technologist reflects such a lack of distinct identity. At the close of this book, this artifact, this almost-lunar module created in collaboration with the Tvashtris, I feel myself disoriented, as if I've been walking in outer space, directionless... The Tvashtris d o not seem to be similarly affected. They may be little shaken. I see a shadow of anxiety in some clear Tvashtri eyes, especially in Ramnik the Philosopher's and Ankur the Idealist's. Nevertheless, they are ready to move on. Not guilty. The mire of earthly guilt never seems to stick to Tvashtri surfaces. Covered myself in a muddy coat of what feels like guilt but is more likely to be petty resentment, I think sullenly: If the century now drawing to a close has been categorized as an age of mass migrations and mass murder, it could be thew liminal movement of technological skills across national boundaries and the deployment of those skills in the multiple production of everything from nuts and bolts to nuclear bombs that's contributed most to the century's reputation for amorality. How can they plead not guilty? We have after all agreed in class that the post-colonial engineer is a natural migrant. His routes of travel from 'Third' to 'First' worlds, and back again are bound to have profound consequences, shaping the identifying signs of a new sensibility. This as yet little understood epistome has been called 'the Internet Mind'. It indicates the mental apparatus needed to inhabit Tvashtriland-a country without contours, as its designers have existed without faces within this book. How can they not be just a little guilty? Questions of routes lead to questions about roots. In Technobrat I'V; tried to track the behaviour of engineers in

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their natural habitat-that is, the sacred space of an Indian classroom in a technological institute 'of national importance'. Here, the Tvashtris and I exanline that architecture, both of mind and of space, which appears to offer an ideal environment for the growth of an 'internet self'. The whole work mimics, in this sense, the polyphonic, uncontrolled nature of website conversations. iIT, Delhi, is built of reinforced concrete, rfc, a building material symbolic of strength and functionality. I was told by an architect once to observe its Main Structure, or MS as it is known in the no-nonsense IITian language. The MS sits, he explained, 'atop the landscape' like so many Corbusier-inspired buildings. Such a structure commands; it does not integrate. Blending into the background is not its style, nor are concessions made to aesthetic longings in such a building. From all of which it follows that teachers and students who operate here are drawn willy nilly into accepting an ideology that is set, so to speak, in reinforced concrete. Since the architecture discourages commingling, a teacher within these sternly regulated confines is almost obliged to inhabit an intellectual panopticon, always yisible but always isolated as she goes about her task of monitoring her students. That I attempted on HU484, even if not with conspicuous success, to collaborate with the Tvashtris in the making of 'their' text could offer a methodology that challenges in its formal structure this institutional 'rfc' authority of the teacher. TO this extent Technohrat is a work that deconstructs itself. if the engineer is a Frankensteinian creature, imaginatively call~ng up the forbidden union of humans with their own creations, machines, then soinething of that anomalousness is reflected in the series of conversational incantations that connect this text. Textual renditions are ways not so much of telling as of leaving out. So much has depended in the writing of Technobrat on my ideology, memory, and my personalized

my

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reconstruction of events in class. It is the classic anthropologist's dilenlma, not to mention the historian's How not to rob the Tvashtris of agency, when mine is the dominant voice? NO author, especially n o teacher as author, can wholly escape occupying the panopticon. From which panopticon perspective of surveillance, it's inevitable that reportage and writing distort and flatten out the tonalities of conversation and lived interaction. So much goes missing. There's no romance in Technobrat except perhaps with machinery, no hint of those frenzied Fests with unlikely names such as Rendezvous which occur like swift blood-lettings in the lives of IITians before they fall back into their work routines once more. The classroom constrains. Obvious enough, but the other choice was silence. Or to wait for less obtrusive, more generous, recording technologies in the future, hut even these would involve selectivity and point of view. I think of the unavoidability of authorial self-projection as an existential flaw in any 'hurnanities' text. My own positioning as a ~nemberof the 'powerless' Humanities Department in a mainly technological institute was another factor I mentioned at the beginning of Technobratand then promptly forgot about.. Marginals don't belong. They may have jobs in premier universities but they are really out. Discussing the situation of what she calls 'Marginality Studies' in the US-preferred homeland of the Tvashtris-the critic Gayatri Spivak has described Indian and other immigrants as paracloxically 'Outside in the Teaching Machine' pf the US educational system. Spivak argues that this outcaste status nlay I7e something of an advantage as far as a critical perspective on education goes. Much the same, I suppose, could be presumed of professors in the Humanities Department in an IIT. However good they are, they stand at the subject margins of the Institute, but, as working with the Tvashtris of IIT made lne realize, this* could actually help in the writing of a book like Technobrat.

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Mahadevi Speak out of the Pmt to the Future 291 My anthropological stance of 'distance' was only possible because, for the first time in my career, I could conceptualize my students as a breed apart. The farcical list I've compiled below of an engineer's list of moral dos and don'ts should be read with these caveats in mind. In the section on 'Cultural Relativism' in a previous chapter I'd dwelt o n the possible 'significance' of the number 7 for the HU484 course. Now here, let's say, are: SEVEN TENETS OF THE TECHNOLOGICAL FAITH, based o n a pre~lliseof CULTURAL SAVAGERY.

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I. Be extremely functionalist in your attitude. Adopt instru~nentalismas a cast of mind since means are always justified in terms of ends. By the same token, use intellectual brute force to push solutions through. Subtlety is for sissies. 2. Be wary of expending time, energy or money o n aesthetic or ethical pursuits. If it's culture you want, the cheapest and best solution is to rely o n popular culture as a guide to taste. There are few returns from humanistic pursuits. Any kind of generosity with time-energy-money is a sign of survival stupidity.

3. Be prepared to think of all problems as practical problems I

I I

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and cultivate an absolute mistrust of verbal solutions. corollaries: metaphorical language is worthless and confusing; reading fiction is a waste of time

4. Be ready to adopt the triage mentality whenever you can and don't take on others' problems. If it's good for you, why should you care ahout anyone else.

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5. Be willing to accept simple answers to problems ancl always think in terms of clear simple'slogans, e.g. progress is inevitable, god is good, time is precious, strong arm tactics

292 Technobrut are necessary, etc. This policy will help you to overcome doubt and function better as a moral agent.

6. Be suspicious of involvement in political ideologies, I ~ u tif you must get involved, choose the simplest available political path. Above all, don't pay too much attention to women, have-nots and other disadvantaged groups because they usually fuss without a reason. 7. Be assured that tangible goods matter; intangible goals don't. Oh, yes-and always use CAPITAL LE'ITERS to imprint things on people's minds. More subtle methods may be ineffective given the cultural chaos which engineers are committed to keeping in check. Binaries are best 01 01 01. Having unburdened myself of some bile in listing the tenets above, I was I think enabled to adopt a calmer, more highminded tone in a note I was asked to write at the time by the Director of the IIT. I called my piece rather grandly 'Ethics and Engineering'. An extract:

Constructing consciences 'If we are concerned with the prohlem of inculcating morality among young adults in a contenlporary technological context, there is an obvious question that we must address. It is this: m a t relationship holds hetzueen the notion of 'conscienceJ and its embedded term "science"? 'Much of the ideology of modern science today is still dominated by the progressivist mind set of the Enlightenment which a) envisioned science as the enemy of ignorance, and b) saw technology as an agent that would bring about the "greatest good of the greatest number". Froin this attractive, if somewhat naive, Utilitarian perspective, the inevitability of scientific and technological progress signalled a massive improvement in a society's "quality of life". Material goods brought a b w t mental, and by implication, moral goods or goodness.

Muhadmi Spaks out of' the Pust to the Future 293 'How d o we go about constnlcting a good, durable, moral gauge? A conscience after all, is a thing, and all "things" have a "structure". When we are said to possess a conscience, what we possess is a set of social beliefs. These beliefs about "oughtness", about those thoughts that are evil, and those actions that are impermissible, are the planks from which the whole object "a conscience" is constructed. 'My notion of "conscientisation" o r "conscience construction" in a classroo111 is to take the often fairly rudimentary conscience that we are assumed to have and turn it, or build it, into a more sensitive and powerful organ. Like many mental possessions, a conscience is largely acquired in the course of socialisation: Hence, there is as much a role for the teacher to play in inculcating a conscience as in inculcating a calculus. 'The way in which our consciences are built are not very different after all from the way in which we assemble logical premises for our other rational decisions. As Henry James once put it, "we care what happens to people only in proportion as we know what people are". Ethics, as I see it, describes what people are, how their consciences are constructed, so that we tnlly begin to "care what happens to people".' For a day or two, I managed to llnpress myself with the rhetoric in that note to the Director, but then I remembered the Tvashtris. Would they agree to spend so much as five minutes on my measured prose? Unlikely. I could imagine their scorn: Arey, chodo yaar! Eore hai. Constructivists they might be, but would they hold for a minute with the fuzzy nonsense of constructing consciences? hro clzance. Deflated, I turned to Rai~lnikthe Philosopher. What d o the Tvashtris talk about among theinselvcs, I asked, when the monitoring agency of a teacher is ahscnt? What are your collective ol>sessions, your politics, ykur aspirations? Rainnik's report, as usual, was illuminating. Below, his notes for me,

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and my quite immediate mental responses (in hermeneutic brackets and only in the form of brief interventions, except o n the vexed matter of reservations where I get a little carried away). As for my note to the Director, it drifted away..

Winging it: The ~nsideStory from ~amnik The otherwise uncommunicative IITian emerges highly opinionated when amongst his peers. The closed corridor architecture of the IIT hostels ensures that every voice of opinion knocks at every door in the so-called 'wing'. A wing is a group of seventeen rooms that are arranged facing a common closed corridor. Every wing enjoys an identity through the close association of its residents. In fact a 'wing' becomes an entity to the e k e n t that questions like 'Should X he thrown out of the wing', or 'should Y be accepted into the wing' are commonp:ace at the time of allotn~ehtof rooms every year. The wing is the locus of discussidn, debate, conference and contention. (RBN: I see a fascinating connection between these comments of Ramnik's and our glancing references to the architecture of IIT, Delhi, throughout Technohrat., The underlying thesis? Physical, out-there architecture can sornetinles function as a mirror of mental, in-here, architectural features. Buildings can be read in terms of psychology). Ralnnik continues: From the time of my joining the hostel, I have o h s e ~ ~ , ~ e c l the IITian react to many subjects of current and not-so-current concern. These can evoke in his supposeclly ohjectivr ~nirida very subjective reaction. In my freshman year (1992) the Babri Masjid episode took place and many of the sleepy faces in the ~rlorningscould he attrihutecl to the long discussions in the wing during the short night hours. (The 1I'T night has an average of less than five sleeping hours during weekclays). Our reactions were forceful, ancl alllongst the consecluences was the emergence of a cross-hostel group that extended

M u h ~ h Speaks ~i out of the Past to the Future

295 support to the R.S.S. and conducted a signature campaign to support the demolition. The battle was fought with equal frenzy o n both sides. From these debates, I gathered that for the average IITian, involvement and sensitivity towards the issue at stake is less than towards its argumentative value. (RBN: Could there be a connection hetween the engineers' craving for simple solutions to every prohlem and their support for the less subtle, more militantly-stated forms of religio-political discourse? The interest in 'argument' rather than in emotional investment in 'iJsues', as Ramnik puts it, seems symptomatic of that more general tendency towards self-protective intellectual detachment anlong IITians identified earlier as 'the technologisation of the soul', after the US model of the late twentieth century self). Ranlnik continues: Recognizing the IITians life to be 'highly stressed', a counselling cell was set up in the Institute. 'Counselling is now available o n working days during class hours'. Resentment of such illogical rules and of the lack of flexibility often displayed by the administration is commonplace on the campus. Student forums and other feedlxlck I2odies are known to be mere formalities. Approaching the counsellors is not even considered, partly bec:luse IITians find it difficult to communicate their feelings and also because tlie close-knit hostel community becomes the natural choice for the unburdening of emotions. Besides, it is helcl hy IITians that their lifestlye, the 'IIT life' is too different from convention:~l student life, especially the 'DU life', for them to he understood hy anyl>ody who is not o n the ship (The shape of the main huilding is supposedly inspired by a ship, and the reason fox- the 1:lck of trees in the institute area is that this I~uilding should \,e visihle from around the campus!). (RBN: Ramnik's observations ahout I>ureaucratic norms stifling innovative ~neasux-esin even the Lest of our institutions, make sense. If self-criticism is a primary goal of our

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confessional in this book, then, as I see it, the essence of self criticism, or deconstructive practice, to use more a la mode ter~xlinology,consists in the willingness to turn the searchlights precisely upon those beliefs and hstitutions that w e cl:srish most--our fantasy landscapes. I recalled that condemnatory article by T.M. Rao I'd shown Ramnik once before. Rao had written: 'The ultimate purpo.se of education is to inculcate in students a degree of self-doubt and a questioning attitude. Without that critical factor, education becomes meaningless. In this regard, education in India which is based on an unquestioning acceptance of authority has been a misnomer'. Going by Rao's definition, then, Ramnik is both being truly educated and proving Rao wrong about the Indian educational system when he pinpoints systemic failures in the IITs. Indeed, such failures seem to be reflected in the isolation and stress recorded by engineers in the very tree-less environment that might, ironically, seem best suited to their own technologized tastes. A good example of the 'non-linear' behaviour of the human species). Ramnik continues: A small percentage of the IIT student community comprises of 'Reserved Category' students-those who get to partly bypass the bnital competition in the entrance test. While few of these students merge well into the campus and hostel life, most remain too 'reserved'. The 'General Category' students feel a degree o f resentment towards them. This feeling is not born from any 'caste difference', rather it occurs because the reserved category students often show themselves academically incapable and misfits for the few seats that are so highly sought after. A complex amongst the reserved category students is also noticeable which makes it even more difficult for them to mix with the crowd. My room-mate carries the grudge that he has to pay his msss dues by taking tuitions even on the busiest of days, while his reserved category neighbour is provided

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free messing at his cost! But in a few cases all these grudges are overcome, especially if the reserved category student is sociable and makes efforts to fit in. (RBN: Some of the bitterest cultural conflicts in India have, as w e know, centred o n the issue of whether there should b e reservations in educational institutions and government jobs. Although the Indian Constitution, perhaps one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, was in favour of such reservations as one of the methods for putting an end to systems of prejudice that had existed for generations, most among our middle classes have remained steadfastly unconvinced that reservations at the cost of 'merit' were a good idea. The Mandal Commission and its bloody aftermath showed how deep ran the divisions o n this subject. The IITs, as government institutions naturally followed a reservations policy, s o ours was an excellent environment in which to observe the psychological reactions that this attempt at mild 'social engineering' by the Indian government aroused. Commenting here as a 'nice', non-reserved category student, Ramnik reveals an attitude that I'd say is fairly typical of the Tvashtri and, o n the face of it, reasonable. He is a) not willing to accept that the prejudice felt against the minority of 'backward' students-Ribhus?-is anything to d o with caste and b) quite willing, at the same time, to accept as a friend any individual student from the backward category who 'makes efforts to fit in'. But Ramnik, I argued with him, isn't it you who should be making that extra effort to extend a helping hand to those w h o have not had elite urban backgrounds and therefore lack the self-confidence to commandeer the system as you do? Why shouldn't you play by his cultural rules rather than he by yours? Well, said Ramnik, I'm perfectly ready to help out but if they stick to themselves, how can anyone help? Mso, in the long run, it is they who will have. to fit into the system in order to I>e successful.

M a h a W . S p e a b out of the Past to the Future 298

iri.ch?rohrcrt

And who standing on 117"s 'pragmatic' grounds, could gainsay Ramnik's arguments? For me, though, here was a classic illustration of social engineering just skimming the surface. It worked to the extent that it provided the initiltlly weak with an opportunity. But there was no folloxv-up. The environment the 'l>ackwards' were escalated into remainecl cool, if not actually hostile. Every bit of effort had to be niacle hy those who were rnos! ill equipped.to d o so. Individuals, as Ramnik said, could overcorne these difficulties and 'survive', even flourish, but icleologically the social impasse remained intact-with 'us' ancl 'them' on hvo sides of an abyss. Adapt or remain niarginal-that, it appeared, was the Darwinian message of competitive success within the 'IIT system' despite its formal commitment to reservations. Were Technohmt a book which m a s attempting to offer 'solutions' rather than mere anthropological description, I'd say that here was a crucial systemic gap that could constructively be followed up through various services the IITs might offer those who still, in my view, came out as victims of the systenl even when they were wiclely regardecl I>y their peers as its-unciesen.ing-beneficiaries). Ramnik continues: 'Career' enjoys the distinction of being the 1110st talked about theme on Campus, and is a regular opening line in 'polite conversation' between the 'not so close' Inmates of the hostel. The pros ancl cons of doing an MBA, of opting for an MS or joining industry directly ;ifter. a first degree are the usual topics. It is surprising even to me why after spending so much effort on becoming an 'engineer', the IITian is so willing to give it up and take the CAT (IIM entrance) or GRE ... (RDN: We have, I inlagine, said ecough on the subject of the o v e m ~ e n i n gambition of the IlTians as well as on America 3s the significant sl~adow-other,the dream-world of the III7i:ln). Kamnili continues:

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With the entry of the MNCs opportunities here have definitely' grown; but the dream of immigrating is alive in the IITian's mind, both by night and day. From the training that final year students undergo, they form a negative opinion about the professional environment in India. A feeling o f being exploited by the software companies that sell in dollars the software they get made here and pay their Indian employees a fraction of their counterparts' salaries is inwitable considering that the IITian holds himself amongst the best in the world. One new prospect that has emerged from the MNC influx is the hope of return after working abroad for a few years to a-high level position in the Indian operations of an MNC. While we are young might as well earn some cash, and what will we be doing for Indfa anyway by making patented products for an MNC sitting here, getting paid a fraction?' A desire to return something to IIT, if ever possible, does exist but that they would be betraying the country by migrating is NOT the opinion of the IITian. And while these arguments proceed, a large percentage of IlTians quietly leave. (RBN-The narrative is neatly brought up to the present moment by Ramnik when he refers to the effects of the entry of MNCs into India in the era of liberalization. Again, I feel compelled to emphasize that Technobrat is not a book of 'solutions'; Otherwise, I would have noted that wh-en the question of 'doing something for their alma mater ' came up, I did put the following suggestion to some of my tutorial groups, and was delighted to find they did not reject it out of hand. Indeed, they seemed almost sympathetic. My thought: True, IITians should be free to travel/ immigrate anywhere in the world, like' any other Indian citizen, but since the relatively poor Government of India spent between a lakh or two of rupees educating every individual IITian for what was, i q effect, a lucrative. career abroad, perhaps IITians could be induced to pay back a lump

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sum of, say 5000 dollars, to their alma nzaters within, say, three years of landing a job. They could even ask to have some control over how such funds would he utilized. The point is that, by Allerican standards, a once-and-for-all payment of around five thousand dollars was not a lot but in India it would contribute both towards better facilities and towards expatriate IITians' continued involvement with this country.) Ramnik now ends with the following coda: These opinions, perspectives, attitudes, convictions of the IITian are formed after coming to IIT. As such, they constitute an 'IIT Culture' and make the IIT environment unique but often confusing to the outsider ...

The Truth About Tvashtri Culture: Two Hostel Stories Why did the famous IIT culture remain confusing to the end to outsiders? I approached the answer to this question circumspectly, through the shadow players, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who had been waiting so long in the wings of Technohrat. Once, l'd taught a creative writing course to the Tvasthris. These boys were not into creativity, but their scepticism and wit allowed me entree into that inner 'IIT Culture' of the hostels of which Rarnnik has spoken. As I remarked in the first chapter of this book, the hostels represent a sort of boundary. Within their interior confines is to be 'found the core culture of the Tvashtris. In this last chapter, I now provide a few quick, and doubtless illegitimate, snapshots of this part of Tvashtri culture, beyond the classroom limits of Technobrat. The stage belongs then, to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern...

A Dialogue by Aditya the Sceptic, Rosencrantz C-9 Aravali Hostel. Vinay is listening to the music of Megadeth, the latest additwn to his already impressive collection of hard rock music.

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Aditya, Vinay's roommate, enters. Aditya--(disgusted with the loud and shrill music) Again?! 'Phir se!, you have put on the music again?!! How can you listen to such crap? It is pure noise and you have it on such a high volume! Stop! My ears!' Vinay-'Kat le! How dare you call this music crap. YOU don't know anything, because you don't listen to these things. This group is a rage in the US and this cassette is their first release in India. It is absolutely funcioo.' Aditya-'So what, you can't make head or tail of what they say. The music is jarring. Aise lagta h a i j a k e jisko jo man me aya woh baja raha hai. You can't differentiate any of the instruments.' Vinay-'Tu phir shum ho gaya. Kitni baar hataoon, hard rock is the most potent music around. Log sun kur pagal ho jaate hain '. Aditya-'Haan! Sirf pagal hi sunte hain'. Vinay-'Tujhe b a p a t a ? In USA rock bands are like cult figures. They influence generations. And not only in the US! In India, in IIT Madras, a couple of students committed suicide because of the death of Kurt Cobain. They said in their suicide note that since Kurt Cobain was dead, no new music would be produced and so they wouldn't be able to concentrate on their studies.' Aditya-:/amor psychc honge. In rock music I can never make out the lyrics. They all seem to be rumbling. Pop music is better, at least the lyrics are legible. I only like Hindi music.' Vinay-'Haan, haan, let's compare the lyrics of pop and rock. Kurt Cobain says "I'd rather die than fade away". "I hope my end is brighter than life", w h l e in pop they say "Pump up the jam", "Boogey Boogey". It's bullshit!'. Aditya-'Rock lyrics are pessimistic. "1 hurt myself today!" "Don't call me daughter". Why d o they have to take such a morose view of the world? Have you ever heard positive rock lyrics?'

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Vinay-'Kyon? Bryan Adams is positive. But he is not involved in hard rock. So what if the lyrics are pessimistic. It is their feeling. They can see the hatred in the world. Tere jaise gadhe ise kaise samjhengk' Aditya-'Kyon nahin? As if they are the only intelligent ones.' Vinay-'T~L borz bol raha ha? You too listen to rock music. Yaad nahin tere paas two recorded cassettes hain. And you have Metallica, Aerosmith in it? Aren't they rock bands?' Aditya-'But all their songs are not shor! I only have their slow songs which can be considered instrumental pieces. 1 can never figure oqt their lyrics.' Vinay-'Bakzi~as mat & a r ! Here you are, shouting at the top of your voice calling rock nlusic shit! while you have cassettes of rock music. You are a bloody Pseudo' AdityaAshocked) 'I bm ,not a Pseudo.' Vinay-'Yes, of course you are a Pseudo. Mere samne \cassettes ko bade p y a r se sunta haitr but duniya mein j a a k a r gakli deta h a i ' . ' Adityai'I don't like your taste in music and if you think I like it, you are entirely mistaken'. Vinay-'Chup c h u . o n l t give justifications'. Aditya hod yaar- Okay I lose. Let's eat arzda para&&. Vinay-'Yeah! Phod-diya. Sare arguments par h a r a diya'. Aditya-'Okay, Okay. Lqt's go'.

Major Who? by Shalabh the Super Sceptic, Guildenstern From the diary of a hardcore IITian: 9.00 am 24th March: 'Bloody fool, why did you have to sleep through the night when you hadn't completed your course. Bastard, couldn't you take a night out?' I say to inyself furiously. M? Structural Analysis Major examination is just one

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hour away and I have completed only half the course. I had promised myself that I would take only a 1/2 hour.nap at midnight and had set the alarm accordingly. But the clutches of sleep were too strong for me to escape even if my ringing alarm clock did wake up my room-mate who'd disgustedly shut ,it off. When I wake up its 9 am. I hurriedly complete my ablutions and sit at my desk, with a martyr's look on my face. If only 1 had studied through the night. 'You know Shalabh, this only proves that no one has ever defeated you. Each time you have defeated yourself, a voice inside me says. 'Shut up', I mutter. My room mate looks at rne questioningly. I avoid his gaze and return to the book, attetnpting to understand in one hour what I couldn't in an entire semester. 10.30 am: The majors are about to begin. I pray-'Please God. Save me this time. I promise I will mug very seriously for the major tomorrow and get an A grade in that. Just save me in this course.' The major begins and within n o time ends. I have done half of it right and half wrong. 'Fuck it! I did it again. There goes m y . grade in this course', I mutter. I return to the hostel w-ith a dejected air on my face. 1.30 p.m.: I conlplete my lunch and go to Popat's room. 'Popat I am taking 3 nap. \Y:ake me 1.1p at 4 p.m. As it is, neither of us has passed in the I'M1 in 0ptil:lization. Today w e really have to fuck ourselves and then fuck this course to get a respectable grade'. Pop:lt agrees ancl goes off to sleep. I too return to nly l x d and enter the world of dreams. 5 p.m.: Popat wakes me up. 'Bastard! Couldn't you wake me u p at 4 p.m. You deserve to have your I~allseaten by rats', I shout at h i n ~ .He shouts Iqck some equally filthy expletives, Till 5.30 p.m., 170th of us :lrgue ahout what to study and what not to. Then for two hours I and I'opat mug

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seriously. We are slowly but surely cmcking the fundas of Optimization. Dinner time passes by. We are still mugging. 8 p.m.: The power system fails. 'Fuck! Bloody Fuck! ' I shout at the top of my voice. 'A hundred million fucks down IIT's throat. They always cut the power during majors!' Popat shouts back. 'It makes the majors tnore challenging and separate the chaff from the wheat. That's the IIT funda!', my room-mate interjects. 'Mother-fucker!', Popat and I chorus together. From 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. we walk the streets. At 10 p.m. the lights come back. From 10.30 p.m. to 1.30 am, Popat and I again have an intensive muggai-session. 1.30 am 'Popat, let's take a break, yaar! My system is overloaded', I say. Popat agrees and we both march down to the Common Room (C.R.). Popat says, along the way, ' We will watch the movie for just 15 minutes and then go hack. I haven't even reached Simplex!' 'Sure', I reply. We sit down in the common room. Within 5 minutes an intimate sex scene appears on the tube. Popat and I draw our chairs closer. We become engrossed in watching naked bodies writhing together. Goodbye Optimization. Half an hour has already passed. I say to Popat, ' Let's go. Otherwise we will get fi~ckedtomorrow.' 'Just wait. Let me see one more scene.' Popat's wish is immediately granted. A particularly detailed scene is shown on the tube. Both of us are mesmerized. We sit there for another half an hour enjoying more love sessions. 'Damn! Popat, its 2.45 am. Let5 go back and mug.' 'Shit. I never knew time was flying by', Popat wails. We climbypstairs to our rooms on the second floor. Both of us are too tired to do anything by the time we reach our

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rooms. Anyone would be if he'd kept awake till 3 am preparing for majors. Popat says, 'Let's sleep yaar. I will wake you up at 5 aln and then we can have an intensive, fundu muggai session from 5 a.m. to 10 am.' The idea appeals to me and I go back to my room and set my alarm-clock. I debate whether to shag or not. 'Fuck it, man', I say to myself. 'You can't shag before an Optimization paper. Don't you remember when you did before the quiz and got a zuck'. Duly chastened, I drift into sleep without indulging in untoward activities. 25th March. 9.30 am: I am cursing myself again. Once again I slept through the night. But this time it's Popat's fault. That bastard never wakes up anyone. I storm into his room. He is still asleep. I pour choice invectives on him and shake him awake. He takes one look at his clock and with amazing dexterity opens his book and starts mugging. I take pity on him and spare' him further abuse. After all, while I need 5 marks to pass, he needs 10. Poor guy. I return to my room and start mugging attempting to understand in one hour what I couldn't in an entire semester. 10.30 am: I am in the examination hall. On receiving the papers, the first thing I do is to fervently pray-'Please God. Save me this time. I promise I will mug very seriously, for the next major tomorrow ... .

Understanding the IIT Lingo Panic and sex, music and competition. Here was truth, caught l ~ yAditya and Shalabh in the knot of language as I hadn't been able to capture it. Rarnnik the Philosopher, writing earnest notes for me on the IITian hostel culture, had taken the first Hamletian step, but it was left to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, unselfconscious players, to show us 'the tn~th'.

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Before I lost my way again in the mazes of Tvashtri culture, I quickly questioned my other co-author, Ankur the Idealist, about that obvious meme carrier of IIT subculture-the 'IIT lingo' used by Aditya and Shalabh. How, I enquired agitatedly, does your 'lingo' help you cope with the stresses of 'IIT culture'? How does the vocabulary you use among yourselves secure you in your relationships? I know it's rather late in the day, but I want to understand how you manage the world linguistically. Sure, said Ankur, unfazed, and quickly jotted down a dozen or so phrases. Being a Tvashtri, naturally, he numbered them as well: 1. arbit. -> arbitrary 2. okay alright -> an expression of joy 3. masti -> fun 4. kat le -> an exclamation of disbelief 5. fight -> problem 6. stud -> a person who is good at everything 7. blast or phat gayi -> expression of frustration in a very problematic situation 8. kat gaya -> said when a situation fails you 9. scene -> situation 10. crack -> a very well done job 11. raped -> any job done very badly 12. night out -> being up all night 13. gandh -> useless 14. bhun chaka -> a nonsensical expression, used as an excuse to create a .nuisance The thing that struck me instantaneously about Ankur's list was that its phrases fell into broad typological categories: immediate expressions of emotions such as joy, disbelief, frustration (2,4,7,8,14);evaluations of persons or work (6,10,11); adjectival qualifications (1,3,5,13) and, minimally, situational descriptions 19,12). In short, this is first and foremost a vocabulary of attitudes and feeling. It presents the language

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Mabadevf Speab out of ths,Past to the Future 307 of bonding. Here, delicate as the traces of foam on the surfaces and margins of an ocean, we observe the elusive emotions of fellow-feeling that the IITian m d e often makes it his business to self-consciously deny. Notice also the repeated theme of 'problems' (57). A second obvious feature of Ankur's list is its wonderful and familiar bilingualism, which I see as a manifestation of

that rebellious, nonconformist pluralism that is often held to be typically 'Indian'. Arguably, by v ~ h of e its unconventional and always evolving khichri qualities, this student-lingo could work as a consistent antidote to the stern formalisms that characterize the workings of institutions such as the IITs. ast ti^, I asked Ankur why his list was so short. Surely, the IITians stock of lingo did not consist of only 14 words? Ankur the Idealist grimed a little shamefacedly. He said: Yes, there are a lot more words, as well as acronyms of the names of Profs., but they are not so polite! Which brings us to the important matter of self-censorship. AS we recognized quite early o n in HU484,ways of marking boundaries were cn~cial to self-definitions within a culture. A 'respectable' mainstream class in a mainstream institution had its tacitly declared boundaries and certain kinds of intruders, and intrusions, could simply not be allowed in. So a number of topics that had to be central in any discussions of current i~rbanculti~ressuch as films and sports-were discussed only tninirnally in our class-the plea being that while these subjects were indeed part of popular culture at large, they did not have much to do with technology-and the rubric of HU484 was ostensibly 'Technology & Culture'. I suspect, though, that we deluded ourselves when we stated that these topics were not wi:hin our purview. The real reason, I think, was that-like sexfilms, sports and so on were judged by the strong, conservative element in our class as inappropriate topics for free debate. These were the spoor of unspeakable sentences within our classroon~,the tracks of the Freudian unheimlich. They

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defined what was judged, by unspoken consent, as do-able within the classrooln and what remained taboo. Aditya's and Shalabh's stories were crucial because they had broken a taboo, a linguistic taboo that had remained in place throughout Technobrat. And blessedly, their curses now called up a vision of the Tvashtri unguarded, as I had never seen him, outside the confines of the classroom. Free. The flight of the peacock, its stunning fantail and its harsh cry--one was unimaginable without the other. I saw now how the flamboyant achievements of the Tvashtri were connected to his febrile anxieties, how his facelessness censored feeling, deep, troubled, feeling. By a strange coincidence, Shalabh the Super Sceptic, the deathless author of 'Major Who?' applied to d o a summer job with me at about the time the first draft of Technobrat was nearly done. One of the tasks I set hinl was to read the draft and then write 3 sort of 'Idiot's Guide' to it. Shalal7h began manfully but tired after a page:

A Page from the Idiot's Guide to Technobrat 'Please g o through the following test to detern~ine your suitability to read this Guide. If IQ <220 or illiterate about Alvares, Nandy, Davidson and other eclectic stuff or IITian 17iit not done HU484N, then you are qualified to read this Idiot's Guide and hence by implication could be termed a twat, sorry, Tvashtri ... 'Introduction/Preface/Foreword/Aftemord-I wasn't able to decide which of these would I3e most suitahle for the Idiot's Guide. So, in a fit of unconventionality, inspired I3y RBN's deconstn~ctedand polypllonic Technobmt, I illtinlately decided to leave the choice to the reader. Sonle readers might already be harbouring n number of doubts regarding my intelligence (where n as we all know in IITD tends to infinity). Lest you panic, let me inform all of you who qualified in the test above, that there isn't anyone Inore

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competent to guide you through Technobrat. For, while you are embarking for the first time o n this reading voyage I have already travelled the territory thrice, cover to cover, before I wrote this guide. 'I feel like old Charon escorting the dead to Pluto's underworld o r if you like closer home, a Yamadoot. Now that you know my impeccable credentials ji~st stay cool, 'dear reader'. By the way, don't you think dear reader is phonetically similar to Derrida and, well, if you are ignorant about who Derrida is then you better read this Guide before you plunge into Technobrat. Still not convinced enough to peruse my Guide?. You might b e thinking, well, you always considered yourself a decent, sensible person who got lauded for cool-headed, rational thinking. And now here comes along this impish fellow who calls you an idiot. Imagine such impudence! I understand, guys. But maybe, as I relate h o w I came to write this stuff, you'll appreciate my position. 'Let me introduce myself. I am an average/above average student (as defined by the grade point system of IIT) with average looks etc., etc. It was a semester or so back when due to a registration day mix-up I landed in a humanities course which I hadn't opted for. 'The course was HU420N-Workshop in Creative Writing and the course coordinator was Dr. Ruknuni Bhaya Nair (RBN, in short, for most of us in IIT). The course was, to put it in IIT lingo, 'cool'. I sleepwalked through most of it occasionally pulling myself out of my stupor to turn in some assignments. It was the same story for the other courses (of tlle Engg. variety) except that while I got an A- in HU420N, incidentally the highest that RBN awarded to anybody that semester, my other grades weren't as mentionable. Semester ended; summer vacations commenced. And, feeling a not-soindistinct cash pinch, I approachecPRBN for a summer job under her ...'

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At this point Shalabh's 'Idiot Guide' comes to an abrupt end. He thinks the whole business far too silly, summer job or n o summer job. What's the point, he asks. No one's going to read the book anyway. It follows logically that no o n e will read my Introduction,lPref~~ce/'Foreword,lAfterw ord. So what's the point of writing it? I thought you told me you liked reading and writing, I counter. Not this, answers Shalabh, it's boring. It's a response I recognize hy now-the IITian's reflex reaction to the printed word, So I don't back down. Instead, knowing the Tvashtri predilection for capitals, I silently hand Shalabh the following list:

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BHARGAVA 8r CHAKRAVAKTI. SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY AND THE INDkV MIND TURING. ELEGANT COMPUTERS: THE TRIUMPH OF THE MECHANICAL MIND PENROSE: WHY ROBOTS CAN NEVER BE H U W V RAY: OUR MACHINES AND OUR FICTIONS CRICK: WE'RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF NEURONS LYOTARD: HUMANS NEEDS INHUMAN MACHINES TO SURVIVE HARAWAY: POSTMODERN CULTURE IS A CYBORG CULTURE GOULD: WE'RE SOCIOBIOLOGICALLY PROGRAMMED TO PRODUCE TECHNOLOGY DAVIDSON: CULTURAL RELATIVISM AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL CONSEQUENCES MAHADEVIYAKKA: '0 ENGINEER OF THE WORLD, I'VE RUN TILL YOlJ CRIED HALT...'

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NEHRU: THE CONTRIBUTION OF TECEINOLOGY TO THE IDENTITY OF MODERN INDIA HEIDEGGER: QUESTIONING THE ESSENCE OF TECHNOLOGY PITRODA: WHY INDIA CANNOT RESIST TECHNOLOGY IN THE FUTURE NARASIMHAN: TECEINOLOGICAL LITERACY AND ITS PWCE N DEVELOPMENT ANDHI: EVIL MACHINERY: THE IDENTITY OF VILLAGE NDIA DESTROYED LVARES: COLONIAL VERSUS TrL4L)ITIONAL TECHXOI.O(;IES DAS: MACFIINES AS THE MEASURE OF MAN ARLIKAR: BUREAUCRACY, SCIENCE AYD HI-I'I'ECHNOLOGY IN hlODEKN INDIA TAGORE: THE TYRANNY OF TECIqNOLOGY ANI) THE CONSUMERIST MENTAI.ITY NANDY: TECI1NOLOC;ICAL HEGEMOhT & THE LONELY CONSUMER SEN: TI-IE ZERO SUM GAME OF TECHNOLOGICAL ONE-UPMAN-SHIP PIRSIG: QUALITY: TECHNOLOGICAL ZEN AND ARTISTIC PERFECTION '

Fancy reading any of these, I ask ~ h a l a b h .Not really, he answers, polite but defiant. We read them on HU484, I declare proudly. They were our key and sul~texts.But I'm not doing HU484 Shalabh reminds me with an air of great reasonableness. And he pans through the list again, stalling for time. I wait, my thoughts a dry trickle. summer's got Delhi by the throat. A pigeon thuds against my high sixth floor windowpane. No shelter anywhere. Delhi is a dr): dust-pwl. The IIT is deserted, most of the Tvashtris o n vacation. Waiting for Shalabh to nlake up his mind, I'm reminded suddenly of a story someone has told me about TITflora. Thirty years ago, when the Delhi IIT came into being, some enthusiastic horticulturist imported a beautiful leafy tree from South America. The campus was to be a garden of Eden. And the South American tree, growing in a clearing in the calnpus is truly glorious. I can swear to that. ~ ' dnoticed it, alive with

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birds at sunset, when I first joined IIT in November. I'd nicknamed it the singing tree. There was only one problem though, I was informed by a colleague. The tree was South American. So what, I asked, puzzled by his peculiar emphasis, too slow on the uptake. It looks good, he said, but it doesn't fulfil its purpose. What purpose? Well, it was meant to provide shade in the summer heat of Delhi but because it's a tree bred in the southern hemisphere, it sheds its leaves in summer. Look at it now! I crane to look. It's true, the tree is completely denuded. And the pigeons and peacocks and ~llynahshave to make d o with nestling against concrete window-sills in the Delhi heat ... It is hard, I realize, to be a Tvashtri in an all too chaotic world. He is the divine artisan, the most skiljiul oj' workmen, he has given to heaven and earth and all things their form, he is master of the universe... But there is always the possibility of a glitch, a spanner in the works. The best laid plans go awry. A South American tree or India herself will not exactly conform. Suddenly, I think I understand the frustration of the Tvashtri, a divine being in a human place. He may never lose his way in a maze of alternative answers; he may negotiate all the gates in a labyrinth like the expert that he is. He may know the truth but he cannot prevent others, like myself, from taking innumerable wrong turnings and generally mucking things up. How will Shalabh-Guildenstern, a model technobrat, deal with me? I look up. Shalabh grins at me. He has fortified himself with a bottle of Coca-cola and is fanning himself with a rather snazzy peacock's-tail fan. The cola has its immediate origins in the canteen and its true origins in a transnational superworld, proper homeland of the Tvashtris. This I know, but where did the fan materialize from? AS I ponder this minor mystery, an adjutant bird perched on IIT's bare ledges repeats its relentlessly tinny, cosmic question: don't you know, don't p u know, donY you know. It strikes me that there will

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always be some things obscure to me about the powers of Tvashtris. Who's this Mahadevi anyway, enquires Shalabh. I gather he has figured out that it's got to be a poem or such. The shortest of the tens on offer, he'll take that Honour saved, I rummage among nly files, secretly rather pleased at Shalabh's choice. That my faltering narrative should merge at the end of Technobrat with the prophetic cadences of Mahadeviyakka, twelfth century poet and a woman to boot, seems to me fitting. Things have come together rather nicely after allMahadevi's the last and wisest mantra in the ear of the divine IITian: 0 twittering birds, don't you know, don't you know? 0 peacock in the cavern, donY yoti knozv, don't you knou~?.

Monkey on monkeyman's stick puppet at the end of a stick I've played as you've plnyed I've spoken as you've told me,, 0 engineer of the world I've run till you cried halt ....