Sriramajeyam

Sriraramajeyam

I had a string of aunts and cousins who had their little notebooks with unruled blank pages.  As a kid I would watch them sit quietly, focused on their writing.  It would read in Tamil, possibly in No. 4 font, Sriramajeyam.  More than half a dozen columns, about fifty lines to a page, filled with Sriramajeyam.  It would take them half an hour or more.  They would look at me and smile and say it is good for you.  The exercise resulted in the cleansing of the mind; an affirmation of the sense of discipline and obedience that Rama must have surely shown when he was banished from his palatial home with Sita and Lakshman.  An affirmation of the fact that he had strength and power, but that could be used only for extenuating reasons, ensuring that punishment is meted out only to those directly responsible for the crimes.  Sriramajeyam became a metaphor for both devotion and restraint.

Over the last three decades, Sriramajeyam in the south has been replaced by a more truculent Jai Shree Ram – a bullying war cry that has emanated from the north, finding the occasional echoes in the South.  While we cringe at these sounds, and long for the solace that Sriramajeyam brings the question that needs to be addressed is how did we get here.  How did what was essentially a tussle for street and muscle power between two communities assume gargantuan proportions of a theologically driven hate campaign, something that could not find any sanction in the scriptures.   Was it just the Parivar prodding the masses or were there deeper undercurrents at play.

The answers probably lie in how we read the past, in the South and the North.  The hinterlands of Tamil Nadu which are a huge draw for domestic tourism are replete with temples for every God; most of them are centuries old, magnificently conceived and constructed, cherishing a lore which is unique to that temple.  While the devotees come in clearly stratified by birth and wealth, those differences seem dwarfed by the power the temple holds – so much so that even the poorest of the poor come out feeling special and blessed.  The South sees the past as a heritage that continues to thrive to this very day.   Our freedom was special not because we attained it, but more so because of the methods of ahimsa that was used.

However in the north, freedom got mixed up with partition, a scar that one would have hoped would have disappeared with the passing generations but refuses to do so.  Even liberals have it.  I still remember a casual post on social media about the Birla Mandir in Delhi, constructed barely 100 years ago, as the oldest Hindu temple in Delhi.  Is that true?  May be not grammatically, but much of the heritage that existed is gone thanks to centuries of conquest and plunder which inevitably followed.  One could ask similar questions about the grand Angkor Wat temple in Borubudur.  Did something else exist undernneath?  Was a culture put to the sword to build the grandest of the grand shrines?  Can we go beyond the wounds that our ancestors suffered that we never did, and hold out a hand in peace and say enough is enough.  May be build a museum for conflicts and erase the past.  In the culture that we grew up in this could be called Sriramajeyam. 

The 2020 D-Virus

Our world is now being rocked by the COVID 19 Pandemic, threatening to wipe out 5% of the population in one go unless we lock ourselves down and wait for the viral tsunami to pass.  A century after the Spanish flu, the medical technology has only palliative answers to such epidemics.  Over the past decade the world has been hit by dozens of extreme weather events – the unprecedented bush fires in Australia, the inexorable melting of the ice cap in the Arctic, mind boggling rain fall in a span of a few days in western ghats, western Himalayas, while concentration of green-house gases has been rising towards the precipice year after year.  Ah we have Renewable Energy we say and point to the Giga-factories with hope; the truth is that while the capacity of renewable energy is 30% of total in many countries, what is delivered to the grid is barely 12% of the total energy needs, and why?  - the best sunlight for solar power is for 5 hours a day, the wind blows the way it should for a few hours every day.  While the smokestacks smoke, species extinction under anthropogenic pressures is an occurrence that takes place week after week.  Imagine trillions of virus and bacterial looking at humans getting obliterated saying ah that is a blip..  In the engineering world, a major aircraft manufacturer is faced with issues where boundaries of a legacy design have been stretched to a point where it could not work that reliably under certain conditions; getting to such a point would have been unconscionable a decade ago.  But it is a new normal across life.   In the nitty gritties of the brick and mortar engineering world, flyovers have collapsed because of a welding defects. roads have become sinkholes, wind turbine towers have collapsed, boilers have blown up.  The automotive world is replete with failures in the middle of nowhere of trucks that should run for a million miles break down in highways because of a differential pinion or a broken axle, all because we could still cast and forge a metal free of defects, that show up like a hidden cancer years later; while digital operators think all of this could be predicted by big data.

Is there a common thread that links all of this?  I think there is. We don't focus on the problem.  We are distracted.   While we have Terrabytes of memory, we can command only a few bytes of rigor.  The rigor that goes into the very foundations of our thinking – as engineers, scientists, economists, ecologists, sociologists, administrators  – has given way to the DISTRACTIONS of the modern world.   These distractions are all pervasive. 

I would define distraction in our context as follows:

1. A distraction is a problem statement that is neither real nor has real world solutions.
2. A distraction is also a learning moment, where an avenue gets pursued to find a solution which became a dead end for a valid reason.
3. A distraction is a buzz world that the working core of an organization could smell from a mile away.
4. A distraction is turning ones head away from the issue at hand to respond to stimulus that could be done later.
5. A distraction is a nugget from the external world, processed and stored, to be harnessed by thinking laterally.

Not all distractions are bad, but there are some we need to think about.

Techies Distracted: 
We need to put food on the table, which means grants to buy equipment, fund research staff or students, recruit more bright minds and the works.  A substantial focus is on the here and now and that is how the system works and I respect that.  The challenge begins when we start thinking about research ideas which are a bit more out on the horizon.  The question is are we focused enough on addressing the world’s problems or are we creating a virtual universe at work which will never fix the real problems of the outside world.  The automotive market is about 100 million vehicles, consumed by a fraction of the 7000 million humans who inhabit he world.  The rest can’t afford it, and view success as simply holding on to their dignity and livelihoods doing back breaking work that brings food to our table, keep the streets clean, lay the roads for us to drive and build houses for us to live.  But the best minds across the world are hell bent on automation because of the challenge it brings, of computing and sensors on the edge, backed by AI that allows for autonomous decision making, backed by programs and decision making algorithms that envisage every possible scenario encountered by a driverless car or a fruit picking robot.  The world ‘s best parallel computing chips are now being harnessed for VR Games that kids and adults can play on their smart phones.  While the AI enabled big brother watches every text you type and click you make to entice you with products that could be home delivered tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, the worlds critical problems go abegging.  Epidemics, non-communicable diseases, mental illness, climate change, carbon sequestration, species extinction, agro-waste, dying forests, life limited metals, brittle ceramic coatings, turbomachinery and IC engines that seem to be plateauing out in efficiency and performance, performance degradation, unexpected breakdowns – in boilers, power plants, rolling mills, Aluminum smelters, computers.  The list is mind boggling, yet we distracted techies of all hues seem to be just skimming the surface, chasing the what ifs that never address the crux of the problem.  And right now, it often goes like this. the real (engineering, biological, microbial) world is too complex and will require hundreds of PhDs and dozens of years to wade through.  so, the secret sauce lies in fusing enough of the incompletely understood physics with big data to predict behavior in the engineering or microbial world to leap frog in product capability.  It sounds seductive – and so organizations start chasing data analytics letting go of the physics which often needed only the last mile funding to get to the goal post.  We were chasing a problem statement that may be real, but the solutions were a mirage.  Did we get distracted?

We need to look to the medical world that is focused like a laser beam in trying to find solutions, backed by time tested rigor of hypothesis, establishing feasibility, and testing to get products and solutions right – whether it is a stent that saves us from open heart surgery or drug delivery systems that target the diseased organ and bring it back to life.  We need to take cues from the success stories all around – if millets can become wine, and beer can become alcohol and flowers become liqueur, surely agrowaste can become fuel – it is renewable – a headlong rush to find the best digestion and gasification technology can make farmers sell their waster and become part of the energy and fuel supply chain.  The possibilities are endless if we can collaborate across disciplines and address problems that are real and critical, rather than chase ideas that benefit the top 1% of the world.

Organizations Distracted
We are talking about the “d” word because our eco-system is vastly different from what it was two decades ago.  A typical day starts with reading newspapers online and TV and browsing through social media posts on whatsapp, facebook, twitter, a barrage of information clustered around polarized opinions, nuggets from the world of science and engineering – as my daughter pointed out, flashes of deep peer reviewed papers tweeted into our cellphones and one off experiments fleeting through and occupying an equal Mindspace, nuggets from who is where – with where typically being associated with the best  - the Silicon valley, MIT – the cradles of technology as is seen today.   Some of these nugget clusters transform into idea clusters – the aspirational what ifs that are exchanged between us and the virtual peer group of academia and thought leaders.  Some of these concepts snowball into buzz words – becoming that body of potentially transformational science or technology that can help us get some funding, go to the next one, maybe solve some real world problems and create new products along the way – and if not… who knows a decade or two later it could hit the shelfs.  We forgive the wild goose chases even before it begins.  The modern workplace understands and often encourages the impingement of ideas socialized in the social media to make its way into workplace.   I can’t think of a single contemporary organization that is not thinking about, exploring and acting on today’s buzz’-word.  The test they could have to put it through was – “what real world problem statement does it solve, is the solution real and plausible?” , or  “in getting into this what did I stop or undercut in my world” and equally importantly,  “what other product could I have created which is more useful and critical for the world than the buzz word being explored”.  These distractions packaged as growth engines, but really buzz words that give a growth path for the millennials have found a way to hijack the some of the best minds in the best corporates to a career path which creates no real products or value for the organization they work for.  While the corporates and the millennials live on the possibility that it could all work out, the experience and rigor, they could have brought to an existing product is lost.  The synapses we trigger through the stimuli from social media, combined with just that right whiff of science and technology, creates ripples, across the engineering world and academia that can potentially kill rigor in our ecosystem.  It is the D virus.  Distraction Virus.

Nations Distracted.  For a nation state a distraction is chasing a problem that is neither real nor has real world solutions.  In the 1980s, the most genial and one of the best Presidents Republicans had produced – Ron Reagan dreamt of Star Wars ..  an array of lasers or something mounted on satellites looking for Russian missiles and shooting them down, with pinpoint precision with enough firepower to destroy 200-ton missile, and intelligence to know that it is not a civilian aircraft or a satellite but the Russian nuke.   A complete eco – system to make Star Wars feasible on a pilot scale boomed –  while surely Star-wars funded lasers and AI and a success theater was created around Patriot Missiles, 40 years out we watch helplessly when North Korea pushes the launch button, or when an Iranian soldier and a Russian maverick launch a surface air missile that took down two  civilian aircrafts, and even worse look on helplessly when MH370 evaded every radar and satellite to disappear.  The billions that went into Star Wars could have funded a million more ventilators today.  Or get us closer to finding cures for debilitating illness such as MS and Parkinsons.  If there was rigor at the top someone could have told the President the purpose of defense is to keep the citizens alive.  Star Wars is best done by Steven Spielberg..  That is rigor in thinking, that is rigor in setting the agenda.  Back home in India the leadership at the top is obsessed about hoisting India up as a developed country, while setting a cultural agenda to reclaim our civilizational glory.  If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck it must be a duck goes an old saying.  And so, we have embarked on the Bullet trains and glittering airports and the Hyperloops to show that we are developed, while we are clumsily trying to recreate a chauvinistic and aggressive India where Hindus ruled over a thousand years ago.   These are distractions.  What India needs is an engine that continues to create socio economic growth, while ensuring sustainability and inclusion.  And where individuals and corporates can pursue their passion – whether it is art, literature,   religion and philosophy, science, sports, enterprise – business or social – and excel.  When they do that, they will bring enough laurels, and recreate contemporary history.  But every now and then we can find ways to transcend the clutter as our Prime Minister did last week to heed advise backed by rigor and hard data and the science of epidemiology to order a lock down avert thousands of deaths.  If only the marginalized people could go home or live the next month with dignity.

I see hope in the small experiments that combine rigor and inclusion.  Social enterprises that are restoring degraded forests by combining livelihoods and local know-how to cost effectively bring back habitats, organizations that have found ways to take a small pot full of seeds to create dry land crops that provide food on the table, enough hay to feed two hefty cows for a year, and milk on our tables while that one home lives in dignity.  I see hope in surface science that can stop aircraft wings from icing up and stop that one in a million chance of an accident.  I see hope when aircraft engines and gas turbines today produce 400% more thrust at 25% better efficiency through years of product development involving advanced materials.  I see hope in the rigor and speed with which scientists from all hues in Indian Space Research Organization could launch the mission to Mars at a cost which is less than what a fortune 500 CEO makes in a year. I see hope when a 88 year old could wheeled into the emergency room with an aging heart, flooded lungs and a failed kidney and the doctors take stock, and chart a course of action where everyone smiles again.

Rigor lurks everywhere..  COVID 19 tells us that we need to pay heed to the science..  AND while we find ways to kill the Corona Virus we need to  overcome the D virus..  without being distracted.