On the threads that bind…
Happy xxxx is a greeting often seen in social
media, and today’s feed was no different. A day spent to honest materials
research under a hot shop floor with cutting edge materials and a data logging
laptop was interrupted with a happy Onam. Yes happy Oman I messaged back. Happy
namo came another response. Sure he is I thought and got back to work. The day done;
a cool Uber took me to an air-conditioned metro which took me to Chennai
central. Happy Onam the lady greeted to someone over the phone. That done her
phone with a Jesus Saves as the DP buzzed, her tone was more than a tad
respectful. What did you eat? Was the Avial OK? He is on a call, right? I will
take a metro and come home. Not to worry. Ah. Ah. Sure. Thanks. Tomorrow is Avani
Avittam? Oh yeah. Are we going to make payasam? Sure. The person next to me was
juggling cultures and schedules. Unfettered by healthy diet, I waved out when
ice-cream vendor passed by, cutlets, avoided cold dosas with rivers of chutney
and dozed off. My school group buzzed. There was an argument between free
speech loving American desis and anti-preached desis. Happy Raksha bandhan and happy Avani Avittam said another
thread. While these are well intentioned events, with the former supporting some
interaction between genders when it was all frowned upon, while the latter is a
brahmin male’s ritual committing to learning and piety, marked by the changing
of sacred thread, to mark the retrieval of Vedas stolen by demons back to
Brahma – however this tradition excludes women and men who are not brahmins by
birth. Hence the debate, to put it mildly.
The best interpretation of the Raksha Bandhan is
that women are vulnerable, and the men protect them tying what is a platonic
knot symbolised in the form of a thread. Who are they protected from? The
nameless underworld? A frustrated lumpen? Or those who belong to any other? And
why not the other way round. The men who are vulnerable to myriad pressures,
including being robbed, mugged, cyber duped? I That only the males offer
protection is a stereotype.
Avani Avittam is the day when Brahmin males
change their sacred thread. A morning spent in gentle male bonding within the
clan, with shlokas narrated, Ganesha propitiated, an hour spent cross legged in
front of a smoky fire, verses narrated without comprehending the meaning. The girls don’t get to partake, they can of
course cook dishes to mark the event. People
from other castes are not a part of this ritual. A
tradition that is kept alive partly out of belief, and partly because other
good traditions are under assault. Well,
others are not equipped to understand is the refrain. The shlokas, even the more profound ones are
not too complicated. If high school kids can solve differential equations and
perform matrix inversions and multiplications they certainly will not blank out
when asked to narrate the meaning of Gayatri Mantra. While these rituals are
replete with meaning and symbolism, connecting us to the divine, exclusion is the
only problem.
So here is a simple appeal to make all threads
universal.
Switching to the corporate world, threads have
become a buzz word. Especially a digital thread. In such a magically connected
world, the digitised design process would interface with CAD drawings and on to
production and on to production records and on to service records. The digital
thread becomes the nerve Centre of organisation learning and memory. To lend
complete meaning one needs to have a digital twin that connects changes to a
component in service to how it got there in the first place, the manufacturing
parameters, supplier heat numbers, quality records,and operating conditions including
life limiting locations. Getting those threads connected is more that appending
files, but getting to really understand material response to service
conditions. Such a philosophy can be applied to anything that is manufactured and put to
use. From implants to airfoils to batteries. A
thread built on rigor. But like all engineering proclivities this such an approach
tends to be reductionist in nature,
trying to simplify the complex. The unknowns are not dug further. But mashed
under a probabilistic response. The focus has shifted more towards the digital
thread and digital twin. In some ways
the systems response is like solving a multiple choice tough exam. The toughest of the problems is left unsolved,
while those that find traction are solved.
The corrosion condition that pushed the material to pit and crack gets
ignored; the failure of a seal upstream in allowing the hotter gas flow to
reach critical locations is ignored too.
The digital twin supports decision making for typical conditions while
transients and upset events which are life limiting often get ignored. But like a college kid who could ace the exam
without knowing everything, initiatives like the digital twin continue to allow
the organization to live the 80 – 20 rule without comprehending that when the
bad 20% catches up one could be caught napping.
Therefore we engineers, have not quite gotten
ourselves to say happy digital thread day..: today is Avani Avittam. Time to
reboot the computers and data. Partly
because engineers on the ground, except for the super ambitious are grounded. They are
quite aware of the physics that is missing, in not being able to predict that
corrosion fatigue failure, that fatigue interaction, that flutter induced
damage event. With so many unknowns, the ones who are honest say, well the
digital twin is great when the entire physics is nailed, but we need money to
nail the entire physics. However, the
lure of a digital twin, that combines probabilistic algorithms with an 80% understanding
of physics, to predict machine performance and failures, caught the upper
leadership and drove a culture where the physics need not be completely
understood. The digital thread falls
short of the ideal and needs to be further tuned.
Which gets us back to other threads in the society
that bind and divide; Can all other societal threads be tuned too. To produce a
twang that sounds inclusive
