Prof. P.V. Indiresan awarded IEEE honorary membership
Prof. Indiresan was awarded the IEEE honorary membership for 1998. The text of the citation is given below. More information about this award (what it is, past recepients etc.) may be found at
http://www.ieee.org/awards/sums/98honmem.htm
Pavaguda
Venkata Indiresan, president, Indian National Academy of Engineering, New Delhi, India, -- named as Honorary Member ``for contributions to the growth of electrical engineering in India through
his leadership in education, applied research and professional engineering institutions.''
IIT Delhi had a ceremony to felicitate him for this award. His speech at the ceremony is included below.
Response of Professor Indiresan To Felicitation by IIT Delhi On The Conferment of Hon. Membership By The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (April 6, 1998)
Some people are born with honours; some acquire honours and some others have honours thrust on them. I belong to the third category! I have been lucky, lucky to have the kind of students I have had, and particularly lucky with the kind of colleagues I had the privilege to work with. Many of you would have heard of the Big Temple in Tanjore. That temple is an engineering marvel. As its name implies, it
is big, very big indeed. It is also aesthetically fascinating. But it is not a holy temple. It is not described as Thiru Tanjore the way holy temples are described in that part of the country. That is so because the Big Temple never had an ardent poet who sang in praise of its deity. Evidently, it is not how great you are but how great your
disciples are that determines what honours you get. So, I thank my stars that my students and colleagues are as great as they are !
Today, I plan to explore the reasons why India is, and has always been a weak force in international technology. Once we understand why we have been backward, and why we still are backward, we should be on the way to success. Let there be no misunderstanding. I yield to no one in my pride in what India has achieved in recent years. In many areas of space technology, defence systems, nuclear engineering, telecommunications and the like, we are admittedly at the cutting edge
of technology. We do not want to boast about it, we do not even talk about it but the work that we have done here at IIT Delhi on phased array radars would be deemed commendable in any part of the world. At the same time, it is proper for us to enquire why we built temple halls with a thousand pillars a millennium after others had mastered the design of the arch. Or, consider why we built the great sundial in
Jantar Mantar long after telescopes had become commonplace, and why even today we remain the only manufacturers of vintage cars. When Alexander bore down on us with his swift horses, we stood stuck in the mire with elephants. We learnt no lessons from our defeat at his hands. 1700 years later, we lost again to Babar because, in all those intervening centuries, we had remained loyal to elephants and further had nothing better than muskets to counter Babar's canons. Even in 1962, the Chinese humiliated us because they had modern arms and we had none. Why do we stick to obsolete technology all the time?
Let me illustrate the issue with a couple of stories. The first concerns a dhabha where, as is to be expected, the food was delightful. A guest after enjoying the meal, washed his hands and asked for a towel to dry them. The towel that was proffered was so filthy that he was driven to protest. The dhabha owner was perplexed. He replied ``Saab! Hazaron log use kiye hain; abhi tak koi complaint kiye nai!'' (Sir! A thousand people have used that towel and nobody has complained!) The second concerns a seller of gud in a mandi in Rajasthan. Noticing that the whole mound of gud was covered with flies, a young police officer asked the shopkeeper to do something about it. The shopkeeper was unperturbed. He said: ``Wo kitna kha sakta hai, saab!'' (How much can they eat, sir!) These anecdotes tell us a great deal about our culture. One, as in the case of the dirty towel, we are content with the barest minimum utility and have no concern for quality. Two, as in the case of flies, we measure what is irrelevant. We are backward in technology not because we do not have the materials, not because we do not have the talent, not
because we do not have the money, not even because we cannot get the technology. We are backward because, as Mancur Olson has postulated, our culture makes us think poor.
Technology innovation is like a baby. As you know, a baby is defined as an alimentary canal with a loud voice at one end and no responsibility at the other! Likewise, technology innovation is a conduit for digesting natural resources - with environmental disturbance at one end and science at the other. Let me turn to Thomas Kuhn to explain the science part of it. Kuhn has developed a theory to
explain why Western science has dominated the world for centuries. For that purpose, he broadly divides science into two categories: the normal and the revolutionary. Normal science involves:
1. Acceptance of a paradigm composed of mutually consistent hypotheses.
2. Setting solvable puzzles based on the paradigm.
3. Checking theoretical solutions by experiment.
4. Looking for anomalies.
In normal science, researchers operate with a paradigm by accepting certain hypotheses to be absolutely true. Based on those axioms, they set for themselves puzzles, solvable puzzles. After solving them theoretically, they verify the same by experiment. Every time experiments confirm the theoretical prediction, the paradigm gets strengthened. However, sooner or later, anomalies crop up. When they
do, the initial attempt is to question the experiment, not the paradigm. After some time, so many anomalies accumulate that the paradigm becomes indefensible. At that stage comes a new genius who postulates a new theory to trigger a revolution that produces a new paradigm which explains the anomalies and explains the earlier results too. What Einstein did to Newtonian mechanics is one such example. Once the new paradigm is accepted, the process continues with a new set of puzzles until yet another paradigm becomes necessary. At times, the old theory is subsumed; at times it becomes irrelevant. In the latter event, textbook writers give obsolete concepts an unceremonious burial by deleting them altogether. For instance, which
textbook today talks of phlogiston or even about electronic tubes?
Science textbooks do not argue the past, they merely ignore it! Compare that with philosophers who never forget and will not forgive either! That is why we have ideological wars but no wars between followers of Newton and Einstein, not even between devotees of Newton and Huygens.
Kuhn's paradigm may be described as a tetrahedron. Puzzle solving, anomaly detection, experimentation and textbook writing are its four vertices. A tetrahedron is admittedly the most stable structure imaginable. In this case, the situation is different. The Kuhn tetrahedron is normally as stable as you wish. But once in a while, it explodes. That combination of normal stability and occasional revolution is the hallmark of the culture of Western science. What about our culture? The Mundaka Upanishad says: Dve vidye veditavye . . . tatra apara rigvedo yajurvedah, samavedo atharva vedah; shiksha, kalpo, vyakaranam, niruktam, chando
jyotishmati. atah para, adrishyam, agrahyam, agothram, avarnam.
(There are two kinds of knowledge; the lower one consists of the Rig Veda, the Yajur Veda, the Saama Veda, the Atharva Veda as also diction, rituals, grammar, etymology, prosody and astrology. The higher one is unseeable, unreachable, origin-less and undescribable.)
These thoughts are prehistoric, were enunciated thousands of years ago. They still control our attitudes. We still feel in our bones that the highest knowledge cannot be measured, cannot be deduced logically, may only be realised intuitively and hence, cannot be taught in the conventional sense. There is also no space for experiment. Further, in the Indian tradition of caste, imparting knowledge to the undeserved
is prohibited. So, textbooks are not written with the fear they may fall into wrong hands. (That we have jumped to the other extreme with our affirmative policies is a different story.) At any rate, however much Feynman and Samuelson could have become famous, we look down on the writing of textbooks. So, if current Western science philosophy is like a solid tetrahedron, our tradition, lacking as it does both
experimental spirit and interest in writing textbooks, is formless. At the same time, some aspects of our philosophy are unbelievably fantastic. In which culture will the holiest of holy texts (in our case the Vedas) be described as inferior knowledge? Thus, we are warned not to accept even holy texts as immutable. That is great; that
should have made us prolific inventors. Unfortunately, we were also taught that innovation requires intuition that comes out of a form of Immaculate Conception. That needs a miracle. Unfortunately, in the strict sense, technology permits no miracles. Instead, as Kuhn points out, revolution is actually the culmination of continuous evolution - it is always one last straw that breaks the camel's back. In our culture, in theory, we may question but as we do not experiment, we have no logical way of doing so. That is why we still manufacture cars exactly the way they were designed nearly half a century ago.
In this respect, Indian intellectual culture is similar to that of ancient Greeks. They too felt that the best way to develop new ideas is to sit under a tree and think and think and think until realisation comes like a bolt of lightening. There is the story of Aristotle decreeing that women had less number of teeth than men. Such was
Aristotle's reputation in the Western world that, for centuries, people did indeed believe that women had fewer teeth. They could have easily verified whether that was true or false by asking their wives to open their mouth. They did not because in those they too did not believe in experiments. Eventually, they started experimentation, and progressed. We do not do so as yet. So, we remain stuck. Not many people are aware that the first rockets ever used in war were of Indian origin. Almost exactly two hundred years ago, Tipu Sultan stuck terror among British troops with his rockets. Unfortunately, his rockets were so primitive and so uncontrollable that they devastated Tipu's own troops as often as they hurt the enemy. So, Tipu Sultan abandoned his rockets instead of trying to improve them. (As a matter
of curiosity, the only sample of Tipu's missiles is not in India, but in the British War Museum.) The moral of the story is, generating ideas is not the same as converting ideas into usable products. The latter needs patience, time, determination and above all empathy. Thatis where Indian technology policy is found wanting.
These days, we are looking for new models of economic development. Many of us have been fascinated by the extraordinary progress of East Asian countries. There is a talk of instituting a new ministry on the lines of Japan's MITI. As Lawrence Summers has explained, the East Asian success is attributable less to technology
innovation and more to higher application of capital. East Asian countries operate with technologies that are available for sale, not with innovations of their own. However, a large country like India cannot become rich by selling TV sets and notebook computers based on somebody else's design. Then, what can we, who missed the bus of post-war expansion, do? The story of drug industry indicates the way out. Drug prices often fall to less than a tenth the moment their patents expire. That is an indication of the power of technology innovation. Monopolies are always profitable. However, in that respect no commercial monopoly can hold a candle to technology monopoly. That is, what India needs most is technology of her own. India can become rich not by exploiting labour, not by borrowing capital but only
through technical innovation.
Getting back to MITI, even in Japan, MITI is not much admired. MITI is a bureaucrat's paradise. It assumes that bureaucrats can out-guess entrepreneurs. We know that is not true. It is merciless competition (with unsentimental bloody exit) that ensures prosperity for worthwhile ideas and the elimination of useless ones. So, if have to at all try a MITI like experiment, it is best to introduce MITI-like divisions in every economic ministry and let all of them compete against one another. That might possibly work. On the other hand, one single MITI will end up like our Planing Commission, excellent in promise but poor in performance. What we need is not more management but better innovation. That is exactly what a bureaucratic set up like MITI cannot provide.
Richard Feynman has some very interesting things to say about innovators, rather about uncreative people. According to him.
``(Uncreative people's) main characteristic is a desire for exactness and precision, and for definiteness-a desire for formal rules that will be guaranteed to work and to yield results. I have to be very specific here. The main characteristic is really that they want someone to give them that exactness and precision, those definitions
and those formal rules. But of course what distinguishes a creative scientist is a desire to create (italic original) an exactness or a definition or a way of stating a problem. Or to create a system of rules that will guarantee that the other fools get the right answer.''
Then, who deals with rules? Bureaucrats! So, let us leave them alone. Instead, let us ask what we ourselves do here in the IIT. Do we train our students to be creative, or do we let them assume that the engineering world is a precisely regulated place with exact answers to every problem? IITs are so much examination oriented with so much emphasis on accuracy that it is possible we induce our students to concentrate on common-sense and prevent them from exploring uncommon sense. Feynman is contemptuous of uncreative students who ``worship
the Baconian idea of science'' and ``delight in trying to define as precisely as possible.'' He regards them as ``the bottom of the barrel''. As he says, the Baconian method is like Darwin's, to record everything and hope to find a pattern there in. Instead, Feynman extols the ability to pick and choose what to record and what
not to record, that is, the ability to approximate. Let me modify his thesis to point out that the more precise your measurement becomes, the more probabilistic the result will be. I shall not repeat Feynman's own earthy description but paraphrase it in more polite terms.
``Your weight is essentially a constant from one day to the next if the accuracy chosen is plus or minus a Kg. However, what with your daily imports and exports, your weight becomes a random variable if it is measured accurate to a gram.''
Do we teach our students to appreciate that the fun is not in measuring precisely the average value but in studying the variations around the mean? While we teach them Boolean logic do we also tell them about Bertrand Russel's paradox? If the village barber is defined as one who shaves every person who does not shave himself, does the barber shave himself or not? In other words, can it be that
we in the IITs train students to solve problems but not to think! If that is happening even in the IITs, where else can India go to get thinkers and innovators of tomorrow?
Let me now shift the thread of the argument. I believe philosophers are those who have the sixth sense. Then, let us say they can solve sixth order equations. By the same token, artists can solve fifth order equations - they can handle all five senses. Scientists are often described as mad. That is possibly because they have no
taste. So, they can solve only fourth order equations. Engineers, the common garden variety at any rate - come yet another peg lower; they are often accused of having neither taste nor sense of smell. Ask any environmentalist! So, they can handle only third order equations. Politicians are worse, they have no taste, they stink and
further, they have no vision. However, they have their years to the ground and a fine sense of touch, I mean they know how to make a touch on your purse. So, we may take it they can solve second order problems. Still lower are bureaucrats who do not care to hear. They know only how to make a touch. So, they can tackle nothing better than first order equations. Is there a still lower breed? Who can that be? Let me make a guess. How about IIT graduates who go on to study in the
institutes of management and manage Indian industry!
Let me explain. The problem with those who make it their profession to provide precise management answers is, they often end up with precisely wrong answers. As it has been said, it is better to be approximately right than to be precisely wrong. Let me give one example. It is said that Howard Hughes the self-made billionaire of
yester years approached a banker for a loan to build an aeroplane. According to the story, the banker refused to lend him the precisely- calculated amount the gawky youngster wanted. He insisted on lending him a lot more because a new venture is always uncertain, and there will always be unexpected demands. Compare that banker's wisdom with the way our bankers and grant giving agencies operate. Our
administrators pare down financial support to the barest minimum in the expectation the returns will then become maximum. As we know, more often than not, our bankers and our government lose everything. In contrast, Hughes's banker not only saved all his investment, he made millions for himself and for Hughes too. Once again, precise answers are wrong, approximate ones are right! Our country will march forward in technology only when our managers stop insisting on assured
returns, and prepare to gamble to lose all -- or win the jackpot!
Then, there is the even more startling case of the Xerox Corporation offering to sell to IBM the patents of the Xerox copier. In turn, IBM turned to Arthur D. Little, the famed management consultants, for advice. Those management experts calculated that even if the Xerox copier took away 100 percent of the existing market for carbon paper and for dittographs, it will not be financially viable. So, IBM turned
down the offer. Against such advice, Xerox persisted. The rest is history. The flaw in the management approach of Arthur D. Little was, there is no way of conducting market research on a product that does not exist, a flaw nobody in India appreciates. As Schumpeter pointed out over eighty years ago,
``innovations do not as a rule take place in such a way that first new wants arise spontaneously in consumers . . . It is the producer who as a rule initiates economic change, and consumers . . .are taught as it were to want new things.''
When we look at our managers, I am reminded of an itinerant vendor who sold a customer a bottle, which, he assured, will kill mosquitoes. When the customer wanted to know what he should do with the bottle, the vendor explained: ``catch the mosquito and put it inside the bottle. Then it will die.'' When the customer protested that he could as well have squashed the mosquito, the vendor assuaged the customer saying ``That may as well be the easier way of killing mosquitoes, but
this has always been my way of doing it!'' It would be nice if our managers, whether in the government or in industry, ask of themselves every day, and day after day, ``Am I using this technology because it is good, or is it because I am used to it?'' As Robert Frost has written:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that made all the difference.
Do we train our students to take the less traveled road?
Let me conclude with another thought. We bemoan that our lot is bad, that teachers are not given their due. Having been a member of the Pay Commission of IIT and other institutions, I know those complaints very well. The situation indeed is bad. As Donald Christiansen, long time editor of IEEE Spectrum has said:
``A country that trains its engineers and technologists well, then rewards them with both real and psychic income, should have little trouble competing in a world economy that thrives on trading high quality, high tech products over international boundaries.''
I could not agree more. Consider Christiansen's phrase ``psychic income''. That comes from respect offered and respect received. Do we, the teachers of IIT respect our colleagues? We know our colleagues too well, we know what their failings are. That blinds us to their virtues. We want the government to single out IIT teachers for special benefits but we do not want to give the same teachers anything ourselves. In one of the most evocative passages in our Upanishads we are given the advice:
Shraddhaya deyam, ashraddhaya adeyam.
Hriya deyam, bhiya deyam, sriya deyam, samvida deyam.
(Give with reverence; do not give disrespectfully. Give with humility,
give with a sense of awe, give generously, give affectionately.)
We are not good at giving. That is why we ourselves get so little. I must admit, however, that you have made an exception in my case. You have given me a lot. I am getting so much from you at this old age long years after I retired. I have come to believe the only reason why I have been so lucky is because when I could, I gave what I could. I did not give away what was mine but only let others have what was actually theirs. Authority is exercised both when you say ``Yes!'' and when you say ``No!'' I can assure you, it is more joyful to exercise authority by saying ``Yes!''than by saying ``No!''. Then, if you have to say ``yes'' ultimately, why not
say so immediately? As you observe from my case, it is rewarding too! Dutta Roy told you today about what I have done for IIT. He forgot to mention that the best thing I did for IIT is to induce a number of outstanding persons like him to give up lucrative careers elsewhere to join in the struggle for life here in IIT. That is my pride: I persuaded a number of minds greater than mine to join the IIT. It can
only be on their behalf that I can accept the honour you have done me today.
Mancur Olson Jr., Big bills on the sidewalk: Why some countries are rich and others are poor, The Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1995.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago
University Press, 1970.
David and Judith Goodstein, The Uncreative Scientist: Feynman's
Other Lost Lecture, Caltech News, Vol. 31, No. 4, PP. 12-17, 1997.
Michael Hammer and James Champy, Reegineering The Corporation: A
Manifesto For Business Revolution, Nicholas Braily, London, p. 86.
J.A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development, Oxford
University Press, 1961
Christiansen, Donald, Engineering Excellence: Cultural and
Organisational Factors, New York, 1987, IEEE Press.
