fear of engineers

[Guest guest]

Fear of Engineering Rajeev Srinivasan (E-mail Address(es): rajeevmail

 

http://www.rediff.com/news/2002/nov/01rajeev.htmI have been noticing an

interesting phenomenon for some time, but it reached a crescendo with the

ascent of Abdul Kalam to the post of President of India. The rise of the humble

aeronautical engineer to the nation's highest post coincided with a flurry of

articles and statements in the Indian media that demean and attack scientists

and engineers. I conclude, following in Erica Jong's footsteps, that 'Fear of

Engineering' is the root cause. You remember Jong and the zipless

you-know-what, don't you? Anyway, the first inkling I got about the fear of

engineering was in something by a particularly puerile (but definitely cute: I

saw her photograph somewhere) 'secular progressive' columnist: she named many

right-wing Hindus with backgrounds in science. Since right-wing Hindus are

scum, implied she, those who study science must ipso facto be scum. Her logic

is wrong, of course: she ascribes to the whole an attribute of the part. The

interesting allegation is the connection between right-wing-ness and science.

Are right-wingers more prone to study science rather than humanities? Or is the

causality the other way, that is, they studied science, therefore they became

right wing? She didn't say. More recently I saw a magazine interview with the

celebrated author Amitav Ghosh, where he said something to the effect that a

lot of fundamentalists are engineers with banal ideas about religion.

Charitably, he didn't confine this to Hindu engineers alone, but gave the

impression that engineers of all religious persuasions had banal ideas about

religion. I wondered why he focused on engineers alone. Do doctors have

non-banal ideas about religion? Do physicists? Do botanists? Or for that

matter, what about economists? Lawyers? Ghosh did not elaborate. Now it is

surprisingly politically incorrect of these people to pick on a set of people

and impute certain characteristics to them. We are all aware of the Bell Curve

and the perils of broad-brush stereotyping. I mean, imagine if the first

columnist were to say all Buddhists were scum, or if Ghosh said all Christians

have banal ideas about religion. There would be an uproar. This is another

example of how the 'secular progressive' cabal is able to compartmentalize its

concerns: religious minorities get all their solicitous attention, but not, for

instance, linguistic minorities. Personally, I have never claimed to be

politically correct, so I am entitled to generalize, and I shall do so quite

happily below. I have to make some disclaimers here in the interests of full

disclosure. My parents are both retired professors of the humanities, and

whatever I say about the humanities types applies mostly to the younger

generation: for in my parents' young days, it was not the case that every

bright student wanted a technical education in engineering or medicine to

guarantee them a livelihood. In their day, the liberal arts had not yet become

monotheistic cults regurgitating received wisdom from Beijing, the Vatican,

Deoband or Chicago. Furthermore, I have my degrees in engineering and

management, so attacks on these technical subjects I do take a little

personally. Some Canadian woman (waving her PhD) once suggested that, because

of my background, I couldn't possibly understand the humanities. I asked her,

based on the general (low) level of intelligence she exhibited, if she had

bought her PhD on the web. She was most offended. I must confess though that

one of the best insults I ever got in my hate mail pile was from some Malayalee

fellow (therefore possibly a Marxist) who suggested that I should ask for my

tuition fees back from IIT and Stanford, for I had obviously not learned

anything here! Touche! In any case, it is pretty clear that some people have a

rather poor opinion of either pure or applied scientists. And in particular, a

bone to pick with engineers. This of course is a gauntlet waiting to be picked

up; and there have been some retorts. P V Indiresan, former director of IIT

Madras, responded with an article. And of course, there is always the old

Samuel C Florman classic, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering, to fall

back upon. Why this disdain for the T-square brigade? The Indiresan article

suggests that it is pretty safe to abuse engineers, because they are generally

inarticulate and tongue-tied, diffident, and poor communicators. They do not

react, nor do they get much media airtime or column inches. Quite. But then a

few upstart engineers are spoiling the whole thing by speaking up, rationally

and logically. They are beginning to upset the cozy apple carts set up by

humanities types, especially those from the Jawaharlal Nehru University cabal.

Said JNU-bots are appalled. Naturally. I mean, how dare these engineers...?

These JNU people have, ever since the BJP came to power, been on the defensive.

Their comfortable sinecures as court historians and hagiographers have come

under a microscope. They had for fifty years labored mightily, and

successfully, with a few simple agendas: The glorification of the Nehru dynasty

The downplaying of Indian history, Sanskrit, and anything else native The

myth-making about some imaginary composite culture based largely on imported

ideas A prime example, of course, is the Aryan Invasion Fairy Tale. It suits

the humanities types (and their many sponsors and financiers overseas) to keep

drilling into the minds of impressionable Indian children and youth the idea

that there is nothing of value that is wholly Indian, and that India is

entirely a second-rate, imitative, culture. Which I suppose creates a better

market for Euro/American and Chinese goods and ideas. And keeps India forever

servile and backward. It bothers the JNU types that many of those challenging

both their cherished shibboleths and their neo-colonialist processes are

engineers and computer scientists. For example, N S Rajaram, Subhash Kak, Rajiv

Malhotra. That many are Non Resident Indians adds fuel to the fire. There have

been quite a few articles from for example, the formidable Anita Pratap, simply

bashing NRIs as though they were collectively some kind of troglodytes.

Appalling, an NRI engineer, my god, how awful that these people dare challenge

the obvious superior wisdom of us flat-earth, 'creationist' humanities types! I

am again reminded of Galileo Galilei and his encounters with the Vatican. Some

people just can't take new ideas lying down: like the Vatican which finally

recognized that the earth revolves around the sun 300 years later (in 1980 or

so), it will take JNU about 200 years to accept that the Aryan Invasion

Twinkle-Toes Tale is bunkum. There is a particularly illuminating and

entertaining discussion going on at www.sulekha.com as I write this. Rajiv

Malhotra triggered it off with an essay on the representation of Hinduism in

American academic circles. One might think this obscure stuff, but Malhotra

showed how this has a significant impact on real life decisions: the negative

images of India and Hinduism affect how India and Indians are treated in all

sorts of ways, much as the positive images created by the Needham Project have

helped the Chinese project themselves forcefully in the Western psyche. Warming

up to his subject, Malhotra then launched a spirited but cogent attack on the

self proclaimed guardians of religious studies, the Religion in South Asia

group, a rather exclusive group of academicians who look down their noses at

those outside their clique. In particular, he pointed out that the den-mother

of Indology studies, Wendy Doniger (formerly O'Flaherty) of the University of

Chicago and her band of acolytes have a strangle-hold on the academic

representation of Hinduism. Alarmingly, they also have a supremely Orientalist

and dismissive, unabashedly racist, attitude towards Hinduism. And they do not

agree that those in the tradition, the believers, could possibly have a valid

opinion on said representation. See RISA Lila 1: Wendy's Child Syndrome.

Malhotra's point was that Wendy Doniger and her brood both misrepresent

Hinduism and insult it, and that they essentially indulge in intellectual

terrorism. The responses were quite interesting. One Patrick Hogan (apparently

a Wendy's Child) came back with the rash, superficial, patronizing and inane

Ten Reasons Why Anyone Who Cares About Hinduism Should Be Grateful To Wendy

Doniger. When his arguments were soundly thrashed by lay readers - indeed

thoroughly and systematically demolished - Hogan refused to respond. Then came

Jeffrey Kripal, infamous for his distasteful and ultimately dishonest study of

Ramakrishna, wherein he accuses the sage of being a repressed homosexual, based

almost entirely on his misinterpretation (deliberate, says Swami Tyagananda of

the Ramakrishna Mission in his thorough and scholarly critique) of Bengali

texts, Bengali being a language Kripal does not speak or read. (Despite the

Indian sounding name, Kripal is white.) It is also likely that Kripal is

projecting his own psychological needs or fears to the sage. He wrote The

Tantric Truth of the Matter defending his work. S N Balagangadhara rebutted him

in India and Her Traditions: A Reply to Jeffrey Kripal and plenty of lay readers

also responded. Once again, the 'Indologist' was annihilated; once again, Rajiv

Malhotra's basic point about insincere and malicious academics was proven

amply. How extraordinarily like India's own JNU cult this Wendy Doniger cabal

is! I am struck by the equivalence between Romila Thapar and her brood and

Wendy Doniger and hers. Furthemore, Sankrant Sanu, in a brilliant

deconstruction, Are Hinduism studies prejudiced? A look at Microsoft Encarta,

showed how the chapter on Hinduism in the most popular encyclopedia in the US,

used especially by impressionable children, is grossly unfair. Not

surprisingly, the Encarta chapter was written by Wendy Doniger herself, an

unsympathetic, unbelieving outsider obsessed with the presenting the most

simplistic, indeed most base and often titillating interpretations of highly

symbolic Hinduism. In comparison, the very sympathetic Encarta chapters on

Islam and Christianity are written by believers, insiders who go out of their

way to explain the symbolic meanings, for example in the rite of Christians

consuming the 'flesh and blood' of Jesus: something that looks rather a lot

like cannibalism to an uninitiated outsider. Imagine the field day Doniger

would have had with this if it were part of Hinduism! Interestingly, it was

(mostly) a set of NRI engineers who accomplished the feat of exposing these

people, logically and (generally) dispassionately debating the points raised by

Kripal and Hogan. Granted, there were experts, non engineer non NRIs, too;

however, the bulk of the respondents were NRI engineers, as they are most

comfortable with the Internet and e-discussions. Interestingly, the comments

were surprisingly thoughtful and erudite: frankly, more knowledgeable than I

would have given an Internet forum credit for. And that brings me to a

hypothesis: technologists, who have to deal with the complexities of the real

world, are intellectually equipped to debate humanities people even in their

own specialties. Yes, an engineer can comment sensibly on politics, economics,

even religious studies, but someone from those disciplines will be baffled by

complex engineering concepts. This is not to say that technical tasks are more

important - clearly not, for brainwashing people on a large scale is much

easier for those who control history - but let the humanities types beware: and

I believe they do. Thus the fear of engineeringDiscover your Indian Roots at -

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Intellectual KshatriyaGenerate Positive Vibrations lifelong worldwide.Aap ka

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the Geeta teachesStop cribbing, ACTION is what the Indian scriptures talk

aboutTake the battle into the enemy camp, SET THE AGENDA, be proactiveIn an

argument, no emotions, be detached, get yr facts right, then attack with the

precision of a missile