“If IT is going to take away our basic values, then you can burn Bangalore and burn IT,” thunders born-in-Basavangudi C.N.R. Rao, in his as-told-to Outlook column.
ALOK PRASANNA, also born in Basavangudi, and training to be a lawyer, picks 15 holes in the argument of the eminent scientist.
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1. The greatness of Bangalore was that it allowed simplicity and enjoyment—a cup of coffee and a masala dosa at Vidyarthi Bhavan kept you happy.
The cups of coffee and masala dosas are still there. People have changed. They prefer their coffees to be mochas with chocolate sprinkles, to go. And people still come from across the country to taste the MTR masala dosa. Besides, the coffee is not native to Bangalore, nor is the potato which goes into your masala dosa. People’s tastes change. Live with it.
2. There was more poetry and music here before the IT boom.
And what is the connection between poetry and music and the IT boom? There’s no diktat among IT companies forbidding their employees from indulging in poetry and music as far as I know. If patronage on the arts is on the decline, I’d like to know just who the devil keeps Ranga Shankara and Bangalore Habba alive. Or just where the hell do they find the people to attend musical concerts in Bangalore.
3. Bangalore was always a highly intellectual city. Though people called it a garden city, there was more science here than anywhere else in India. Nowadays, nobody talks about it.
To me, this is the traditional rant of a scientist about the importance given to the engineer against that of a “pure” scientist. In today’s world, science cannot be conducted separately from information technology. It is called the Internet! What have IISc and all the other science institutions done to absorb and incorporate IT expertise and remain relevant in science? If people have stopped talking about it, doesn’t it mean that nothing worthwhile has come out of it for sometime now, Mr. Ex-director of IISc?
4. When it all started, I thought it was a good thing because so many people were getting jobs. Over the years, it has created a large upper–middle–class population who crowd the malls. There is nothing wrong in that, but what is really serious is the influence this has had on Bangalore’s intellectual content. It is wonderful to have a lot of young people getting big salaries, provided they don’t take away the essential lifeblood of other professions.
How patronizing. Without fine intellectuals like yourself, Prof Rao, who would ever tell us how stupid we the people of India really are, and how it is OK to be stupid, just so long as we don’t live in Bangalore or work in the IT industry. By your definition, 99 % of India, and possibly the rest of the world is filled with such people. So why pick on the IT industry in Bangalore for being responsible for this?
5. Bright people at a very young age, before they are even 20, think of IT as an option because they can make quick money. Lots of intelligent people are doing jobs that are much below their intellectual capabilities. They are like coolies who are working for wages and not producing great intellectual material.
“Intellectual coolies”? How original. With all your brilliance do you still not see an oxymoron when it stares you in the face? And perhaps as Chairman of Science Advisory Council, you know the precise intellectual capacity of every man, woman and child in this country, and thereby are empowered to determine exactly who should do what job based on their “intellectual capacity”?
6. Can an India of the future afford a highly skewed growth like this? All the humours should be balanced—we must also have good poets, good economists, fine historians, quality scientists and top-class engineers.
If other fields don’t give bright students the opportunity to make lots of money, why blame IT for being brave enough to do so? What spiritual obligation do “bright students” have to ignore money in order to fulfil some pre-ordained quota of engineers, doctors, poets, economists? Sounds very communist or very casteist, depending on how you look at it. Besides, all of 10 million Indians are directly employed in the IT or ITES sector, so that leaves about 490 million Indians to be economists, poets, doctors, etc. Is it the growth or your vision that is skewed, Prof. Rao?
7. An [NRI] recently asked me, if India is so great in IT, how come it produces only 25 PhDs in computer science per year? That’s a very good question.
It is stupidity to believe that the innovation in the IT sector is because of a team of PhDs cranking out papers for peer reviewed journals. Innovation in the IT sector happens faster than a journal is turned out, and it doesn’t need a research degree from a prestigious University to be at the forefront of IT innovation. In a country where computers became accessible to the middle-class only in the last ten years, it is hard to imagine that we will turn out a Shawn Fanning or a Linus Torvalds or even a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs anytime soon.
8. Right in the beginning, the IT industry should have planned their campuses in towns like Ramanagaram (40–odd km from Bangalore).
I’m pretty sure Electronics City fits that definition of 40-odd km from Bangalore if you listen to any complaining techie.
9. They should have created IT satellite towns, but they all wanted land inside the city. They not only took away that land, they also complain about not getting enough.
Oh yeah, because land acquisition in rural areas in India is so unproblematic and hassle-free as recent experience has shown. Did someone say Nandigram?
10. Why should we create roads?
Because the people who use those roads, the IT employees, are usually inhabitants of Bangalore also, and have every right as you and me, to use pothole-free and “jam-less” roads. Just because the IT industry has come out in the public in this demand, and sought citizen support for the same, it doesn’t mean that it is any less legitimate. Would we deny the roads to an exporter because all they do is just “export”?
11. IT people have a responsibility that they are yet to fulfil. If they’re making so much money, why shouldn’t they create an outstanding private university equivalent to Stanford or Harvard?
Seriously, Prof. Rao. You bring into question your credibility as an academic by a statement like that. Do you seriously think that a company that has enjoyed about 10-15 years of profits (and doesn’t figure anywhere in the Fortune 500) would be able to replicate the success and quality of a 400-year-old institution in less than 15 years? Screw Harvard, the IT industry as a whole won’t be able to fund and start an institution of the quality of the IITs in the same time. It took the Government of India years of funding to build 4-5 good IITs, and we are supposed to believe that a growing industry dependent on the Government for tax breaks (and a weak rupee) would be able to replicate it in half the time?
12. Had they done something like that they would have compensated for the other problems they have created.
I suppose the amounts given to their alma mater by IIT-alumni in the IT sector should be ignored since we are generally not dealing with much reality.
13. If IT people are making money, what do I get out of it, unless I am employed in Infosys with Narayana Murthy? The trouble is, we have given them a lot, but have got nothing in return.
Sorry Prof. Rao. Imagine pitting the benefits enjoyed by the people who are employed in the IT industry, and their families (along with the four other jobs created with every single IT job in Bangalore and their families) against the imagined injuries of a disgruntled academic. Next time, I’ll personally ensure that every paycheque contains a small “disgruntled former academic in Government position” deduction just for your benefit.
14. Our society has created a bunch of icons and role models who are distorting not just the future of this city but of all India, and of our sense of values.
Whoa… Didn’t know NRN was responsible for Nandigram and Godhra. At least that’s what you seem to be imputing. Maybe we should prosecute him instead of Buddhababu and Narendrabhai. Perhaps, if you are right, it is NRN’s fault that Deve Gowda caused the Government to fall. Bad IT industry, no cookie for you!
15. Our people have lost respect for scholarship. Money and commerce has taken over. If IT is going to take away our basic values, then you can burn Bangalore and burn IT.
Where was our respect for scholarship when we spent about 1% of our budget on education for 60 years? Where was our respect for scholarship when droves of India�s brightest left for foreign shores? Where was our respect for scholarship when no Indian Nobel Prize winner since Sir C.V. Raman can claim to have done his prize winning research in India? Money feeds and clothes the poor. Commerce gives jobs to the unemployed, educated or otherwise. I think we should offer the above mentioned, the choice between our “basic values” and “money and commerce”.
churumuri 
I disagree with C N R Rao on this question:
… if India is so great in IT, how come it produces only 25 PhDs in computer science per year?
It should have been:
… if India is so great in IT, how come it starts getting the shivers when the rupee gains value by 10%? What will happen when, say, 10 rupees get a dollar?
Yeah, I was very much in the IT industry, been there and didn’t do that etc…
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Why the professor doesn’t talk about governance, freewill of general public?
True, there’s some amount of IT ‘culture’ in parts of Bangalore but the industry cannot be blamed for that.
IT industry has become an easy target..be it in praising or bashing.. If IT industry is making lot money, its also paying huge taxes.
A man of his stature can do better – let him talk about how to use IT for enabling good governance, better education etc.
With our population towering above a billion, we need more ways to create jobs so that our basic needs are easily taken care of. So IT and ITeS are doing that..why complain?
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What a sophomoric rant!! Alok, you will make a fine lawyer one day. You certainly know how to turn every sentence from half a page interview into an argument by itself. Sure one can pick holes in many things CNR says. But stretching them like you did is the stuff of over-imagination. Many of the points you made amount putting words in his mouth.
I am sorry to say that you understand how innovations work in IT or electronics. PhD’s don’t come out with innovative end products. But their research and ideas are used by innovators to create or refine new products. You can’t produce a small gadget like iPod without high density storage. Guess who is working on improving storage capacity? Certainly not Jobs. This is what CNR implied. Not what’s in your rant.
Since you mentioned Linus Torvalds, you should know that MINIX was the inspiration for him when he created Linux. Guess who created MINIX? Andrew Tannenbaum, PhD. How many people who use Linux even know about Prof. Tannenbaum? Or even Linus for that matter?
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I had written about the same topic a while ago.
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the biggest irony is that …it took an Alok ( lawyer by trng) for a rebuttal while the rest of the IT folks here ( incl. me ) to sit back and sulk, thanks for the effort
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Seems like Churumuri is stuck with just 2 options these days
1. Bash IT-haters and IT-likers equally.
2. Write 1000000 word documents on how Modi is destroying India or Gujurath.
The saga continues.
Sorry, but I find this thread particularly boring, unoriginal and not required. So, will Alok write another blog-post if someone defends CNR? Should there have been a writeup to CNR? Is that all that is happening in Bangalore today. Then CNR was correct. The only thing that matters are the lives of IT/BT folks. The rest of the news can go take a hike.
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@Girish
Thanks man, I hope my profs. and future clients think the same ;).
I don’t doubt that you probably know much more than me about IT and innovation, but my point was the Prof. Rao seemed to collapse all of innovation to a few PhDs, ignoring the importance of a mass market to make the innovation viable and useful, and IT companies that have adopted and adapted such innovations to the mass market. I’m not doubting that PhDs have played an important role in the development and advancement of innovation in IT, but I object to Prof. Rao’s imputation that all innovation in this sector is simply because of PhDs.
I mean its all very well to conduct research on high density storage devices, but without Apple and Steve Jobs, it would have just been a well written and deeply researched paper in The Stanford Journal of High Technology or some such thing. We can churn out all the PhDs in the world, but it is a futile effort if all they do is make Bill Gates richer than he already is. Doesn’t help India or Bangalore.
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Let the bubble get pricked again, sense will prevail.
What to do with the half-literate, half-skilled BPO junta once their masters dump them and go to Papua New Guinea for cheaper workforce!?
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Alok, Thanks for handling my criticism well!! Another mark of a good lawyer :) Now stop splitting hairs!
I am going to digress and talk about what little I know about research in academia. I know a bit about research in US universities. Professors in applied sciences don’t just write papers on specialized subjects. Most of them have enough hands-on skills to put an experienced techie like myself to shame in certain areas. Unlike in India, there is also a lot of industry-academic interaction. The technological dominance of US after WWII came about because of the research in pure and applied sciences coupled with manufacturing prowess. A lot of strategists in US are now worried that off shoring/outsourcing of manufacturing and tech services is going to affect research in applied sciences and eventually pure science.
Chinese also understand this very well. They are putting a lot of resources into building “world class” universities. China can’t rely on contract and low-end manufacturing forever.
Indians have a long way to go in product innovations. We have to improve research in pure science which forms the basis for applied sciences like engineering. Only then an innovator can look at our internal market needs and develop or innovate truly Indian products for local consumption. When it comes to IT, our focus is still outward and so far we have sustained by offering cost advantages. This model is not going to work for long. The operating costs are already rising due to huge salary hikes and the complex nature of doing business in India. Rupee is strengthening. Eventually we will have to sustain ourselves by serving domestic market. This is where the soft infrastructure comes into play and we need strong lower and higher learning institutions.
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this alok prasanna’s arrogance is typical of IT people. they apply narrow logic to every damn thing. the world works because they wrote the code. alok prasanna may turn around and say he is not an IT guy, but then the south bangalore (basavanagudi included) IT spirit has rubbed on him. sad these guys don’t know what they have lost.
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Pingback: The Acorn » Dear Dr C N R Rao
Thanks Girish and Alok for providing some fodder for thinking. The burning question is why havent we been innovative in IT. The plain fact is India does not have the funds for research. The ROI from research is not very predictable and Indian government is in no position to take the risk of funding enoromous amounts of money into research. Notwithstanding India shining we are still a poor country. In US it is a different matter. The industry and the university has a close tie up. Look at the amount of products that have come from the research from Bell labs. It was researchers from stanford who started Cisco and for the first time marketed routers. Do you think a search engine like google be built by Indians, No way. The IT industry in America has a strong backing and vested intrest from the government. We indians dont even have an indegenous OS. We have produced some products like Flexcube and tally for which we can be proud of. I think thats enough for us to be proud of considering where we were 15-20 years ago.
There is no use blaming IT industry for not producing PHds. You need a clear roadmap, planning and funds to create a program for research. Actually Prof Rao himself should be answerable to his questions as he was holding a high administrative position in IISC and was one of the polcy makers in Indian science. NRN, premjis and the tatas are just human resource providers to the american and european industries benefitting from the labor arbitrage. The one remarkable thing for indians from the IT industry is it has given us access to understanding the american industries and the inherent processes they follow. Prior to IT this was just a black box. Maybe something will emerge from the next generation of IT professionals in India. NRNs and premji’s have done their job and raked in the moolahs. Now it is time for them to retire in their glory and It is the next generation IT professionals in India who need to work towards innovation and building products.
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Oh I forgot about the main intent of the post – the Kapi’s and Vidyarthi Bhavan Masala Dosasa. As old timers we do love the Vidyarthi Bhavans and NMH but what about the Adiga hotels and the Darshinis. That is the new culture of south indian fast food unique to bangalore and this was started post IT. You can still enjoy your Dosas in Adigas along with roti nan and gobi manchurian
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Well said Girish. India has not adequately supported reasearch in pure or applied sciences for that matter. The middle class outlook here is to go for whatever gains them meaningful employment- it used to be medicine or engineering once and now it is software engineering(mostly Saapatware). Our industry also has been pretty mediocre in the sense that when a scientific instituion in this country has come out with an occasional good invention/idea. they have not bothered to take it and optimize for commercial mass manufacturing.
Look at what happened to our IT industry. When Rajiv Gandhi government gave them sops the Wipros and the HCLs did screw driver assembly of PCs. When the margins went down, they went global and are now running armies of slave coders in their backyard.
In 2002, software engineers in the US were cursing us as our H1B assembly lines were replacing them. With increasing salaries in the IT sector I wouldn’t be surprised if Koramangala’s nerds would be cursing Filipinos or Chinese. In fact even companies like Wipro and Infy, which are thriving due to the low cost of operations here are getting ready to shop for skills in cheaper destinations. The scene won’t be pretty then.
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What a stupid arguement. Alok Prasanna is trying to prove Dr.CNR Rao wrong just because he does n’t like him for some reason. We should treat his arguement with the contempt it deserves!
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@DPS
On the contrary, I don’t like him for the way he blames all the ills of Bangalore on the IT industry…. as though corrupt babus, legislators, the land mafia, other industries, half of Bangalore’s citizens, and poor city planning have nothing to do with any of this.
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You are straight on the face of Mr CNR Rao. Seriously, what has he done for betterment of Indians that he has any right to insult any industry. In fact what has industry done to any body, except probably made them live honorably.
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@Alok
The debate is only on the IT people and their role in the systematic destruction of Bangalore and its culture. CNR Rao rightly said that IT was the biggest curse. Why are you trying to turn the heat on corrupt babus (we don’t use babu in Kannada. Its a northern word!), MLAs, land mafia?
Hope you have no stake in IT industry!
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Prof. C.N.R. Rao is a renowned scientist. There’s absolutely no doubt about that. But his biggest challenge right now should be to worry how he is going to attract and keep bright and sciene-inclined from flying off to IT industry and Business Mangenent. Some suggestions are:
1 Dust out the cobwebs from CSIR Labs. Hire some MBA’s to do that!
2.Give freedom to young scientists to do research on whatever they want without a babu looking over them holding the purse.
3. Get the best from outside to do research or teach in select universities.
4. Tie up with Industry – both private and Public sector and give them free hand to promote products and ideas.
5. Plan succession plans at top labs, get younger and top notch scientists ( ex. E .C.G. Sudarshan-who was in the running for Nobel ). You will get at least 20 such scientists who WANT to come back – but were driven out.
Do this for 5 years and you will definitely see a change.
Action and reaction are equal and opposite- you will see people coming back to science both at home and from abroad
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Ayyappa..Its excrutiating to read even a couple of points in the rant above.. ‘The cups of coffee and masala dosas are still there. People have changed. They prefer their coffees to be mochas with chocolate sprinkles, to go. And people still come from across the country to taste the MTR masala dosa. Besides, the coffee is not native to Bangalore, nor is the potato which goes into your masala dosa. People’s tastes change’ —
enri idu.. tarkanaa?? something for the heck of it?how much more peurile can this get? …instead of taking individual sentences, how about taking individual words and rebutting each word? for eg, if one sas masale dose, one could could pick up the word masale and posit masale has many ingredients, whose origin is not india/ karnataka. How can you therefore claim that you were happy with masale dose, the very ingrediants of the masale of which is not yours?? I will be left with no hairs to split if i reach the end of this rebuttal
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Alok Prasanna’s rant is probably the worst piece of garbage I have come across in my entire life. Alok engages in tarka for the sake of tarka. Alok has completely missed the spirit of CNR’s honest albeit misguided jibe. Let me talk about CNR instead.
Why is CNR’s column honest ? Because I and you and all the IT & non-IT people & Kannadigas & non-Kannadigas & their maids and managers are discussing it. If it was a non-issue would you devote so much attention to it ? It is honest because there are some home-truths in it. It is honest because it says things we all want to say but don’t say aloud because we don’t want to offend anybody. Bangalore of today is very different from the Bangalore of 80s. Why ? Because of IT. Take IT out of the equation, it would basically be the same old Bangalore. Anybody can attest to that. The question is, is this change good or bad ? CNR says it it bad. That’s where he is misguided.
Why is CNR misguided ? One word – scalability. Let us say murthy angadi & Wipro & TCS already have the best & brightest million Indian employees. They should stop hiring, sit down & write code. But instead each year they hire another 10,000 people. Why ? Because coding is very much like bricklaying. If you have 10 masons they will take 2 months to build your house. So if you have 100 masons, how many days…do you remember those high school ratio problems ? That is what coding is like. Despite API, modular programming, OOP whatever, end of the end, if you firm has more people than mine, you will complete the contract faster. As long as demand for IT is there, and as long as supply keeps up in the form of newly minted IT graduates from our engineering colleges, this equation will be true. Before I became a scientist, I too was in in IT, a lowly programmer, then an IT manager. And our mantra was the same – hire more, more, more! Steal from Wipro, steal from TCS, steal from IBM, pay more, more bonus, but hire more at any cost!
Why ?
Because more programmers implies shorter deadlines implies more revenue implies higher GDP implies better facilities implies more contracts implies more programmers…endless loop!
Because coding is scalable.
Now I am a scientist. But Science, alas, is not scalable. Look at Claymath, for example. 1 million dollars to solve a very simple mathematics problem that is atleast 200 years old. Let me explain what that means – for 200 years, millions of very bright mathematicians from all over the world have studied a problem. They still cannot solve it. Do you think offering 1 million dollars will change anything ? Arre, even if you offer 1 trillion dollars, nothing will happen!!!
The problem is too difficult to solve. It needs a genius. And genius does NOT scale. That is the problem with science. Science does not scale. Today we have say 1000 top-notch scientists in India. Or say, 100,000 top notch scientists in the whole world. Now we are all trying very hard to do breakthrough science, solve the hardest problems in our field. Speaking as a scientist, we are already doing that. Do you understand ? We are already doing it.
Now if all the engineering students drop out tomorrow & start doing BSc, MSc in science & get their PhD & become scientists and join our ranks, do you think we will have breakthrough discoveries ? NO!!!
Very counter-intuitive, but the answer is still no. Because we are not doing coding or technology development.
If 1 programmer writes 100 lines of code, 100 programmers will on average write 10 thousand lines. True ? Absolutely. Because it is a scalable profession. But Science is not scalable. If 1 scientist solves 1 theorem does not mean 100 scientists will solve 100 theorems! If that was the case there would be no need for Claymath, no need for 200 year old problems, we would have already solved everything by now.
In fact CNR also understands this, but he still insists on going off on his misguided rants. Based on my personal information about him, CNR thinks that these rants serve a purpose. It is like earthquake fund relief or tsunami fund relief. Say there is a tsunami and million Indians die. Immediately, all the NRI hearts will melt, they will take out their credit cards and write 100 dollar donations to CRY. Now you think that 100$ is going straight to the poor people who are affected by tsunami ? Of course not! Administration cost, office space, electricity, taxes, parking, and yes, some corruption, will eat up that $100. But still, at least $1 will go to the actual cause.
CNR has the same reasoning. The more he rants like this, maybe out of 100,000,000 students, at least 1 student will switch from engineering to science. Maybe that 1 student will become a Raman or a Chandrashekar. Maybe he will solve a Claymath, maybe he will put India’s name on the Nobel roll. Maybe. That is why CNR goes off on these misguided rants. He knows every single point that this Prasanna is writing about. But still, he does it, because of his love for science.
But CNR also knows that science is not scalable. Tomorrow if government of India comes up with some draconian policy that bans the teaching of IT in every college & insists that everybody do science, even then no new breakthrough science will be produced! Sad but true. Science is not scalable. You need geniuses, and you cannot mass-produce a genius. You cannot train them. We all try as scientists, but the sad truth is that genius is like magic. Do you know for example that 99% of physics today was produced by scientists UNDER the age of 21? How little training they would have received. But they did it because they were a genius. You cannot train a genius. You can have your Aptech and NIIT and train coders, they will happily do monkey job in murthy angadi and come up with some XML API and call it “innovation” ( ha ha ! ), and dudes like this Prasanna will also lap it up and actually think innovation happens in IT at lightspeed! No need for peer-reviewed papers, no need for years of study, just write a protocol for binary encoding of XML data for B2B domain, apply a layer of SOAP, you have innovation! That sort of innovation I have done 20 years ago…it is trivial. This is why IITians don’t join Infosys…because who wants to waste your genius brain on some idiotic monkey activities like this.
But I admit, monkey activity will yield rich dividends in the short term. That is where my thinking differs from CNR. For every developing country, a few generations will have to be sacrificed. Sad but true. Do you think the generation that built the massive George Washington Bridge across the Hudson, that built the World Trade Center, was the SAME generation that drove a limousine across the bridge to work on posh paychecks on wall street ? Of course not, they were busy building the bridges & towers! But the next generation did a little bit better, and the next, and the next. Finally the present generation ie. today’s Jews take the limo and pays $50 tip to the Indian cabbie & goes to work for private equity for the starting salary of $450,000, even though they can take the subway and pay only $2 for the subway token. See the difference ? A few generations have to be sacrificed in the name of development.
That is what is happening in India & China today. The youngsters who are wasting their brains working on coding for 20k or 50k rupees or whatever peanuts they are paying these days instead of doing a PhD in Physics are necessary for the 11% year-after-year GDP growth. We need that growth. We need that money. But you can bet their children will not go work in murthy angadi, they will think about Biotech and so on. Then their grandchildren will go work in the arts, write a novel, do Physics, etc. Because science, math, arts etc is ultimately a rich man’s profession. You can write nonsense like “scientists are not doing it for the money”. True, I admit, I am not doing science for the money. Because, I already have some money! See, you need some backup. A starving man will not do science, he is better off learning C# and working for murthy. But once he has some buffer, some backup money, then he can cater to the artistic impulse, scientific impulse etc. So our Indian middle-class, with the millions of 20 year olds, let them learn the APIs and make some money. This generation will have to be sacrificed, so that the next generation can go on to do more intellectually attuned activities like Physics & Math. Ofcourse if you ask a hotshot Infy programmer, he will not say it is a sacrifice, he doesn’t know any better. He thinks shuttling around the world for his 100,000 rupees and Infy stock is actually useful in the long run! So don’t argue with him, Rao sahibre. Let him have his 100k. Don’t begrudge the programmers. The next generation will do better.
So long CNR, I will meet you next time I come to India and pay for your masaldosa at Vidhyarthi Bhavan.
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Its probably a good thing lawyers don’t write software.
Imagine how long winded and buggy the code would be. And probably wont work either.
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@ Alok
You have made your points. Now dont argue with every comment that is posted. That is not fair on your part. Just sit back and watch how your views are debated. You need not spend sleepless nights and check the page evey 10 minutes!
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Nice rebuttal by ‘Just another scientist’. I agree with you on many of the points. You seem to be CNRs shishya since you know his mind and his tactics so well. CNR again is a well know PR and publicity hungry scientist administrator. I once interacted with him in organising a fund raiser in Chowdiah and was amused at the ‘huge ego’ he carries with him. He constantly talks of his awards and acheivements. It is true that we cannot afford research and innovation in pure science at this time. But what about art. We can afford art, we dont have to wait for the next generation to write novels while the current generation is immersed in C#. We also have the internet and the blogs and online communities. It is going to be a new art form that is going to emerge from the new IT gen.
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@‘Just another scientist’,
Good writing and very good rebuttal.
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@ ‘Just another scientist’, ur comments are considered to be a troll as u r not presently living in Basavanagudi :)
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Vinay avre, I studied under Sri. HN at National College. So you see, I may not be living in Basavanagudi, but Basavanagudi is living in me!
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I think I like Outlook magazine. They write garbage in their magazine but provide fodder for churumuri and its readers (and maybe other blogs and bloggers and commenters) to have a healthy debate.
Just another scientist – a good piece of writing.
I didnt know I was this much of an optimist:-)
Yo!
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JAS.
scalability is a bottomline type of point. others have said the same thing in so many words. but thanks for putting it the way you have.
but you have skewed the battle lines between science and engineering, taken bad examples to skew the lines, made a generally pessimistic prescription and reduced all engineers to IT worker bees.
all science is not about abstraction, though its frontiers are. a lot of properties, application, analysis type of work is of value too and make significant contributions. there are p such examples.
for one, there are worker bees in science too. perhaps not scalable, but still there are. there are a zillion problems in India which need more than engineering level understanding of issues.
i think that perhaps is CNR’s main point.
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there will always be one veerabanta who will actually fight the decisive battle and slay the king, but to set up that battle, requires a lot of bantas to be fighting their battles so that the king is exposed.
IMO education is not about training geniuses. education and academia is all about taking ordinary folks and giving them skills of the battle and more importantly an understanding of the lay of the battle field and just like a banta convince him that his is a very important battle.
and that is what CNR is saying, the battle is not limited to seeme, we need to hold the ghatta too even though it is very difficult to man it.
pardon my metaphors. just that i am blown away by ondanondu kaaladalli.
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I am also an IT guy sadly not from Bangalore, but tasted the superb masale doae in Vidyarthi Bhavan when I was young. I see truth in what CNR says, although I like many hundreds were disappointed to see that not much was achieved in his tenure as the Director of IISC. I hired hundreds of Indian IT graduates because they come cheap (in Western terms) and put them in the IT sweat shops. Many of them were intelligent and smart and would have become very good scientists. In the IT sweat shops they were writing codes, debugging them, running test suites etc.. which did not stretch their intellect, but filled their wallets thanks to the German and American companies who outsourced the chores. True they threw their wads of hundred rupee bills at things they fancied, which a PhD in science can do only in his/her dream. I often wondered what would they do later in their lives when the outsourcing bubble bursts.
Alok, the world knows about CNR and what he achieved in science. You had your ten minutes of glory. Despite my reservations, I an IT guy support what CNR says.
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hope you all would have read Subratho Bagchi’s version as well. It’s not that IT guys are working for Aliens in Mars. Somewhere the society also is responsible. to a large extent. Change in life style, it has been always there. the Pace is faster and alarming though.
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@Just another scientist
For the record I too am “just another scientist”. Your following remark was very curious to me.
>>Now if all the engineering students drop out tomorrow & start doing BSc, MSc in science & get their PhD & become scientists and join our ranks, do you think we will have breakthrough discoveries ? NO!!! >>
While I do agree that science needs geniuses to uncover nature’s secrets ( to do science), it is also very true that a problem attacked by more people has a good chance of being solved. You can’t just keep on waiting for that “one genius” to arrive. Let BSc and MSc be encouraged and people interested in science go into those streams. Maybe we’ll find some geniuses along the way.
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A blog picking holes in Alok Prasanna’s arguments would run into more pages than James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Phrases like “who the hell”, “rant of a traditional scientist” not only demonstrate the ignorance and lack of depth in the thought of Mr. Prasanna, but also betray the contempt and personal hatred he has for Dr. CNR Rao. Such arguments only reduce the quality of this otherwise very informative and thought provoking blog!
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The large and incresing population of India which helps to churn out the massive number of IT graduates upon which the whole IT outsourcing depends has its weakness -a few of which particularly the fast consumption of earth resources which CNR touched albeit not in a pretty way referring to Bangalore If one would visit European and American science departments particularly the life sciences departments, one would see large numbers of bright Chinese students pursuing degrees in sciences.
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@ just another scientist
I am a graduate student in physics and I found one of your statements ridiculous. Now seriously “99% of physics by scientists UNDER 21”? I challenge you to name 10
nobel prize winning works in Physics awarded to ppl, who were below 21 when they performed it. Trust me you cant say this for even math where the best mathematicans were staggeringly young; at the top of my head, there are galois and abel and i am not even sure of abel! Seriously the number u quoted is way too high, I would put it as 0.1% of physics by scientists under 21
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Some responses above and those to the Acorn post have mentioned to the efftect that Innovation does not happen in India because the ROI from research is not very predictable and Indian government is in no position to take the risk of funding enoromous amounts of money into research.
Fair enough.
But many successful innovations did not happen with an objective of a decent ROI & the tax benefits the government can give.
A question always baffles me as to Why not a single graduate with some knowledge about the Internet could devise the concept & product like Google – which might not have been too expensive for Larry Page & Sergei Brin when they first conceived Google. I do not belive that ROI and Tax benefits weighed on their mind.
With such a strong industry having lots of bright people working for them, lots of money, surely we need not be content with only Subir Bhatia who again did his Hotmail innovation in the US and not in India. Several product such as Anti-virus softwares (please don’t tell me about a Quick Heal), CAD-CAM softwares, Process Control Development softwares such as RSVIEW / RSLOGIX, are developed by companies or people operating out of the US or EU. It is quite possible that someone somewhere in India may have contributed to writing codes of these softwares but the Idea behind it & what it takes to make it a successful product belonged to foreign companies. I believe that it is here the IT companies should concentrate apart from maintaining the IT Infrastructues of large banks, insurance companies etc.
It is quite possible however that some bright soul working in one of the IT companies might have got similar ideas & proposed the same to his bosses – who may not have seen the potential of it and the idea was dead soon enough as employees have strong priorities on completion of their given tasks & may not / need not have the perseverence to see their idea to fruition.
In this sense, I am of the opinion that the comment of Dr. Rao on “Innovation” is correct & IT Industry has to do something about it. It does require time & money.
But Tata did it with their car project – took a massive hit to their bottomline sometime in 2000 or 2001 and came out quite successful in that. There is Tata in IT alongwih several other large cash rich companies.
Unlike a manufactured products like a car or a refrigerator or LCD panels, a successful IT product would be far cheaper to bring on to the Market which can be the whole world & not just India.
Milind
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Wah ! Very wll said Alok.
Prof. Prof. CNR Rao… Thou art not well. See a Doc.
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I am with “just another scientist” here……most of the points CNR Rao has raised are valid…..most of them.
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