Thursday, April 2, 2026
Unlearning to Write
I could type 1000 words in an hour or less. I could do it in class while I didn't want to pay attention to the lesson. I could do it sitting on the College bus back home. I could do it while partially watching a cricket match. Writing came easy. It wouldn't win any prizes, but the flow of ideas was smooth. It had a beginning, a middle and an end.
And then I became an Engineer.
It didn't happen overnight. Took well over a decade. But slowly, every natural instinct to write was replaced by an urge for perfection. As if, perfect writing has ever existed!
It is not that facts did not matter before. They always did. But it used to be a smaller piece of what I was writing. When the engineer starts writing, all he wants to do is report facts. Soon several tabs are open on the browser and every word a laborious effort in building towards a conclusion. Because the conclusion is often lost in the stream of data the engineer wants to report.
I first noticed it after I wrote my Master's thesis. In fact, if I had to trace it back to a single moment or act, it would have to be the need to find and specify a reference for every scientific fact I stated in my thesis. Every sentence, every piece of the hypothesis I was building, that I had not discovered over the course of my own research would have to be cited with a published peer-reviewed reference. When the brain has to constantly look for reference, it stops making leaps of creativity.
It is a good process. An important process that produces valuable scientific advancement to our Earth. But it is effective especially because it defeats the ability of the brain to create spontaneously.
The brain has to be coaxed to give up on rules to allow it to flow freely. Because running every rule for each written word brings the brain to a grinding halt.
Twitter works in a very similar way. For years, writers could ramble on to get to the point. Build up towards a climax page after page. The joy of writing or reading came from the patient development of a situation or context. And Twitter killed that instinct by pushing you to a conclusion in 140 characters. Less is More, they said. The platform was designed for people who wanted to skip the writing, the build up and jump straight to the point without any of the contextualization. Less thinking, less words, more publishing. In recent years, you can go around those limitations by paying for a premium account or stringing threads together, but the Genie cannot go into the bottle. The platform on the whole still runs on short, no context blurbs that get widely shared because they are not rooted deeply in anything specific.
Somewhere along the way it became harder to write about what I felt because it became more important to write about what I knew. An important distinction because writing what one feels requires no confirmation, no fact check and no external assessment of accuracy. It is also exactly the type of writing an engineer has to avoid at any cost to be taken seriously.
Da Vinci was famous for being scientifically inquisitive while being an extraordinarily talented artist and is often touted as a remarkable engineer-artist. But the fact is his best work was just artistic reproduction of his scientific experiments and observations. It is a different matter that he applied at a very high level, the techniques employed by artists and his work was so beautiful that observers were enamored by it. His art represented what he knew, not necessarily what he felt.
The backspace key is another huge factor. A lot of my early writing happened with pen and paper. You could not Ctrl+Shift+Up and Backspace entire lines or paragraphs at a time. You could always scratch and make corrections real time, but you didn't have to start over half a dozen times. Starting over multiple times is the easiest way for your brain to forget what it wanted to say in the first place. Nothing ever comes out right if the likely outcome of the sentence is deletion. It kills the brain. Disincentivizes thinking. It is like looking for a movie to watch on Netflix. You may even land on something interesting, but you'll still keep looking, because who knows what else you may find that might be more exciting. The paradox of choices for where you want a piece of writing to go disappears when you commit to the direction you are taking while putting ink on paper. The physical act of discarding a piece of paper takes a lot more than the act of deleting the first paragraph you have been laboring on for minutes on your digital screen.
Unlearning to write is the best way to help the brain find its words again.
Labels: Citizen
Thursday, March 3, 2022
The Fall and Fall of Boeing
Of the many thought provoking bits that Downfall pulled together in its presentation of Boeing's failures in the aftermath of the 737Max crashes, the one that struck me the most was the change in Boeing's culture in the mid 1990s.
At the surface, the easy target is unabashed Capitalism. It is fair to say that over the decades, we have come to expect American companies to optimize moneymaking potential in all of their endeavors, skirting at the edge of ethics and moral compulsions but mostly behaving within the confines of civilized society. But it was not this urge to profiteer that affected me. The forces at play here are far more complex, and subtle.
This phenomenon is more than just about profits.
***
In 1984, Bhopal suffered an explosion in a pesticides and chemicals factory. In less than a few hours, the toxic gases spread around the city and killed, maimed and permanently disfigured not only the people that were unfortunate enough to live in the city at the time, but multiple generations thereafter. More than half a million people were injured, thousands died!
The American company running the plant knew of safer (but more expensive) alternatives to the dangerous chemicals they were using in the production process. The facility also had a history of casualties from toxic exposure in the years leading up to the accident, but didn't institute permanent corrective actions to fix their controls.
And yet, even nearly 40 years after one of the World's worst man made Disasters, condemnation of the American Manufacturer, UCC, is far from unanimous. Questions are often raised on the quality of the Indian managers running the Plant and the engineers and workers who were operating the processes.
This is very relevant to the Boeing story, because the first public statements from Boeing and American Aerospace "Experts" in the aftermath of the crash ascertained at least a part of the blame on "Third World" pilot training. It was ironical when it eventually turned out that the pilot of the Lion Air that went down was actually trained in the United States.
It is more than just about profits.
The issue is the purported unassailability of American Engineering. Obviously the USA cant be designing poor products and processes right? Is it not more likely that the operators from poor Asian and African countries cannot comprehend the complexity of the said American products?
This is flawed thinking. As evidenced by Downfall, production engineers and operators (including users/consumers) are often at the mercy of design decisions made far away from the field, with limited ability to control their own destinies.
In a World that is driven by Centralized Design, Decentralized Manufacturing, and Global Product Application, the control of critical characteristics in the product specifications is progressively moving further and further away from the end user. And unless companies strive to democratize within their supply chain and effectively establish the feedback loops to solve these engineering problems, disasters of this magnitude will probably, unfortunately continue to happen.
And that's part of the reason why Homegrown Product Engineering and Manufacturing deserves the push in India.
* * *
The Chernobyl Nuclear Explosion happened less than 2 years after the Bhopal Tragedy. In this case, everything was designed and developed by Russians, at that time one of the World's most technologically advanced nations. But it happened in a system that was occupied from top to bottom by the State. Engineers and Scientists were valuable, but not as valuable as the Polit Bureau member who could control through his whims and fancies the allocation of resources, and hence had to be pleased.
In study after study, there has been critical analysis of the unintended consequences of this power dynamic - when in a moral dilemma, would an engineer owe primary allegiance to the quality of his engineering work or to the idea of serving his Motherland?
It is more than just about profits.
Boeing was in a rat race with Airbus and it was losing. To rise above this, quickly, was not just a matter of corporate rivalry, but one of national identity! Every part of the American Aerospace Industrial and Regulatory complex recognized this and agreed to work in coordination to fix it ASAP.
Mission statements are great in aligning the forces of bureaucracy and paperwork in a large faceless system. The problem occurs when botched mission statements stand in direct contradiction of product integrity. Should the MCAS Engineer or the Regulator reviewing it have owed primary allegiance to the quality of his engineering work or to the idea of serving Boeing/USA by letting them get ahead in the race against Airbus?
And if this happened in an Individualistic, Self Preservation before All Else society like America, what chance does the rest of the World stand?
* * *
Downfall was a very thought provoking movie and as shown above, got me thinking on multiple levels about the state of the World, and more personally about my role in the World as an Engineer.
What caught me the most by surprise was that one of the World's most iconic companies, through a series of changes up at the top ended up with a culture that discouraged people, especially engineers and subject matter experts to speak their mind.
Surely, of all places in the World, the Land of the Free and Home of the
Brave would have given its brilliant engineers and scientists the platform to
debate on merits and demerits of technologies on scientific principles
with absolutely no other consideration.Unfortunately, no.
Indian Engineers around the World are now involved in the design of most products you will encounter in your life. And in their pursuits of excellence, they might do well to remember India's motto which in times like this seems more far sighted and timeless than we have given it credit for.
In the end, Satyameva Jayate. Truth Alone Prevails.
Labels: Citizen
Sunday, July 26, 2020
Make for India
When a product was crafted so beautifully and was so uniquely Indian that it taught you something new about the heritage of the people who created it...
When you were so enamoured by the product that you didn't really care what the price tag was, and all you wanted to do was procure it...
It is not that such products do not exist. We have all seen these products. In temple streets lined with overstocked shops, along highways near level crossings, at airports, at railway stations, and at the gazillion bazaars that 90% of India shops in. We just do not know these products - there's no popular brand associated with them. There's no colorful packaging that differentiates the product from a million other less distinguished sellers of the same product. This causes a grave unintended consequence which will prevent the product from ever generating large scale economic value - a lack of sophistication!
Labels: Citizen
Sunday, January 20, 2019
Breakfast Cereals - An Electoral Extrapolation!
As I was distractedly meandering around the local Supermarket this last weekend, pushing a cart progressively being filled with goods curated thoughtfully by my wife, we arrived at the aisle that represents the epitome of this choice and diversity - the Breakfast Cereal Section, where every known grain, every critical nutrient and every fathomable source of energy is well represented by a dozen different manufacturers with varying amounts of sugar, and color, in every permutation to attract the full spectrum of consumers.
Products and packaging are carefully tailored to appeal to key target demographics. Choices in each flavor are meticulously researched and matched with the right base product. And of course, there's always the brand ambassador - the popular fit filmstar or sporting hero that flexes his/her muscles in tank tops holding a box of his/her favorite cereal smiling broadly at the perplexed consumer who is intimidated by the variety of choices available - how does one make the right choice under these circumstances?
As the weight of this predicament hit my disinterested brain, it dramatically bounced off in every direction, to activate hundreds of different neurons and put up quite the light show in a very unrelated part of the brain - the Political Sciences. The figurative light bulb that went off in my head presented a hypothesis so imaginative, that it could've only pulled it from the depths of boredom -
"What if the choices in the cereal boxes represent the choices available to us in the political system?"
"What if cereals from the Breakfast section hold the key to cracking the political dysfunction that has been creeping into the Democracies of the World?"
"What if this aisle is a mirror image of our democracy?!"
* * *
There is always the safe, stereotypical choice. It is a form of corn flakes with whole grains, has under 4g of sugar per serving, 9g of Carbs, and over 5g in protein (which, if you think about it, is identical to a Harvard/Oxford Degree, 15 years as a lawyer, and a 10 year career in Politics). It doesn't promise to do anything out of the ordinary, strictly understands and commits to performing nothing but the most basic function. It is not very creative, but it can work well with anything else you throw with it - Bananas? Sure, why not! Chocolate Syrup? Bring it on. Nuts? Oh Love those guys, get on the alliance! The safe choice understands it is not exciting, so its best selling proposition is compatibility with other breakfast foods. But who wants a safe choice right???
There is the seasonal flavor, exploiting the current health trend, which at this point evolves every 15 days, or so it seems!! There is a demonstrated lack of anthocyaninsin such type of cereals - the antioxidants that actually bring the nutrition in. Politicians of this class bring limited nutrition - no ability to actually legislate or lead - but are great at marketing the pros of their miracle food - anti-corruption or war-mongering or taxes or social reform - without moving the needle much. These cereals can sell once, but not twice, and depending on the damage they cause to your tastebuds or health, voters gravitate to the worst possible choice next.
The most dangerous choice is the one where you know its not good for you, but you are just getting back to eating breakfast again, and feel the need to be drawn in with a controversial choice. Such cereals are high on sugar, promise to give you everything you are looking for, and are available everywhere you can look. But when you eat them for breakfast, all you get is a 7 minute high followed by an extended period of self-loathing and introspection into questionable decision making about riding waves that you don't understand. Seriously, everyone knew the guy was a dufus, who exactly thought this would be a good idea, let alone dragging the rest of the voter base down with such suicidal thinking?!?!
The worst part about the experiments of the above kind, is what follows - the unbeatable urge to overcompensate. "If I can make a bad decision at the one extreme, I can only fix it by making a bad decision at the other extreme." Bad choices now pave the way for terrible choices later.
Scarred forever by consecutive debilitating elections, such disillusioned consumers give up permanently on the breakfast system, opting instead to put their faith in farfetched unproven principles like anarchy, and in some extreme cases, intermittent fasting.
* * *
Four voting cycles gone by. You start to learn some lessons. You start to see the point that you are never going to be in love with the breakfast cereal. And that is because breakfast cereals suck. Whoever thought waking up in the morning in deep slumber and chewing the cud for nutrition and fiber made sense?
You start to accept the fact that cereals are a flawed concept, but your best fibrous shot at a successful trip to the bathroom in the morning- at least the best shot that doesn't cause cancer. When everything is said and done, all the trends and waves come and go, the stereotypical box of cereal you originally said no to is still sitting in the same place on the aisle, and doesn't look as bad anymore. You are ok with giving up on cool looking boxes, when you realize these cereals wont set your breakfast on fire, but they wont cause long term harm to your well being either.
And that's because as much as the media tries to convince you that your life revolves around breakfast and politics, reality is that this is only one compartment of your life, and that your well-being depends cumulatively on all the other choices you make to keep your health and sanity in check.
What's important is no matter how bad your choices, you keep voting because eventually you will make the safe choice that defeats a crackpot and on that day, your Gut and Democracy will thank you.
* * *
We were checking out, and the lady at the end of the Self-Scan line felt compelled to make a personal connection by staring at our bag and remarking,
"Oh, Kellogs' Krave with Chocolate filled inside? My 6-year-old loves that!"
Bad choices now pave the way for terrible choices later.
Labels: Citizen
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