Innovation and India

Its almost an accepted fact that socio-cultural pressures in India force us to tend towards professions like engineering and management as a career option. Our position in the world economy, our unique problems, our politics and our people all contribute to this trend, and it is no wonder then, that India is the preferred outsourcing destination of the world with its abundant supply of engineers and management professionals.

I feel that we engineers tend to grow up with this inherent attitude that makes us believe we are more significant than those from another profession [exception: doctors, MBA's and lawyers]. Our society, family and friends do little to rid us of this fallacy - everyone is busy proclaiming the achievements of his or her son/daughter in terms of college admissions, campus interviews and salaries. This extends right through to marriage proposals and beyond. Engineers look for engineers, doctors look for doctors and pity the person who does not have one of these high profile degrees.

Recently, I've kind of become really interested in the Arts. Besides my pathetic attempts at poetry, I've started to read about English literature and the work of some prominent poets. I've also started perusing some resources that deal with such issues. I even spent a pleasant two hours analyzing essays from students to a verse written by Emily Dickinson! I also read with fascination about how Lawrence Summers, the Harvard president, resigned due to power conflicts with the Arts faculty in Harvard. My exact thoughts were "...woah...wait a minute...he resigned due to pressure from the Arts guys...? " I went back to school and college and tried to think of the weight that arts faculties carried when compared to the math and science folks. I think in most of the cases, we science students had more say then them!

Why am I talking about all this? If you're an engineer you're probably ready to close the window by now....and that's exactly my point. What do we actually know about the Arts? Critical thinking, presentation, persistence, creativity and discipline are some of the many qualities that the Arts teach us. And India is hardly paying any attention. How many innovations have come out of India? Compare those with the number of clients whose back-end processes we manage. We are too concerned with managing others work, and need to start thinking about creating our own work. With the world becoming flatter, the onus is on humans to do the one thing that is still unique to humans - innovate. And this is integrally tied in to the Arts and Humanities.

Thomas Friedman had an excellent article on this in Friday's Times. Read it if you can. Some people he quoted from a recent Nasscom conference in Mumbai:

"..we need to encourage more incubation of ideas...make innovation a national initiative..."
- Azim Premji, Wipro

"..we have a creative problem in this country..."
-Nirmala Sankaran, HeyMath

"..more people will get PhD's in Sanskrit in the US than in India...and Sanskrit is the root of our culture..."
-Jerry Rao, MphasiS

Its not a lost cause yet, we engineers can also innovate, but only when we do not take the Arts for granted. We need to open our minds, educate ourselves and look at how and where we can learn from them. We're so used to certain mental models of thinking that we cannot break the mould...and that is the key to innovation. The next killer application, the next product, the next technology, the next invention - they will all arrive and transform how we live. Who creates it, and how quickly it gets created are two questions that are key, and these issues will decide the order of the world economy for generations to come. Creating, sustaining and supporting initiatives for the Arts and Humanities is a critical step that India, and Indians, need to take to have a realistic chance of overcoming this challenge.

What do you say?