Musings - I and disclaimer (please read the disclaimer)
The reasonable man adapts to the world, while the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to suit him. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
-- Bernard Shaw (I think)
For me, higher education without research is a bit of a contradiction. Sure, a large part of higher education is in developing contemporary and specialized skills, but a small and in my opinion, crucial, aspect of higher education is extending our boundaries of knowledge and exploring into the unknown.
By definition, research entails going into uncharted territory. And as nature would have its way, among the most potent primal fears that humans possess is the fear of the unknown. It is the fear of the unknown that has been singularly responsible for the worst forms of totally avoidable savagery, social evils and large-scale warfare throughout civilization. Venturing into the unknown is by no means easy -- the world here is as real as it gets. Perhaps more "real" (jungle like) than the rest of the world who like to say they live in the "real world."
There are essentially two kinds of folks who venture out into the unknown -- researchers (which includes all kinds of explorers) and rank idiots. And it is sometimes very hard to tell the difference -- even about yourself to yourself. There is of course a third variety -- folks who have been forced to explore, out of desperate situations.
In the real world, qualities like self-confidence and attitude matter a lot. But in the real real world, what really matters is competency -- how well you can understand and describe what you are seeing and provide solutions. The only weapon we have here at our disposal is our ability to critically think, imagine, hypothesize, build models and implement solutions.
The reason for this is simple. The ultimate judge for researchers is nature. And nature is very unforgiving. If you mixed two explosive chemicals as part of your research, nature does not care what your intentions were and will not give you the benefit of doubt. Nature also does not follow principles of natural justice when dealing directly with us.
And by definition, exploration is replete with failures. Even the best of minds aren't good enough to "get it right the first time." Failure is an intrinsic part of research and necessary stepping stones. Your survival as a researcher also then depends on how tolerant is the larger society towards failures.
Indian society by and large, is far less tolerant towards failures and far more averse to risk taking than its Western counterpart. We are more comfortable in copying ready-made designs and implementing them at a fraction of the cost. Be it cars, or highways or skyscrapers or going to the moon -- our society does it decades after it has been tried and tested elsewhere. Perhaps our claim to fame is that we get all these things implemented at throwaway prices by world standards.
The main reason for this, in my opinion is this aversion to failure. I can only imagine how several sarcastic journalists and self-styled experts would have been having a field day on all the newspapers and television had the moon mission failed. But then a quick look at the history of space missions elsewhere reveal several failures -- including large catastrophic ones. Be it Challenger or Columbia or the Chinese misadventure where a rocket strayed off and fell on a village killing hundreds of people, failures have happened everywhere.
Learning to tolerate failure is a crucial and extremely hard skill that is necessary for exploration. Perhaps this is where the difference between exploration and rank idiocy becomes most apparent. It is one thing to blindly rush into the unknown with just a philosophy that "failure is the stepping stone to success" and yet another altogether to meticulously model, understand and build safeguards as part of our exploration.
There is one incident that I usually describe in this regard. As a PhD student in Europe, I had once been to a town called Kaprun in Austria for skiing. It was the first time I'd visited a ski resort there and what enamored me more than the beautiful Alpine peaks was the superb engineering. The mountain had a mountain-train that took us from the base to almost three-fourths of the mountain through a tunnel in just 15 minutes. There were also several ropeways, ski lifts, trolleys, etc. The entire system worked so harmoniously that I found myself imagining how such an infrastructure must have been built in that cold weather.
I also learnt about the enormous and rigorous emphasis that was placed on safety. The mountain train for example, had no engine and no fuel tank. It was pulled by cables. There were emergency brakes in case the cables broke. And in the almost impossible event of a fire in the train, the emergency brakes would automatically engage and all the doors will automatically open. The entire length of the track had steps on both sides which people can use for escape.
I was extremely impressed, and rightfully so, at such marvellous engineering. But then, six months after I'd been there, the unthinkable happened. There was a fire disaster in the mountain train in which about 165 people perished. This, despite the rigorous attention to detail.
This disaster is featured on National Geographic (NatGeo investigates), where they explain the freak sequence of events that led to this disaster. The enormous human tragedy was a combination of factors, each of which were singularly next-to-impossible events. A hose containing pneumatic brake liquid develops a leak and drips on an exposed heater coil, which happened to be at the lower end of the train. The emergency brakes work well and the train doors open as designed. But because many people saw smoke coming from below, they make the fatal mistake of moving up the mountain instead of down. All those who made this decision perish. Only 12, who were led by a fireman, go towards the smoke and walk down the mountain and survive.
I still can't believe this really happened.
Folks, this is the kind of challenge to be faced when trying to do something new. When nature is the customer, challenges are somewhat bigger than loss of prestige or social inacceptance. And no, you can't make nature change its mind by creating a lobby, taking it to dinner, offering a bribe or threatening to sue.
By definition, research entails going into uncharted territory. And as nature would have its way, among the most potent primal fears that humans possess is the fear of the unknown. It is the fear of the unknown that has been singularly responsible for the worst forms of totally avoidable savagery, social evils and large-scale warfare throughout civilization. Venturing into the unknown is by no means easy -- the world here is as real as it gets. Perhaps more "real" (jungle like) than the rest of the world who like to say they live in the "real world."
There are essentially two kinds of folks who venture out into the unknown -- researchers (which includes all kinds of explorers) and rank idiots. And it is sometimes very hard to tell the difference -- even about yourself to yourself. There is of course a third variety -- folks who have been forced to explore, out of desperate situations.
In the real world, qualities like self-confidence and attitude matter a lot. But in the real real world, what really matters is competency -- how well you can understand and describe what you are seeing and provide solutions. The only weapon we have here at our disposal is our ability to critically think, imagine, hypothesize, build models and implement solutions.
The reason for this is simple. The ultimate judge for researchers is nature. And nature is very unforgiving. If you mixed two explosive chemicals as part of your research, nature does not care what your intentions were and will not give you the benefit of doubt. Nature also does not follow principles of natural justice when dealing directly with us.
And by definition, exploration is replete with failures. Even the best of minds aren't good enough to "get it right the first time." Failure is an intrinsic part of research and necessary stepping stones. Your survival as a researcher also then depends on how tolerant is the larger society towards failures.
Indian society by and large, is far less tolerant towards failures and far more averse to risk taking than its Western counterpart. We are more comfortable in copying ready-made designs and implementing them at a fraction of the cost. Be it cars, or highways or skyscrapers or going to the moon -- our society does it decades after it has been tried and tested elsewhere. Perhaps our claim to fame is that we get all these things implemented at throwaway prices by world standards.
The main reason for this, in my opinion is this aversion to failure. I can only imagine how several sarcastic journalists and self-styled experts would have been having a field day on all the newspapers and television had the moon mission failed. But then a quick look at the history of space missions elsewhere reveal several failures -- including large catastrophic ones. Be it Challenger or Columbia or the Chinese misadventure where a rocket strayed off and fell on a village killing hundreds of people, failures have happened everywhere.
Learning to tolerate failure is a crucial and extremely hard skill that is necessary for exploration. Perhaps this is where the difference between exploration and rank idiocy becomes most apparent. It is one thing to blindly rush into the unknown with just a philosophy that "failure is the stepping stone to success" and yet another altogether to meticulously model, understand and build safeguards as part of our exploration.
There is one incident that I usually describe in this regard. As a PhD student in Europe, I had once been to a town called Kaprun in Austria for skiing. It was the first time I'd visited a ski resort there and what enamored me more than the beautiful Alpine peaks was the superb engineering. The mountain had a mountain-train that took us from the base to almost three-fourths of the mountain through a tunnel in just 15 minutes. There were also several ropeways, ski lifts, trolleys, etc. The entire system worked so harmoniously that I found myself imagining how such an infrastructure must have been built in that cold weather.
I also learnt about the enormous and rigorous emphasis that was placed on safety. The mountain train for example, had no engine and no fuel tank. It was pulled by cables. There were emergency brakes in case the cables broke. And in the almost impossible event of a fire in the train, the emergency brakes would automatically engage and all the doors will automatically open. The entire length of the track had steps on both sides which people can use for escape.
I was extremely impressed, and rightfully so, at such marvellous engineering. But then, six months after I'd been there, the unthinkable happened. There was a fire disaster in the mountain train in which about 165 people perished. This, despite the rigorous attention to detail.
This disaster is featured on National Geographic (NatGeo investigates), where they explain the freak sequence of events that led to this disaster. The enormous human tragedy was a combination of factors, each of which were singularly next-to-impossible events. A hose containing pneumatic brake liquid develops a leak and drips on an exposed heater coil, which happened to be at the lower end of the train. The emergency brakes work well and the train doors open as designed. But because many people saw smoke coming from below, they make the fatal mistake of moving up the mountain instead of down. All those who made this decision perish. Only 12, who were led by a fireman, go towards the smoke and walk down the mountain and survive.
I still can't believe this really happened.
Folks, this is the kind of challenge to be faced when trying to do something new. When nature is the customer, challenges are somewhat bigger than loss of prestige or social inacceptance. And no, you can't make nature change its mind by creating a lobby, taking it to dinner, offering a bribe or threatening to sue.
4 comments:
In my opinion, our aversion to taking risks probably emanates from the same pool of virtues/qualities/beliefs that we abide by in our Indian Society. Our way of life has probably instilled a certain rigidity, not so much in what we think, but surely in the way we think. We are pretty quick in avoiding thinking about something if we feel it is breaking away from the norm ...
Flipside of the coin, IMO ... or am I putting my foot in my mouth here? :)
Don't worry.. it is quite hard to push a big foot into the mouth. ;)
Anyway, let me not speculate on where this aversion comes from. It would take on a different path altogether.
Indians hate failures because we are too much worried what the society would think of us. We never put ourselves ahead of the society. Moreover indians in my opinion are lazy. They expect google to give answers to every query.
The education in India is one of the factors for programming people to think in that way. The education is more or less a copy-paste education. The course content gets copied to the brain and gets pasted in the answer booklets. There are few of them who break this norm but they always end up scoring average marks as the evaluator will be given a solution manual who religiously sticks to it word-by-word.
I have enjoyed reading the series so far. I hope there is lot more to come in this series :)
-Ravishankar
Thanks for your words.. and yes, there are a few more in this series. :)
Post a Comment