The Revival of Tech GC
"Tech GC is pointless. R&D is a bad
investment”, asserted Kuber1 sliding back
into his chair after wrapping his fingers around a clutch of spicy
pakodas at Café Leopold. It was the end of 2007, and I was back in
India during the winter break and reminiscing about our lives at KGP2.
I suddenly felt transported back to early KGP
days when I was striving for my techie dreams. This was the prevalent
wisdom of its time. It was soc-n-cult and hall-panti-is-everything
world of KGP of early 2000s. It was how to game saboon-tel-beedi and
bahi-khata jobs, which got the creative juices running. There were
individual brilliances and activities, but at a cultural level, it
was shocking cynicism from junta. Even sundry tech clubs were being
used to gain entry into saboon-tel-beedi jobs! While I struggled to
convince others about the need for a student driven ecosystem of
techie events, it proved difficult to attract others. At that time it
was just too hard for junta to believe in this version of reality.
Kuber
was a non-believer.
Practicing
what he preached, Kuber worked hard and got into the top IIM, an important
punctuation mark that must come after IIT for gentlemen of a particular type.
For him, if you can’t PPT it, it didn’t happen. I was enjoying the pleasant
Mumbai weather with Kuber. After a while Ranajay also joined us. It was 2007, the
year when Kuber seemed destined to have the last laugh. It was the climax of
housing bubble3. Knowing fully well that we had predicted a tech
dominated future and strived hard to be ready for it while at IIT, Kuber went
full Nelson. “Tech GC is pointless. R&D is a bad investment”. A second
later Ranajay delivered a one-liner I have not yet forgotten, “IIM plus IIT to bahut dekha hai maine, lekin
IIM minus IIT aaj pehli bar dekh raha hun”. Kuber reacted like one who
had been punched in the face – stunned and deflated. After regaining his
composure, he continued, “Indians are pretty smart. We make money selling
products to others and then use the money to buy R&D from other companies.”
2007 was the year of finance, the year of great mergers – TATAs, Reliance,
Mittal were all on the move at a global scale. GDP growth was expected to
exceed 8% and the world press declared that India was catching up to China. We
Indians who tend to revel in reflected glories, embraced the hype
wholeheartedly. I calmly sipped my tea while Ranajay expressed our collective
skepticism. “What would you do if you acquired a R&D Corp, or inflated the
GDP with overflow cash? It would be like handing a cab driver a Boeing 737! You
will eventually crash land it in a field”. The fate of many of those promises bears
witness to our skepticism. It is not a crime to be aspirational, even if none
of those bombastic predictions came true. However, the problem lies in an attitude
of chronic mercantile short-termism, which is supposed to be both the propeller
of greatness as well as the ultimate virtue to which every other endeavor must
be subservient. Something many of us were disgusted right from our days at KGP.
It is this attitude, let’s call it Kuberism4, that is somehow
elevated almost to a lifestyle choice, right from the most impressionable times
in our lives, which shatters the innate scientific temperament of IITians. Its
debris are visible in the countless clone
sena e-Commerce websites and H1/L1 de
do software repairing companies. It is nothing but an extension of Kuberism
when one argues that events like ‘Ad Design’, ‘Case Study’ and ‘Biz Quiz’ are
Tech events simply because technology is referred in their execution. By making
tech subservient, the same old script of ‘gaming’ is being replayed again. A
slippery slope. An old act. A giant Kuberian leap backward into the ABBA era5.
Fortunately,
there are many IITians who do not exhibit the shallowness of Kuberism. One of
our good friends, an IIT+IIM graduate, currently in finance is more
forthcoming. He informs us that the lack of qualified technical experts is an
extremely severe and acute problem especially in reviewing and guiding budding
Indian tech startups. As a result, even good ideas have a hard time finding
startup funding and conversely, bad ones often go through. Similarly, another
IITian friend who works at an inter-governmental organization in Washington DC
tells us that on a geopolitical scale, India’s is at the receiving end of
cartelization by other superpowers who achieved nuclear and military
technologies earlier. This forces the government into millions of dollars of
tech transfer agreements on obsolete technologies. Such severe and often punitive
economic and geopolitical costs are direct consequences of the cynical neglect
of science and technology as the natural DNA of pride in the land of
Varahamihira, Aryabhatta and Panini.
Our
own story clearly shows that cynicism is a tempting natural state for IITians
once they arrive on the campus. We too were disillusioned by the quality of
science and technology, systemic neglect and lack of any vision in those days.
In fact, we had far too many avenues to turn cynical and frust, to bitterly complain about the ‘system’, to give up and
embrace Kuberism and become its most fervent converts.
But
we didn’t.
We
tried to sow the seeds of events like Tech GC which were meant to begin
remedying the situation. Whereas IIT itself provided ‘tech’ as a skeleton - ever
present, structural and rigid, it lacks a spirit. Tech GC, a mutually
sustaining ecosystem was designed to infuse the spirit force into a well-built
skeleton.
We
did not imagine a market basket full of different usual suspect soft-tech
events to simply shore up quantity or an excuse to pad resumes. We envisioned
quality, kinship, fellowship and purpose. A birth of a true tech ecosystem.
The
first thing we had realized early on over endless discussions over tea at Chedis
was that an ecosystem cannot be built solely on individual brilliance
disconnectedly. While that is commendable ambition, the result for a venture
that is person or disparate event -driven and not a concerted process-driven is
that they tend to tepidly collapse unless exceptional leadership is available.
For events like Tech GC to stand strong for generations, there must be a
sustainable institutionalized endeavor of excellence embodying a grand
over-arching theme. Something on which we spent considerable time at its
formation. But where might we find an over-arching theme for Tech GC today?
That
brings me to a more recent past. It was the summer of 2016 when I was visiting
Boston. Ranajay and I decided on visiting the the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to
catch a glimpse of the Monets and Pollocks. When we arrived at the museum, we
found ourselves greeted by their latest exhibition6 ‘Megacities
Asia’. As we entered a large hall, we were confronted by a humongous graph
showing past, current and projected populations of Delhi and few other selected
cities in the world. I craned my neck to follow the graph for Delhi and I was
astounded! By 2030, the projected population of Delhi would match the current
population of the entirety of Canada! Megacities of this scale are a uniquely
Asian phenomenon to the extent that even cities like New York were dwarfed! But
even in this subset, Delhi had few peers. Imagine peak-hour Delhi, imagine all the people, imagine all
the cars, the noise, the clutter and the absolute sea of humanity. A decade
from now that ocean of humanity would almost double in density! In the coming
decades, India’s megacities will pose challenges and opportunities that India
has never witnessed before. To overcome these challenges India would need
innovation in almost every sector. If labor shortfall catalyzed Europeans into
the innovative spiraling out of the industrial revolution, will this labor and
human surplus move India towards its own unique tech revolution?
Unaware
of the assassination of Tech GC, I turned to Ranajay and asked “Do you think
Tech GC today is a proving ground for young idealists aiming to save India from
this crisis and herald a revolution?”. Ranajay, still looking at the staggering
wall size graph softly added, “We saw it alive, hopefully it has beautiful
eyes”. I instantly got the drift of the statement, something I had always felt
was paramount – vision!
Maybe
we erred in codifying the vision, or what we felt we had thought about it. We
did not intend Tech GC to be a panacea for the shortfalls of the general apathy
that students experienced. It was a means to continue harnessing the enormous
talent that pours in, filtered through JEE every year. A direct mix between the
person, society and imagination in the petri dish of IIT. An opportunity to
transcend. In this great game, we had never thought of ourselves as pioneers,
but simply as ordinary KGPians. After a few hours and several rounds of coffee,
we came to the conclusion that we had done our dharma and left Tech GC in the able hands. There was no reason to
look back!
Our
expectations were belied2.
Knowing
the current situation of Tech GC, we would argue that it is time to start all
over again. Burn the current Tech GC to the ground and reboot. In its new avatar,
Tech GC should aim to become a pre-incubator for hard-tech startups purely
geared toward what are unique problems and opportunities within India. A shastrartha for hard tech ideas, where
the aim should be novelty and creativity and a fearless approach to failure7.
Tech GC should not only deliver for KGPians but also lead others through its
example. It is this approach that will eventually lead to a bedrock of
start-ups and tech leaders that can organically solve many of the issues our
country faces today such as cybersecurity, space technology, urban
transportation, environmental protection, affordable healthcare, cutting edge research
as well as revolutionize other sectors.
This
is not an easy task. Accomplishing it would require a team of dedicated and
passionate techies. The job of this team should be to reach out to individuals
who have excelled in R&D activities such as professors within and outside
KGP, CTOs, scientists and good old google search and situational observations8
to carve out broad problem statements for various events at Tech GC. I would be
rather happy if a P-team like group is created just to meet and network with
IITians in those positions. Our own personal interactions indicate that most
would be delighted to help.
A
note of caution: problem statements cannot (and should not) simply be exported
from existing situations. A certain level of abstraction, synthesis, analysis
and research will be required. Without this holistic approach Tech GC could
simply end up becoming a de facto outsourcing event, a slide into Kuberistic
myopia. This apex group of innovative moderators, which will forcefully embrace
the event in its true spirit must see themselves just like our own experience –
foolish pig headed non-conformists! Geek pride! Let’s call it - Holistic
Advanced Research and Analysis Moderators and Innovators. Will they please
stand up?
Notes:
1.
Name changed
2.
(For non-KGP readers) KGP refers to IIT Kharagpur and Tech
GC refers to Technology General Championship. C.f. first article
in the series – ‘The Assassination of Tech GC'.
3.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_housing_bubble
4.
A more rigorous definition of Kuberism is as follows: A shallow and superficial mercantile
approach to knowledge and knowledge based systems.
5. It is probably appropriate to point out that we are well aware of the
existence of the techno-management fest (earlier Ideon and renamed Kshitij
during our time). There is a good reason why it does not find mention in “The
Assassination of Tech GC” and also here.
7. Probably noteworthy that AK had a GPA in lower sattis after his 2nd yr.
8.
Only tool we originally used
Publication date: This essay was first published by IIT KGP's student run magazine Scholar's Avenue in March 2017. This is a republication of the same essay with minor changes.
Disclaimer: The article is based on true events. The essay expresses the personal opinion views and opinions of the authors. Kuber remains a good friend.
About the authors: (Sutradhar)
Dr.
Aloke Kumar is currently a
Canada Research Chair at University of Alberta (Canada) and a visiting scholar
at Columbia University (USA). He received his Bachelors and Masters degrees from the Indian Institute
of Technology, Kharagpur, India in 2005 and his Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering
from Purdue University, West Lafayette, USA in 2010.
With
inputs from
Dr. Ranajay Ghosh is a KGP Mech’04(BTech) and Cornell
’10 (PhD) Alum and currently assistant professor at the center for advanced
turbine and energy research (CATER) and mechanical and aerospace engineering at
the University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL.
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