Engineering as a methodology … contains a fundamentally materialist kernel, even if its present incarnation as a bourgeois science drives engineers to think and behave otherwise.
— Nick Chavez, Engineers, Materialism, and the Communist Method
After school, I studied mechanical engineering against my will. Most engineering students at the time did, and probably still do. Almost every Indian family not in the top 1% of the top 1% (it’s still a large number given the population) of society by wealth would like to get there. And to this day studying to be an engineer or a doctor seems like the safest bet to ensure families get onto and/or stay on that path.
My family was the same way in 2006. I insisted I wanted to study English literature but my folks were having none of it. When push came to shove, I yielded and said I’d study mechanical engineering only because my father had, too, 24 years earlier. The next four years turned out to be terrible. While it might seem straightforward enough from the outside, having to endure four years of something one is not at all interested in, especially when one is keenly aware that four years amounts to fully one-fifth of one’s life by that point, is corrosive to the spirit. It certainly made my future seem quite bleak to me, more so since I’d internalised my stream of poor grades to mean I was unfit to make it in this world.
Fortunately (such as it was), my folks relented in my third year and faced me with the freedom to decide what I’d do after engineering college. Thus I picked journalism, figuring I could combine my fondness for writing with the prospect of making some money, at least more than a career in English literature in India might have yielded. It remains among the best decisions I’ve ever made — but as it would later turn out, thanks in no small part to my background as a trained engineer.
A recurring motif I’ve observed in journalism as it is practised is that people who enter it with skills from a completely different field almost always have an advantage right away (while those who came in after having studied only journalism don’t). There are many ways to classify the activities and rituals of journalism and one is in terms of generalists and beat-experts. (I’m using ‘expertise’ here to mean the “temporary expertise” as Bora Zivkovic defined it.) I for example am a beat-expert: I focus on science, environment, and space journalism. I regularly commission articles from freelancers, among whom there are generalists and beat-experts as well. The generalists here will be comfortable covering a variety of topics (often as long the subject matter in each case isn’t too involved) whereas the beat-experts might be restricted to, say, RNA viruses, radio astronomy, solar power economics or number theory. Even at the newsroom level, there are generalist reporters who can hammer out news reports with all the right details in the right order and beat reporters who are better equipped to dive deep into specific topics.
Notably, however, beat-experts are generally valued more. There are a few reasons why. Beat-experts can if required competently put together a copy on a completely different beat; depending on the beat, they can be hard to come by; and — this is perhaps most important — by virtue of understanding a topic more deeply than others, they can communicate ideas and developments therein much better. It’s even better if through one’s work as a journalist one is able to bring together the “two cultures” à la CP Snow, that is to draw on insights and wisdom from both science and the humanities to inform the way one covers different subjects. Then one’s value will soar (assuming there are also editors or employers that are able to discern that value).
In the last week alone, in fact, my regret over having spent four years studying the physics and mathematics underlying engineering has been significantly mitigated by the particular events in the news. Air India flight AI171 crashed shortly after take-off in Ahmedabad, killing 241 of the 242 people onboard and concluding as one of India’s worst air disasters. To quote from my piece in The Hindu, “The engine design is an important reason for 787-8 aircraft’s higher fuel-efficiency per seat… The other factors contributing to this feature include the use of carbon composite structures of lower weight and low-drag aerodynamics. [Thus] a 787-8 aircraft burnt around 20% less fuel than earlier twinjet models of a similar size. This allowed the aircraft to undertake nonstop flights between cities with lower passenger traffic than that required to fill Boeing 777 or Boeing 747 aircraft.” Depending on what investigators find from the black box, there’s a nontrivial chance one of these three components was part of the cascade of problems leading up to the crash, and may in turn reveal the processual failures that preceded it.
The Axiom-4 commercial mission to the International Space Station was delayed for a fourth time before SpaceX called it off altogether following a gas leak onboard the rocket. The engineering factor here is less obvious, especially as it relates to a curious statement ISRO issued on June 13: that ISRO had recommended to SpaceX that the latter — the company that actually built the rocket for the mission and has flown it hundreds of times before — “carry out in-situ repairs or replacement and conduct a low-temperature leak test to validate system performance and integrity, before proceeding with launch clearance”. ISRO may not be lying but why, given how rockets are tested and certified for flight, would SpaceX care for ISRO’s opinion on the way forward here?
Last: Israel launched what it called a “preliminary” attack against Iran in order to dissuade it from pursuing its nuclear weapons programme. The attack followed a day after the International Atomic Energy Agency resolved that Iran had failed to comply with the terms of a 1974 agreement that, among other things, demanded the country be accountable at all times about the use of enriched uranium for civilian v. military applications. Now, I’ve been interested in nuclear news from around the world since a brief interaction with MV Ramana more than a decade ago, but my background in engineering — which I was now forced to dust off and retrieve from the recesses of my mind — certainly helped lubricate my comprehension of uranium enrichment. And that in turn revealed like little else could how rapidly Iran was advancing towards possessing nuclear warheads, how and why the IAEA safeguards are limited (and why Iran’s willing participation in inspectors’ surveillance is so important), and ultimately why Israel is so nervous.
Broadly, having a degree in X field and getting into Y field confronts you more often than otherwise with situations where you’re forced to learn on the fly, using your own mental models but often with models you’ve acquired learning something entirely different. In my case at least, this switch allowed me to think about certain ideas in ways that others weren’t. English literature followed by journalism could have had the same effect, although I only know that in hindsight. Just like I was forced to adapt engineering thinking to social issues and vice versa, English literature, which is after all a literary window into history, certain geographies, certain peoples, and the writers, readers, philosophers, and politicians among them, could allow one to compare/contrast whatever is happening today around us with what we know did in the past — an exercise I’ve always found to be illuminating.
(Edit: my friend Chitralekha Manohar helped me see that I also presumed a certain willingness to learn in order for an X-to-Y switch to manifest all its benefits. Chitralekha is a professional editor who runs The Clean Copy in Bengaluru. As she put it: “What I mean to say is, it’s very easy for an English literature student to find science writing by a scientist to be boring. But I really like it. And it might have something to do with a personal project to understand language and communication at a level more than is necessary to get the degree. It’s the recurring question of why some of us are like this…”.)
Engineering offers yet another lens through which to observe the world as long the observer doesn’t lose sight of everything else, especially the social, political, economic, etc. aspects. This is hardly new information but perhaps the corollary is: all these other lenses through which to observe the world may also offer an incomplete picture if they overlook what engineering is uniquely equipped to reveal. Of course I presume here a particular kind of engineering education: learning the basics of physics, chemistry, and mathematics followed by specialised training in the principles and techniques of the specific ‘branch’, i.e. mechanical, chemical, biotechnological, electrical, software, etc.
In fact, I grudgingly admit that even though I barely cleared all these papers, the residues of lessons on calculus, metrology, vector algebra, fuzzy logic, and so on have sufficed to maintain a picture in my mind of how the world works and, importantly, how it can’t, won’t or shouldn’t — although defining these three boundaries also demands political awareness and a sense of social justice. Thus for example one becomes able to spot pseudoscience but also understands that sometimes it needs to be treated with compassion if for no other reason than that it was born of the failure of science to meet particular human needs.
More broadly, materialism has historically exerted a sizeable influence on human societies, their institutions, and their aspirations, and continues to do so. As a result, to go back to the engineer and communist Chavez, “the social relations tying global industry together are obscured underneath an engineering methodology”. Even for its contemporary identity as a “bourgeois science”, then, the engineer’s enterprise is arguably necessary if we’re to retool human industry.
Closer home, I think I’m finally not resenting those four years.
