Let’s begin by ranting about how awful it is to travel on the Bypass to and fro five times a week. That’s about 10-15 hours, about one-and-a-half-workday every week spent travelling on “roads” in steel cages that pass for “vehicles”. It hardly needs mentioning that the end of such a pilgrimage leaves one in quite the rant-friendly state-of-mind.
It was on one such night that a quick look at my social media feed revealed a nation revelling in the elevation of a certain Sundar Pichai to the post of Google CEO. Now, I had been following Pichai’s rapid growth up the corporate structure at Google for a few years now, especially since he moved from managing the team in charge of Google Chrome to managing the development of Android.
Disclaimer: I am a major time fan of Android, especially the vanilla version that Google releases as an open-source OS to be made amazing by the likes of Cyanogen or Motorola, or to be made unusable by the likes of Samsung.
Although most of my experiments with Android involved taking low-end devices running Froyo and Gingerbread and pushing them to run the likes of Jellybean and KitKat, the development the OS underwent under Pichai to the grown-up version of Lollipop was incredible. No wonder he was appointed CEO.
Which was not the reason why the entire nation was crazy for him. They were simply crazy because he was an Indian, had been at IIT Kharagpur for a while, and had now really gone places. It also helped that he had replied to a tweet from nationalistic fan No. 1, our esteemed PM, saying that he looked forward to meeting him soon. You know what happens when bhakts go on overdrive. Things start trending.
Now, I have an instinctive disdain for all things nationalistic. Part of it is explained by my being on the wrong side whenever people get nationalistic. I become a Muslim when bhakts get all, well, bhakt-ey. Back at home in Shillong, Khasi or Assamese nationalism immediately made me a Bengali, an outsider, an illegal Bangladeshi immigrant. West Bengali nationalism makes me the intruder, the refugee, the Bangaal.
Of course, I understand why people are so taken by nationalism. It’s a lazy ideology, easy to adhere to when convenient and easy to shy away from, when not. As long as you belong to majorities. It lets one be proud of achievements one had no contribution to and very dangerously, it makes us hate people we don’t know and have no dealings with. Which is why it is so furiously promoted by nation-states across the world because it helps them make their masses hate and love who they choose for the moment, to hate and love.
All elementary ideas. Nothing any self-respecting fresher social science student doesn’t know. However, in the sub-continent, we don’t place much value by social sciences, given our mad drive to make engineers and doctors of our sons (daughters be damned, of course). So entire generations of middle-class youth, meant to be the “future of the nation” grow up without the most elementary political awareness, grow up as conformists to a system that uses their conformism to justify majoritarian ideas that hold back social development.
Take this for an example.
Otherwise-well-meaning conformists believe the majoritarian idea that it is reservation for historically discriminated castes that is stopping India from turning into Manhattan. Not casteism, that kept vast sections of Brahminical society from social development. It is their token upliftment that has made this country cursed. Write this in a social media comment, and the immediate salvo fired from the other end is that of ‘merit’. I find it hard to believe that the inherently high ‘merit’ that upper castes in India enjoy, is merely a result of genetically higher IQ, and not a result of systemically excluding lower castes from education, from basic hygiene and social involvement for more than 2000 years. However, a dangerously high proportion of educated middle-class young Indians think so and believe so. It deserves rants.
Which brings me back to that night of Bypass and Sundar Pichai. What started out as a rant against conformist nationalist engineers turned into a series of snarky, stereotyped, self-deprecating, Twitter-sized commentaries on failures in various disciplines. Find the full list below.
- There’s a reason nationalism is such a popular idea. It lets a generation of failed Indian engineers, who ended up as bankers, to feel proud of Sundar Pichai, Google CEO who happened to study at an IIT. #PapaNeBolaEngineerBanJao
- Since most Economics students in India start out as failed engineers or failed doctors, that makes failed economists either major failures or failures at being failures, depending on how deluded one is about one’s failures.
- There is no such thing as a failed sociologist. After all, failure is a social construct. If you’re a Marxist sociologist, it’s a market-induced construct.
- Of all though, the least social pressure is on failed historians. They can always say that it’s been done before.
- Also, failed journalists are still called journalists. Except Shekhar Gupta.
- Returning to economists, the ones who have it best are the political economy guys. They are pragmatic about the discipline, which is a kind way of saying they failed at math. Then they build equally ludicrous models, just longer and Greek-free.
- A failed student leader, however, is unique, in that it is an actual career option. The bigger the failure, the larger the cult.
- A failed data analyst is the coolest thing to be. Has been since Chandler.
- Failed footballers and hipsters don’t play onside. Reminders every Premier League weekend are more than the old monk can drown.
- There are no successful or failed statisticians. Just different confidence intervals.
- Failed mathematicians take real analysis and make it so abstract you’d be confused if it’s really great or nothing at all. No wait, that’s failed philosophers. Or mathematicians. Now I’m confused.
- Successful English literature students write reviews for books written by failed economists.
And yes, Happy Independence Day. Jai Hind. Bharat Mata Ki Jai. Mera Bharat Mahaan. All that crap.
carvaan 