The Hindu Business Line : Every child can become a good human being

During the 1970s, Sugata Sanyal was part of the teams that worked on some of the early computer applications in the country, be they in weather forecasting, or defence. Currently, he is Professor in the School of Technology and Computer Science at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Mumbai ( www.tifr.res.in/~sanyal).

“Looking back, we did go through a series of experiences spanning a long period of time,” he reminisces, over a telephonic and e-mail interaction with Business Line, talking about his tryst with high-level research and development work.

“When we were making a computer, in 1977, we were told that similar computers are developed in the US in two months. That was a challenge; we did it in less than four months time. Considering the technical advancement in India at that time, we did a fairly good job.”

Excerpts from the interview:

Any anecdotes about the challenges then?

During the phase when we were making this computer, we had to even design and develop the control memory (programmable read only memory or PROM) programmer.

First day when we put the control data inside the PROM, we saw nothing happening. It was a big setback.

At night, while sleeping I realised that we had inverted all the address lines while wiring the PROM controller. We reversed it, and things started working. What a great day!

Even earlier, one of our engineers was struggling with a display unit. After working for three hours, he was fed up. Then another smart colleague walked in, he told us that he would correct the situation in five minutes, but there was a bet on it. Our smart guy, went to the wall, plugged the unit, and it started working. Last three hours, it was being tested without power!

Another time, I was working in Chennai, at the Cyclone Warning Radar Station. We had gone from TIFR after a month and found that the system, which we had configured, was completely in shambles.

On investigating further, we found that there were continuous sand inputs through the windows that did not close properly. The laboratory is close to the Bay of Bengal.

We went to the market, bought drill and screws, and got the windows screwed tight, put felt in between to stop the air-conditioning leakage. We had to also dig out the cables, which were cut by big rodents; and we had to fabricate some metal grills to block the passage of rodents through the cable duct.

On what made you choose the line you are in. And, looking at today’s technology students and education, what do you find as wanting?

I was influenced by my father; he was always trying to get something new. Transistor radios were the rage of those days. He would get different models, and soon after a month, another model would replace the earlier one.

My father also had a lot of patience; I remember once he had opened up a lighter in the morning at around 8 am; he got up after fixing it by 8 pm. Huge amount of patience. And this has helped me a lot. You need to have patience, if you want to develop something new, or something big, or both. I was also influenced by my cousin brother, who was around six years older than me. His knowledge was very deep, and he was quite innovative.

TIFR is an institution, but in a way, if you look at it in a philosophical way, it is also a great teacher. You can get to meet some of the great intelligent minds in India and also in the world. And under the single roof, you can just discuss mathematics, physics or computer science or molecular biology, and at the cutting edge.

There is also a convoluted teaching one can get from such an institution. One has to be philosophical about it. Whatever you do, most of the time it is not good enough for a promotion. Other than the very highly talented theoreticians, most of the other works do not get a translated benefit in terms of career improvement.

If you look at it in a normal manner, you might get hurt. But if you try to learn from it, it makes you challenge yourself to go beyond the extra line and you only become better. You need to learn with an open mind. And you may not get a direct monetary benefit. Mostly you will not. But it teaches you to handle situations which you may not imagine possible, and quoting Edward de Bono, ‘Lateral Thinking’ is one science which gets taught to you, here, if you can keep your mind open.

Coming back to today’s students and education, not only in technology, I would like to think that parents need to curb the unhygienic expectations from their children. Every child cannot come first in class. But every child can become a good human being.

Our education system, our value system needs to change a bit. I am not a person who loves everything from abroad. Our culture has many positive points. And we are also trying to be modern and trying to develop from “developing” to “developed”.

While trying to utilise computers for taking the country to the 22nd century, let us also remember that we need to have our value system properly. IT (information technology) systems are there for serving us, if we work on computers and earn big money; we however forget to ask the question about what happened to the quality of life which we had earlier and how it is now.

Lord Buddha had advocated the Middle Path, and that is an important lesson. We work for an MNC, earn hugely, but we are also bound to money and computer and mobiles, 24X7X365. Possibly computers are taking over us, rather than the other way round. We should deeply think about it.

D. MURALI

http://InterviewsInsights.blogspot.com

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