Jan 05, 2009

WoW!

I just spent 20 days on the experience of a lifetime! I went to India with the NNIN’s 1st International Winter School for Graduate Students (iWSG). For two weeks we were to immerse ourselves in intense technical learning in an international environment (India Institute of Technology, Kanpur) as well as an intense cultural experience of how to implement technology in developing countries (Paralakhemundi, an ancestral community in southern India).

The description above cannot begin to describe what I experienced in those 20 days. At IIT Kanpur we took a course on organic electronics and optoelectronics, taught by professors from our host institution as well as US Institutions like Cornell, Columbia, Stanford, Univ. of Washington, etc. There was even an MIT MTL alumni who gave a talk, Prof. Ioannis Kymissis who is now at Columbia University. The course was extremely challenging for me because this is not my area of expertise, as well as about three advanced graduate level courses including research that has not been published yet was presented in 7 days. However, we had challenges not only in the course and labs but we had to get used to living in India which was a course in and of itself! Drinking hot chai with equally spicy food, trying to learn Hindi, fighting mosquitoes, and understanding that shaking your head no really meant yes, were things not taught in the classroom but definitely necessary for survival!

The course was only half of our experience, as we traveled from Kanpur to Paralakhemundi via a 24 hour train ride followed by a 5 hour train ride the next day followed by a 3 hour truck ride through the mountains. That was an adventure that I will never forget! We lived, ate, and experienced almost everything that someone living in the villages, and mountains of Paralakhemundi delt with on a daily basis. I tried to teach a bull to plow and I harvested sugar cane. We visited villages so far into the mountains that no cars or trucks could reach them, and thus I got a lot of attention, as many of the children and most adults had never seen someone of African descent. Although there were so many layers of languages, cultural, and lifestyle differences between us and the people there, we were able to communicate with them to find out what types of problems technology can solve and possibly even create.

I have never been able to sit under the stars and just think… Just think about how a technology that is so cutting-edge yet practical to implement, that we think it could “help” people in a community culturally, economically, and socially different than our own. I came to many conclusions over the course of my time there, but one of them was that there is no panacea that engineers can create to solve all the world’s problems. Many times the solutions we believe are so ingenuis tear apart communities and destroy cultures that have existed harmoniously since the beginning of time! So I wondered, what is my role here? I have to solve relevant problems because that is the reason that I became an engineer but to solve them responsibly I must also understand the cultural, ethical, and social implications of my solutions…

[The picture is of myself and Professor Sandip Tiwari, the director of NNIN and organizer of this trip, I believe that this picture is worth a thousand words]

Post A Response