Some musings on growth and culture
I confess that I am addicted to Twitter, or X as it is now known. I've enjoyed the site for as long as I can remember, having dabbled in it as a young school kid with his first computer and a fairly fast broadband connection. I remember the magic of the internet as it unfolded before my eyes. From struggling with a dial-up connection through a landline, to a 50-kbps bandwidth on an upgraded broadband network, life had drastically improved on the log-kilobyte scale. And social media had just begun its steady ascent into the zeitgeist.
So there as I found this new social media site that gave me granular updates a smaller scale than facebook, a number of interesting things happened:
- The margin for error increased: I could whatever I felt and let it float out into the wide sea with a high probability of hits.
- I could have granular control over my feed.
And other things as well, but what struck out was this sudden expansion of the horizon, and sure enough, an almost direct connect to the world of western thought and action. So american engineering became a regular point of discussion, and I delved into engineering missions and culture at NASA, Goddard and JPL, among others. The scale and breadth of work was unreal. A mission to Mars and a mission to Venus and simultaneous missions to deep space that utilized "light sails" and ionic propulsion systems - this was not sci-fi, but real engineering problems being solved by a talent pool of ingenious, can-do humans. Uncle Sam's spirit was visible on every bit of information that landed on my feed. Heck, even the feed was American. What fun!
And then I found myself flipping through the pages of "Science Reporter", a popular national monthly magazine that had articles on Indian science and engineering from scientists and science journalists. The content of the articles and the passion of the writers struck deep, but a parallel pain cropped up when I realized the chronic lack of "culture" in our country. Something along the can-do spirit of American science and engineering was glaringly absent here, and although figures like APJ Abdul Kalam, CNR Rao, Thanu Padmanabhan, JV Narlikar and others were my heroes, I couldn't see past the smog of a third-world country coming to terms with its numerous systemic issues and simultaneously trying hard to stay afloat in turbulent sea of sci-tech. Perhaps a knowledge of developments happening in China and elsewhere back then would've pushed me deeper into depression.
As Murphy's Law goes, whatever can happen will happen. And so the depression did hit me a few years later, and the rest is a story for some other day, but what never left my mind was the chronic lack of a scientific can-do spirit around me. Sure, we have jugaad. But this over-romanticization of frugal innovation misses out on the biggest systemic hurdle: the lack of a culture of innovation and excellence.
After Deng Xiaoping's revolution, China pursued the cost-cutting model with aggression. A large labor force, loyalists, state control of production and industrial infra, and a frightening "party-first" mindset that led to the infamous Tiananmen Massacre and other repressive acts - all these factors contributed to the rise of mega-factories and industrial supply chains, and the rise of Shenzhen from a sleepy fishing village to a technology behemoth is proof enough of the log-scale explosion that happened in a matter of decades. All of it, fueled indirectly by Mao's Cultural Revolution.
We can agree to disagree, but if a nation has to cause a paradigm-shift in its growth trajectory, the first and most important hurdle is cultural. America solved it with their crude oil discovery and subsequent waves of merchants, explorers and prospectors - all settlers from Europe - leading the charge in setting new standards and benchmarks to secure IP and create monopolies. In fact, every prosperous nation reaches an inflection point where policymaking targets the cultural underpinnings of the state and the people, leading to wide-scale cascading effects across the system and system-of-systems. India too, is now on its logarithmic growth curve.
The question is, when does that shift from being updated on the feed to actually shaping the feed happen?