Authors: Patrick French
To an American audience, Indians began to seem like very successful immigrants. Their median household income was $20,000 above the national average. More than 80 percent of them had arrived in the U.S. after 1980, and two thirds held at least a bachelor’s degree, against a U.S. national average of one in four.
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Lists of America’s new-technology innovators invariably contained Indian names. They liked to live the American dream, attracted by the possibility of free enterprise in a legal framework that was more efficient than the one in India. Adjustment was often straightforward. As an engineer who had worked for Motorola in Chicago before returning home to Chennai told me: “I was already ‘Westernized’ when I went to the U.S., because English was such a part of my life. I’d watched all the films, and read the books.”
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Indians relied on family and community networks, tended to be conservative, worked in areas like engineering, business, medicine and information technology, and integrated into society more easily than they could in Europe. In some cases they returned to take up new opportunities after the permit raj ended, but many stayed in the U.S. and—to the initial consternation of their relations—became American.
Since the turn of the new century, these NRIs (Non-Resident Indians) and their ABCD (American-Born Confused Desi) children have become progressively less revered in their home country, their foreign glamour diminishing as India’s economic star rises. Some NRIs are shocked by the
modern social rules and the lavishness they encounter when they return to India—but who would expect to find specially imported South African giraffes at a wedding party in Ambala?
Despite his unusual experiences, Lalit “Pip” Piplani’s attitudes were typical of those who had migrated. I met him on a flight from London to New Delhi. Back in the 1960s, he took a degree from IIT Kanpur before heading to graduate school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he got his master’s degree in electrical engineering. India seemed to have little to offer him, so he was determined to make it in the United States. He made the unlikely move of joining the army. Pip rose to the rank of colonel, specializing in signals and procurement, and believes he was the first Indian to become a non-medical U.S. Army officer. Certainly in his style, in his firm military handshake with his right shoulder pushed forward, in the spry way he removed his bag from the overhead locker, in his talk of tennis championships and grandchildren, he seemed at ease being American. His accent had only the tiniest hint of north India—he was going to Lucknow to stay with his sister—and I asked him when it had changed. He had a story:
“I signed up, started training. Soldiers were being sent to Vietnam. I had to use binoculars and call out references for targets over the radio. A Jeep pulls up behind me and a furious officer jumps out. ‘You’re going to get someone killed.’ I had such a strong Indian accent that they couldn’t understand me over the radio. I decided then and there to change it. It took me about a week.” He had embraced the possibilities America offered for assimilation and reinvention, while remaining himself.
I asked Pip how it felt to be an Indian in the U.S. Army. He told another story: “When I was first in command of a company in the late seventies, there was a serious [post-Vietnam] drug problem. Two African-American soldiers were suspected of dealing drugs. I called them in for an interview and kept a former special forces sergeant in the room in case there was trouble. I said what I had to say. One of them comes in close: ‘You’re just doing this because I’m from a minority,’ so I said, ‘Minority? Let me tell you about being from a minority. Do you know how many Indians are in the military alongside me?’ He looked confused—he didn’t know where I was from. So I said, ‘Zero percent.’ The sergeant just cracked up.”
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Later, in the period of economic liberalization, India’s higher education institutions failed to keep up with demand, leaving many children unable to secure a place. The IITs usually had a third of a million people competing for 8,000 vacancies. In an effort to be one of the winners, many children
took private tuition and others were simply caught up in the prevailing atmosphere of work and competition.
Prateek Sabharwal topped 92 percent in his board exams in 2005 and won a place at IIT Delhi. How did he do it? His father was a wholesaler of tea and edible oils at a market in Delhi and had little spare money. While studying for his exams, Prateek went to coaching classes for most of every Saturday and Sunday. On weekdays, he would get home from school in the middle of the afternoon and rest until 7 p.m. Then he would work through to 3 a.m. before getting up again at 7 a.m. “I planned it very carefully,” he told me, “and I believe in retrospect that if I had cut even twenty minutes off my working time each day, I might not have made the cut.” His ambition was rewarded when he reached IIT and found himself among people “of similar intellectual calibre.” He did so well at IIT that he was sent on an exchange programme to the Czech Republic, where “the discipline on the roads” impressed him. On graduation he joined UBS, to work in a back-end support team. His ambition was to be employed by a big investment bank in Hong Kong, Singapore or New York. “I do technical work in finance on the structuring of derivatives and pricing of new financial products,” Prateek said. Like the ones that caused the meltdown of 2008? I asked. “Well, English only has twenty-six letters, and you can only build so many financial products.”
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I met Srikanth Nadhamuni in a Barista coffee shop in Bangalore. He was in his mid-forties, with a strong, pointed face and a sense of direction. I had originally come to talk to him about the eGovernments Foundation, a “social startup” which aimed to improve governance through new technology, but we diverted to a more arcane subject. He had set up the foundation after spending more than a decade working in California. One of his projects since his return to India was to use volunteers on the ground and satellite maps of Bangalore supplied by the Indian Space Research Organisation to change the way local government across India collected tax. In Whitefield, on the edge of the city of Bangalore, they had seen an 800 percent increase in property tax collection since identifying who owned which building. A short while after we met, Srikanth took on what may be the most challenging job in the world, heading the technology team at the national Unique Identification Authority, creating a biometric ID system for every Indian, all 1,157,000,000 of them—and counting.
Srikanth’s family had been settled in Karnataka for several generations and came originally from further south. After taking a degree at Mysore University, he had gone on to study at Louisiana State University. He found himself well prepared by his Indian education. “When I did calculus at Baton Rouge, it was a cake-walk.” By the early 1990s he was working in computer engineering in Silicon Valley. He spent a year at Intel, designing the Pentium II chip. His ambition was to pack more computing power into a smaller space. When P. C. Mahalanobis had brought the first computers to India after independence, each one took up the space of a room, even an entire floor of a building. Now, the microprocessor in a single desktop computer could do much more than they could, and faster. Thinking your way inside a new chip was more than just a technical challenge, like working out which metal to use or how to design the microarchitecture to generate less heat—it was also philosophical.
“The problem is how to pack the chip, how to get everything into the smallest possible space. Let’s say you’re packing eight suitcases into the trunk of a car. There’s no perfect way to do it, right? So you work out the best way possible. In the chip, you want the lowest acceptable cost-function. You want everything as close as can be. But this is an NP-complete problem, which means there’s no algorithm to solve it in a deterministic amount of time.” What did “NP-complete” mean? “A nondeterministic polynomial complete—meaning that even if you had infinite time and computing power, you would never reach the best solution. Normal math won’t play. So you devise a probabilistic algorithm as an alternative, so as to think your way inside the problem and reach a low cost-function. That was my job at Intel, working out how to pack everything as close together as possible inside the Pentium II chip.”
How did they devise the probabilistic algorithm? Srikanth described to me the process of annealing and the technique used by the makers of Samurai swords. After the steel has been forged and beaten, the blade is plunged into a bath of hot oil; by allowing it to cool slowly, the crystals in the metal stick closer together and the structure of the Samurai’s blade is stronger. In designing a chip, Srikanth was using “simulated annealing,” where as the “temperature” rose, the peaks were higher and the troughs were lower. He was searching for the lowest possible trough, where everything fitted into a smaller space.
“So I’m running simulated annealing through the best computers we have at Intel all night long, trying to come up with multiple solutions. And
come the morning, my numbers are good. The guys are saying, ‘This is getting low, this is getting very low.’ ”
He took my notebook and drew two wavy lines, and marked a trough on the first wave. “This is a local minima. It looks like the best solution, but it isn’t. If your algorithm has the flexibility to make wrong moves—higher cost-functions—once in a while, it does not get stuck in a local minima, and it has a better chance of finding the global minima. Which is here.” Srikanth marked a deeper trough on the second wave.
Why not put the temperature higher still and get more variations?
“Because it becomes so unstable. This is the world of maya—illusion. It’s simulated annealing, so it’s all going on in your head. There’s no actual chip at this stage. You can simulate a chip, the fluctuations, the hot and cold, but none of it is real. It’s all in your imagination, here in your head. You can look out of the window”—he pointed out of the window of the coffee shop—“and see that hotel and think it’s real, but in Hindu philosophy the reality is in the ultimate concept: the Brahman. In the Advaita system, which comes from the teachings of Adi Shankara, you are taught there is no duality between you and the Brahman, and that what you believe is physical and hence ‘real’ is really all maya. So designing a chip can be a bit like maya.”
Another Indian techie had told me it was impossible to design or build pages on the Internet if you thought in a linear way, since it changed constantly and was of infinite size. A web page might look like a page but really held a complex web of links. The Internet seemed to be a Hindu concept, a deity with many arms. A text like the Rig Veda, rather than coming up with definitive answers, asks plenty of questions about creation and suggests we cannot know what made the universe. It also implies that time has no origin and no conclusion. Astronomical distances and geological time are not difficult concepts within a Hindu mental framework, or philosophy. I asked Srikanth if he felt that Christianity and Islam, which encourage more linear thinking, prevented people from making conceptual leaps when they were programming.
“I can’t say that. Indians clearly have an affinity for mathematics. I’ve talked about this with Jewish people I have worked with, and it’s partly about education.
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There’s a lot of similarity in the Jewish and Brahmin family background, with its obsession with education and respect for science: how you’re raised, your grandmother telling you what you have to eat to be smart—lady’s fingers, or okra, in my case. There were people
from every culture working with me at Intel, and at other places I worked like Healtheon and Sun Microsystems. There were American Christians, people of no religion, a lot of Jewish people. One of the smartest minds we had at Healtheon was a guy named Mohammad Alaghebandan. California is the melting pot. It was like the Tower of Babel in those days, with so many different languages: English, Hebrew, Chinese. The one sure way we could all communicate with each other was by drawing pictures on the white board. I can say though that a good deal of the time you would be hearing Indian languages: Telugu, Hindi, Kannada, Tamil.
“The ideas, or the Hindu philosophy, I was learning as a kid probably made it easier to make some mental leaps and to work in the virtual world of designing the chip,” Srikanth said. “My family subscribes to the Vishista-Advaita philosophy—what’s known as qualified non-dualism—which was propounded by the eleventh-century philosopher Ramanuja. My mother and maternal grandfather and family were all very interested in philosophy, especially Vishista-Advaita and Advaita. There were constant debates at home on the relationship of the Atman, the human soul, and the Brahman, and about the interpretation of the Vedas and Upanishads. My mother is very pious and religious, performing daily prayers. I’d say that we grew up in a fairly religious atmosphere. I used to go to the temple every Saturday.”
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The affinity shown by certain communities for mathematical thinking comes from a mixture of religious or philosophical training, personal aptitude and intense education. Discoveries by geneticists preclude the possibility of caste inheritance. In ancient times, mathematics and scientific observation were seen as spiritual concepts by Jains, Buddhists and Hindus and were highly developed.
Much astronomy that was developed later by Islamic or Arabic scholars originated in India, as did the trigonometry that accompanied it. The use of zero—the concept of nothingness—combined with a decimal system can plausibly be credited as an Indian invention, as can the numbers usually called Arabic numerals. The Indus Valley civilization had a weights and measures system which worked on a decimal scale. Archaeological remains, including metal weights found at different places, show the measuring system was in operation for a period of at least 500 years. The kiln-fired bricks of the Indus Valley, which are still useable, came in several different sizes but their length, width and thickness were always in the same ratio, 4:2:1.
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Brahmagupta wrote about gravity, deducing that “all heavy things are attracted towards the centre of the earth,” 1,000 years before an apple landed on or beside Isaac Newton, and he was merely following the thinking
of Aryabhata, who had lived more than 1,000 years earlier.
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Jawaharlal Nehru, who took a degree in natural sciences, was an admirer of Aryabhata and the society that gave rise to him. He saw the mathematical advances of ancient India—the use of fractions, division, squares, cubes, the minus sign, algebra, pi and infinity—as the outgrowth of a developed society that needed ways to calculate interest and the fineness of gold, and to trade and to exchange with others.