WEBVTT 00:00:00.040 --> 00:00:02.470 The following content is provided under a Creative 00:00:02.470 --> 00:00:03.880 Commons license. 00:00:03.880 --> 00:00:06.920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 00:00:06.920 --> 00:00:10.570 offer high quality educational resources for free. 00:00:10.570 --> 00:00:13.470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 00:00:13.470 --> 00:00:19.300 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 00:00:19.300 --> 00:00:20.550 ocw.mit.edu. 00:00:28.530 --> 00:00:29.270 OK. 00:00:29.270 --> 00:00:31.850 Let's get started. 00:00:31.850 --> 00:00:35.040 One announcement is a reminder. 00:00:35.040 --> 00:00:39.040 There is a paper due on April 4, and Michaela will be 00:00:39.040 --> 00:00:42.805 sending out a formal assignment about that within a 00:00:42.805 --> 00:00:43.320 day or two. 00:00:43.320 --> 00:00:47.490 So you can get started on that whenever you like. 00:00:47.490 --> 00:00:49.680 And we can talk about it more next week after the 00:00:49.680 --> 00:00:50.950 assignment comes out. 00:00:50.950 --> 00:00:56.260 But for the most part, what it's going to look like is an 00:00:56.260 --> 00:01:01.390 assignment to do a little more digging and some research 00:01:01.390 --> 00:01:07.410 into, basically, people, place, or thing in the part of 00:01:07.410 --> 00:01:09.750 the history of MIT that we've covered so far. 00:01:09.750 --> 00:01:11.530 So take a particular person-- 00:01:11.530 --> 00:01:14.280 maybe one of the signers of the charter or one of the 00:01:14.280 --> 00:01:18.600 early professors or an early student here-- 00:01:18.600 --> 00:01:22.760 a place, one particular building from the period up to 00:01:22.760 --> 00:01:24.970 1915 or so. 00:01:24.970 --> 00:01:28.480 And we say thing, but I think that could be an instrument or 00:01:28.480 --> 00:01:33.070 a laboratory that is of interest and do a little 00:01:33.070 --> 00:01:37.770 profile of that about what was it used for, what were people 00:01:37.770 --> 00:01:39.330 studying in the laboratory, and how were 00:01:39.330 --> 00:01:42.530 people being taught-- 00:01:42.530 --> 00:01:48.800 and basically, to focus on the first 65 years or so-- 00:01:48.800 --> 00:01:50.330 50 years or so. 00:01:50.330 --> 00:01:55.010 The 50th anniversary of MIT is 1911, so something from that 00:01:55.010 --> 00:01:56.270 early period that interests you. 00:01:56.270 --> 00:02:00.720 There's a lot of material, both online, but also in the 00:02:00.720 --> 00:02:04.020 MIT archives, in the libraries. 00:02:04.020 --> 00:02:06.310 Actually, a really good source is just, of the books that 00:02:06.310 --> 00:02:09.460 we've been assigning pieces of, you can just look further 00:02:09.460 --> 00:02:10.280 into those books. 00:02:10.280 --> 00:02:13.730 And Michaela will help you with that and actually have 00:02:13.730 --> 00:02:17.150 maybe a special session on some of the research methods 00:02:17.150 --> 00:02:19.740 and what to expect for that. 00:02:19.740 --> 00:02:21.400 So that's coming along. 00:02:21.400 --> 00:02:25.300 And next week, we'll have Ros Williams in, who will talk 00:02:25.300 --> 00:02:28.430 about a combination of things. 00:02:28.430 --> 00:02:30.860 She's a historian of technology as well. 00:02:30.860 --> 00:02:34.520 She's written about the history of MIT and the 00:02:34.520 --> 00:02:37.415 chemical engineering department, which happens to 00:02:37.415 --> 00:02:39.830 have been founded by her grandfather, who had a lot of 00:02:39.830 --> 00:02:42.830 interesting personalities on campus and things he was 00:02:42.830 --> 00:02:45.050 involved in. 00:02:45.050 --> 00:02:48.550 Today, we are lucky to have Ross Bassett with us who is a 00:02:48.550 --> 00:02:53.780 colleague of ours from NC State, has written a very good 00:02:53.780 --> 00:02:58.020 book on the history of CMOS technology and the equation of 00:02:58.020 --> 00:03:01.380 the semiconductor integrated circuits. 00:03:01.380 --> 00:03:03.880 And now, he's working on this book part of the assignment, 00:03:03.880 --> 00:03:09.660 which was the reading today on the Indian students at MIT. 00:03:09.660 --> 00:03:12.000 And he's going to talk to us a little bit about that. 00:03:12.000 --> 00:03:14.990 And over lunch, it was just becoming clear how many of the 00:03:14.990 --> 00:03:17.790 issues that were raised both in the readings and also in 00:03:17.790 --> 00:03:20.800 the response papers for today are, as some of you pointed 00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:23.400 out, relevant for issues on campus. 00:03:23.400 --> 00:03:26.080 We happened to be sitting two tables down from Tom Mangnati, 00:03:26.080 --> 00:03:28.560 who's the former dean of engineering here and the 00:03:28.560 --> 00:03:32.430 president of the new university in Singapore that 00:03:32.430 --> 00:03:36.090 MIT has founded based on the principle of 00:03:36.090 --> 00:03:39.250 organizing around design. 00:03:39.250 --> 00:03:43.880 And so as many of you will have heard from a variety of 00:03:43.880 --> 00:03:46.600 things, MIT's relationships with the rest of the world-- 00:03:46.600 --> 00:03:50.380 its profile abroad is very much a topic of conversation 00:03:50.380 --> 00:03:51.890 at MIT these days. 00:03:51.890 --> 00:03:55.220 How many of you work in a lab that has some connection with 00:03:55.220 --> 00:03:59.340 Singapore or some other international research group? 00:03:59.340 --> 00:04:01.620 So a few of you do. 00:04:01.620 --> 00:04:05.430 And how many of you were born and raised in the US versus-- 00:04:05.430 --> 00:04:06.400 so yeah. 00:04:06.400 --> 00:04:07.680 Undergraduates-- 00:04:07.680 --> 00:04:12.290 very much more American-based. 00:04:12.290 --> 00:04:16.089 The undergraduate population is capped at about 8% 00:04:16.089 --> 00:04:18.730 international students, whereas the graduate student 00:04:18.730 --> 00:04:20.760 population is probably-- 00:04:20.760 --> 00:04:22.380 I don't know the exact number-- 00:04:22.380 --> 00:04:24.785 50% or 60% international students. 00:04:28.710 --> 00:04:34.140 But even of the US-born, US-raised undergraduate 00:04:34.140 --> 00:04:37.170 students, many come from families, first generation 00:04:37.170 --> 00:04:37.990 immigrants or whatnot. 00:04:37.990 --> 00:04:41.140 We've talked about that a little bit before. 00:04:41.140 --> 00:04:44.750 So Ros will talk to us a little bit about Indian 00:04:44.750 --> 00:04:45.890 students at MIT. 00:04:45.890 --> 00:04:47.455 It's a very interesting case. 00:04:47.455 --> 00:04:49.540 There's a lot of interesting reasons to be interested in 00:04:49.540 --> 00:04:53.860 India and MIT's relationships there-- but also not 00:04:53.860 --> 00:04:56.610 necessarily typical, but representative of MIT's 00:04:56.610 --> 00:05:03.670 relationships with Japan, China, Iran, Middle East-- 00:05:03.670 --> 00:05:06.020 lots of different places around the world. 00:05:06.020 --> 00:05:09.970 All of them are a little bit special, but they're certainly 00:05:09.970 --> 00:05:12.290 part of a longer story here. 00:05:12.290 --> 00:05:15.490 So he's going to talk for a little bit, put the article in 00:05:15.490 --> 00:05:17.650 the context of a larger project that he's working on, 00:05:17.650 --> 00:05:20.220 and then we can pick up the discussion there. 00:05:20.220 --> 00:05:23.770 And I think that'll naturally segue into also this 00:05:23.770 --> 00:05:26.370 particular period that we've come into-- 00:05:26.370 --> 00:05:29.090 turn of the century up through the beginning of World War II, 00:05:29.090 --> 00:05:32.120 the technology plan, relationships with industry. 00:05:32.120 --> 00:05:35.710 Again, so many of the issues from the reading that were on 00:05:35.710 --> 00:05:39.700 the table in 1915, 1930 are still issues that are on the 00:05:39.700 --> 00:05:42.956 table today in some form or another. 00:05:42.956 --> 00:05:46.270 ROSS BASSETT: Thanks, David and Roe and Michaela. 00:05:46.270 --> 00:05:49.170 I think it's a good strategy to start out by sucking up to 00:05:49.170 --> 00:05:49.700 your audience. 00:05:49.700 --> 00:05:51.460 So let me do that. 00:05:51.460 --> 00:05:54.090 I've got my Ph.D. from Princeton. 00:05:54.090 --> 00:05:55.670 And there was a Professor, Michael 00:05:55.670 --> 00:05:57.450 Borden, who went to Harvard. 00:05:57.450 --> 00:06:01.020 And when he went to Harvard, he had a roommate at Harvard 00:06:01.020 --> 00:06:03.140 who was of Indian ancestry. 00:06:03.140 --> 00:06:08.760 And Michael reported that his roommate told him how all his 00:06:08.760 --> 00:06:12.360 family back in India were all so proud that they had someone 00:06:12.360 --> 00:06:16.860 in their family who went to a school near MIT. 00:06:16.860 --> 00:06:22.010 And it gives you an idea, I think, of what the sense of 00:06:22.010 --> 00:06:24.170 MIT is in India. 00:06:24.170 --> 00:06:26.830 And so I've been to India a lot and I've 00:06:26.830 --> 00:06:28.520 seen that first hand. 00:06:28.520 --> 00:06:34.540 So a couple things, just to put this in context and why 00:06:34.540 --> 00:06:36.650 I'm interested in this. 00:06:36.650 --> 00:06:39.700 I've been interested in India for a long time, and I'm also 00:06:39.700 --> 00:06:41.710 interested in globalization, of course. 00:06:41.710 --> 00:06:44.900 That's a big buzz word these days. 00:06:44.900 --> 00:06:48.850 But one of the ways I think about history and how we can 00:06:48.850 --> 00:06:51.580 find interesting history topics is sort of a thought 00:06:51.580 --> 00:06:52.230 experiment. 00:06:52.230 --> 00:06:57.530 Imagine, say, what would surprise someone coming to the 00:06:57.530 --> 00:06:59.970 year 2011 from, say, 100 years ago? 00:06:59.970 --> 00:07:02.560 Say, President Maclaurin-- 00:07:02.560 --> 00:07:05.890 what would surprise them about the world 00:07:05.890 --> 00:07:08.200 today if they saw it? 00:07:08.200 --> 00:07:12.160 And so I think about that, I guess, especially 00:07:12.160 --> 00:07:13.230 with regard to India. 00:07:13.230 --> 00:07:15.370 And let me just say some of the things that I think would 00:07:15.370 --> 00:07:17.050 be pretty surprising. 00:07:17.050 --> 00:07:20.250 I guess anything involving Indians in the United States 00:07:20.250 --> 00:07:24.300 would be surprising, because they were actually laws 00:07:24.300 --> 00:07:30.100 limiting Indians from staying permanently in America. 00:07:30.100 --> 00:07:32.820 It was very questionable whether an Indian, someone 00:07:32.820 --> 00:07:35.720 from India, could even become a citizen of the United States 00:07:35.720 --> 00:07:36.926 until 1920. 00:07:36.926 --> 00:07:41.240 Until 1965, the United States had laws which basically said, 00:07:41.240 --> 00:07:44.280 we really don't want Indians in the United States. 00:07:44.280 --> 00:07:46.770 There was an annual quota of 100 people. 00:07:46.770 --> 00:07:51.230 But let me tell you some things about the world of 2011 00:07:51.230 --> 00:07:54.090 that is sort of surprising in that regard. 00:07:54.090 --> 00:07:56.330 Silicon Valley-- 00:07:56.330 --> 00:07:57.130 my apologies-- 00:07:57.130 --> 00:07:58.710 but the most dynamic 00:07:58.710 --> 00:08:01.570 technological area in the world. 00:08:01.570 --> 00:08:05.270 It's commonly said that Silicon Valley runs on ICs. 00:08:05.270 --> 00:08:07.050 And that doesn't mean integrated circuits. 00:08:07.050 --> 00:08:09.560 It means Indians and Chinese. 00:08:09.560 --> 00:08:13.060 People understand that Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are 00:08:13.060 --> 00:08:15.670 some of the key figures who really start businesses 00:08:15.670 --> 00:08:20.560 successfully, help move the technology along. 00:08:20.560 --> 00:08:26.100 I think of that school down the road a bit. 00:08:26.100 --> 00:08:30.290 They just appointed a new dean of their business school. 00:08:30.290 --> 00:08:36.929 His name is Nitin Nohria, an Indian who came to Harvard. 00:08:36.929 --> 00:08:40.890 MIT itself, the former dean of engineering, Subra Suresh, 00:08:40.890 --> 00:08:42.419 also from India. 00:08:42.419 --> 00:08:45.430 Now he's the head of the National Science Foundation, 00:08:45.430 --> 00:08:50.230 one of the leading funders of science and technological 00:08:50.230 --> 00:08:53.570 research in the United States, setting the agenda for 00:08:53.570 --> 00:08:55.170 scientific research. 00:08:55.170 --> 00:08:56.520 I think of-- 00:08:56.520 --> 00:08:59.200 do you know the building that's right across Vassar 00:08:59.200 --> 00:09:02.350 Street from the Stata Center, the Institute for Brain 00:09:02.350 --> 00:09:05.780 Research, that the train tracks go 00:09:05.780 --> 00:09:08.370 through the middle of? 00:09:08.370 --> 00:09:11.480 That was designed by Charles Correa, an Indian, someone 00:09:11.480 --> 00:09:15.010 who's the leading Indian architect. 00:09:15.010 --> 00:09:17.520 And so he lives in India. 00:09:17.520 --> 00:09:22.970 This was his first commission ever in the United States for 00:09:22.970 --> 00:09:24.960 an American client. 00:09:24.960 --> 00:09:28.220 And so the point of this is that Indians play a very 00:09:28.220 --> 00:09:32.070 prominent role in technology in the United States today, 00:09:32.070 --> 00:09:34.710 which I think would have been very, very surprising to 00:09:34.710 --> 00:09:37.500 anyone 100 years ago. 00:09:37.500 --> 00:09:40.100 And then if we look at India itself, there are a number of 00:09:40.100 --> 00:09:43.520 things, I think, that are surprising as well. 00:09:43.520 --> 00:09:45.910 We're used to seeing everything that we buy from 00:09:45.910 --> 00:09:48.660 Walmart or Target or whatever having a "made in 00:09:48.660 --> 00:09:52.110 China" stamp on it. 00:09:52.110 --> 00:09:55.840 We can't really judge the provenance of software code or 00:09:55.840 --> 00:09:56.630 something like that. 00:09:56.630 --> 00:10:00.500 But if could, we'd probably be surprised at how much software 00:10:00.500 --> 00:10:03.600 would have the tag "coded in India." 00:10:03.600 --> 00:10:09.530 And I was in India in October and visited a place where they 00:10:09.530 --> 00:10:14.000 made transmission components for Fords and GMs in a place 00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:15.840 in Pune, India. 00:10:15.840 --> 00:10:22.150 Another big Indian company is set to, I think this year, 00:10:22.150 --> 00:10:25.920 begin selling its model SUV in the United States. 00:10:25.920 --> 00:10:30.120 So India is playing a remarkable technological role 00:10:30.120 --> 00:10:32.700 in United States. 00:10:32.700 --> 00:10:35.980 We might have considered that inconceivable 100 00:10:35.980 --> 00:10:37.660 years ago or so. 00:10:37.660 --> 00:10:41.140 So that's what I've been interested in looking at. 00:10:41.140 --> 00:10:47.820 And the way I decided to do this was I was trying to look 00:10:47.820 --> 00:10:50.340 for some way to understand the relationship between the 00:10:50.340 --> 00:10:52.860 United States and India. 00:10:52.860 --> 00:10:56.870 And the way I finally decided to do it was that I found that 00:10:56.870 --> 00:11:00.280 MIT has a series of commencement programs that 00:11:00.280 --> 00:11:02.230 they publish with every commencement 00:11:02.230 --> 00:11:03.920 that lists every graduate. 00:11:03.920 --> 00:11:07.230 And they've listed the hometown of every graduate. 00:11:07.230 --> 00:11:09.590 And so they have these available for 00:11:09.590 --> 00:11:11.170 the whole 20th century. 00:11:11.170 --> 00:11:13.030 So what I did is I made a database. 00:11:13.030 --> 00:11:16.270 I went through these and pulled out every single Indian 00:11:16.270 --> 00:11:21.310 who graduated from MIT in the 20th century. 00:11:21.310 --> 00:11:23.260 So I have this database, and I kind of think 00:11:23.260 --> 00:11:26.010 of this as a filter. 00:11:26.010 --> 00:11:29.740 India is a country with a population now of a billion 00:11:29.740 --> 00:11:31.410 people or so. 00:11:31.410 --> 00:11:34.290 We can't look at all 1 billion people. 00:11:34.290 --> 00:11:37.790 So what I'm looking at is those Indians throughout the 00:11:37.790 --> 00:11:39.610 century who came to MIT. 00:11:39.610 --> 00:11:43.970 And so again, we can't look at every student at MIT from the 00:11:43.970 --> 00:11:44.710 20th century. 00:11:44.710 --> 00:11:45.940 But we can look at-- 00:11:45.940 --> 00:11:47.550 this is a rather small group. 00:11:47.550 --> 00:11:50.330 It's about 1,500 people or so. 00:11:50.330 --> 00:11:54.150 And so let's look at these students and say, how did they 00:11:54.150 --> 00:11:59.440 end up getting from India, 7,000 miles away, to MIT? 00:11:59.440 --> 00:12:00.270 How did that happen? 00:12:00.270 --> 00:12:03.360 And then what happened to them afterwards? 00:12:03.360 --> 00:12:04.690 What did they do? 00:12:04.690 --> 00:12:07.610 Did they make any difference in India? 00:12:07.610 --> 00:12:10.520 What were their careers like? 00:12:10.520 --> 00:12:11.880 And so that's what I've been doing. 00:12:11.880 --> 00:12:14.460 And so in the last five years or so, I've been running 00:12:14.460 --> 00:12:20.400 around India trying to track down Indian graduates of MIT, 00:12:20.400 --> 00:12:23.490 their family and so on, just to find out some 00:12:23.490 --> 00:12:24.920 things about them. 00:12:24.920 --> 00:12:29.010 And so a couple of general themes that 00:12:29.010 --> 00:12:32.570 come up from this-- 00:12:32.570 --> 00:12:36.250 one is the idea of a technological nationalism, I 00:12:36.250 --> 00:12:42.710 would say, and then also the development of the information 00:12:42.710 --> 00:12:46.020 technology industry in India and globalization. 00:12:46.020 --> 00:12:48.640 Then also-- 00:12:48.640 --> 00:12:51.840 in Star Trek, they have this tractor beam that sometimes 00:12:51.840 --> 00:12:54.380 will pull things into the spaceship. 00:12:54.380 --> 00:12:57.850 You could say MIT has been a tractor beam for global 00:12:57.850 --> 00:13:01.560 talent, that it's pulled international talent into the 00:13:01.560 --> 00:13:06.000 United States, and very often it's stayed in the United 00:13:06.000 --> 00:13:09.790 States after it's gotten there. 00:13:09.790 --> 00:13:15.680 So these are some of the things that I'm touching on in 00:13:15.680 --> 00:13:18.720 what I'm doing. 00:13:18.720 --> 00:13:24.560 And so one of the things that you do see is students who 00:13:24.560 --> 00:13:29.670 went to MIT in the early 20th century-- 00:13:29.670 --> 00:13:32.090 very often, going to MIT, you could say, was 00:13:32.090 --> 00:13:33.720 a nationalist act. 00:13:33.720 --> 00:13:39.910 India was a British colony, and most people, in some ways, 00:13:39.910 --> 00:13:43.860 the intuitive thing to do would be to make ties with the 00:13:43.860 --> 00:13:47.760 British, British society, with Britain. 00:13:47.760 --> 00:13:52.580 So those who went to MIT were in some ways doing something 00:13:52.580 --> 00:13:56.550 that didn't make a lot of sense in some ways, having 00:13:56.550 --> 00:13:58.940 ties with the British. 00:13:58.940 --> 00:14:02.870 And so that that's a big theme that I've discovered. 00:14:02.870 --> 00:14:06.980 And one of the other aspects of this that has been kind of 00:14:06.980 --> 00:14:08.110 intriguing-- 00:14:08.110 --> 00:14:11.110 what do you think of when you think of Mahatma Gandhi? 00:14:11.110 --> 00:14:13.270 What sorts of things come to your mind? 00:14:13.270 --> 00:14:14.760 What sort of images? 00:14:14.760 --> 00:14:16.830 What kind of things do you think of? 00:14:19.776 --> 00:14:21.740 AUDIENCE: Small, peaceful man. 00:14:21.740 --> 00:14:24.200 ROSS BASSETT: Small, peaceful man. 00:14:24.200 --> 00:14:28.710 Anything else you think of about Gandhi? 00:14:28.710 --> 00:14:30.290 AUDIENCE: He was fairly well to do and then 00:14:30.290 --> 00:14:31.820 he gave it all up. 00:14:31.820 --> 00:14:33.140 ROSS BASSETT: He was a very wealthy 00:14:33.140 --> 00:14:36.602 lawyer, gave it all up. 00:14:36.602 --> 00:14:37.520 AUDIENCE: Spiritualism. 00:14:37.520 --> 00:14:37.930 ROSS BASSETT: Pardon? 00:14:37.930 --> 00:14:38.847 AUDIENCE: Spiritualism. 00:14:38.847 --> 00:14:40.097 ROSS BASSETT: Spiritualism. 00:14:44.920 --> 00:14:46.460 Anyone else? 00:14:46.460 --> 00:14:48.700 So we have those images of Gandhi. 00:14:48.700 --> 00:14:52.600 One of the intriguing things about this research-- 00:14:52.600 --> 00:14:57.750 when I look at the Indians who went to MIT in the 1920s and 00:14:57.750 --> 00:15:00.580 1930s and try to look at the networks of people they're 00:15:00.580 --> 00:15:04.500 involved in, where they come from, one of the things that I 00:15:04.500 --> 00:15:07.150 find is, if I try to identify where is the 00:15:07.150 --> 00:15:09.500 heart of these people-- 00:15:09.500 --> 00:15:11.090 what sort of, again, networks are they 00:15:11.090 --> 00:15:14.240 involved in and so on-- 00:15:14.240 --> 00:15:17.920 if you look at a large number of them, you get connected 00:15:17.920 --> 00:15:22.090 back to Gandhi, that a large percentage of Indians were 00:15:22.090 --> 00:15:26.280 from the part of India where Gandhi was from. 00:15:26.280 --> 00:15:28.380 A large number of them actually had 00:15:28.380 --> 00:15:29.390 connections with Gandhi. 00:15:29.390 --> 00:15:35.790 One young man who grew up in Gandhi's ashram went to MIT. 00:15:35.790 --> 00:15:40.230 And so this has been the intriguing thing. 00:15:40.230 --> 00:15:43.280 And it's suggested some things to me. 00:15:43.280 --> 00:15:46.240 I've gone back and looked at Gandhi's papers. 00:15:46.240 --> 00:15:52.920 And Gandhi has often been, I'd say, captured by political 00:15:52.920 --> 00:15:53.510 historians-- 00:15:53.510 --> 00:15:56.480 most people who are interested in him are people interested 00:15:56.480 --> 00:16:01.500 in political history, Gandhi's spiritualism, his philosophy, 00:16:01.500 --> 00:16:04.300 his philosophy of nonviolence, and things like that. 00:16:04.300 --> 00:16:07.645 But Gandhi was very interested in technology himself. 00:16:10.510 --> 00:16:14.290 Maybe the most common image of him being interested in 00:16:14.290 --> 00:16:16.340 technology, of course, is handspinning. 00:16:16.340 --> 00:16:19.960 And it's easy to see that as very 00:16:19.960 --> 00:16:22.900 regressive, you might say-- 00:16:22.900 --> 00:16:23.910 very archaic. 00:16:23.910 --> 00:16:26.980 But he was really very interested in efficiency, as 00:16:26.980 --> 00:16:29.200 he was interested in spinning. 00:16:29.200 --> 00:16:32.470 If you were a contemporary of Gandhi's and you told him you 00:16:32.470 --> 00:16:36.790 spun, he would ask you what your production rate was. 00:16:36.790 --> 00:16:40.320 And he was very concerned about increasing production. 00:16:40.320 --> 00:16:44.520 His magazine had statistics all the time about what 00:16:44.520 --> 00:16:47.090 people's spinning production was and so on. 00:16:47.090 --> 00:16:52.970 And so it seems like Gandhi had this-- and I think this 00:16:52.970 --> 00:16:55.420 term has come across before in some of your other readings. 00:16:55.420 --> 00:16:58.830 He was almost tailoristic is taken some of his ways, that 00:16:58.830 --> 00:17:01.510 he was very concerned about efficiency. 00:17:01.510 --> 00:17:06.109 He once wrote a piece in his newspaper-- 00:17:06.109 --> 00:17:09.410 20 rules that anyone who was going to meet him at the 00:17:09.410 --> 00:17:11.630 railroad station should follow. 00:17:11.630 --> 00:17:17.280 And he was kind of upset in this that he said, a lot of 00:17:17.280 --> 00:17:21.560 people who met him at the train station would block his 00:17:21.560 --> 00:17:23.940 path of going out of the train station. 00:17:23.940 --> 00:17:26.250 He said, normally, it should take me five minutes, but now 00:17:26.250 --> 00:17:27.740 all these people are there. 00:17:27.740 --> 00:17:28.930 It's taking me 30 minutes. 00:17:28.930 --> 00:17:30.470 I'm wasting all this time. 00:17:30.470 --> 00:17:32.540 And so he was very frustrated with that. 00:17:32.540 --> 00:17:35.790 And so he was very interested in efficiency. 00:17:35.790 --> 00:17:41.640 And it seems one young man who grew up in Gandhi's ashram 00:17:41.640 --> 00:17:45.960 basically said later on, I became an engineer at the 00:17:45.960 --> 00:17:46.850 hands of Gandhi. 00:17:46.850 --> 00:17:48.400 Gandhi made me an engineer. 00:17:48.400 --> 00:17:52.240 And again, it seems, in some ways, fairly counterintuitive. 00:17:52.240 --> 00:17:57.530 But that was what he said he saw and that was how he became 00:17:57.530 --> 00:17:58.110 an engineer. 00:17:58.110 --> 00:18:03.040 And so many of these people went to MIT as this act of 00:18:03.040 --> 00:18:04.760 technological nationalism. 00:18:04.760 --> 00:18:08.600 They saw that if India was going to be an independent 00:18:08.600 --> 00:18:12.380 country, they needed to have a technological base. 00:18:12.380 --> 00:18:14.680 They needed to have technological capabilities so 00:18:14.680 --> 00:18:18.500 they wouldn't be relying on British people, Americans, 00:18:18.500 --> 00:18:20.880 that they could develop their own technological 00:18:20.880 --> 00:18:21.990 infrastructure. 00:18:21.990 --> 00:18:25.750 And so that seems to have been a very big theme among Indians 00:18:25.750 --> 00:18:31.450 who went to MIT in the early part of the 20th century. 00:18:31.450 --> 00:18:33.580 I want to flip through some of these-- 00:18:33.580 --> 00:18:34.260 PROFESSOR: We can if you want. 00:18:34.260 --> 00:18:36.700 ROSS BASSETT: Sure, that'd be great. 00:18:36.700 --> 00:18:39.410 This is Alfred Marshall, the British economist. 00:18:42.230 --> 00:18:44.560 One man had studied at Cambridge-- 00:18:44.560 --> 00:18:49.340 an Indian man-- and Alfred Marshall told him, as I 00:18:49.340 --> 00:18:52.820 mentioned in the paper, that he thought Indians should not 00:18:52.820 --> 00:18:54.730 be going to Cambridge, but instead 00:18:54.730 --> 00:18:56.550 should be going to MIT. 00:18:56.550 --> 00:19:00.050 This is [INAUDIBLE] 00:19:00.050 --> 00:19:03.040 who I mentioned in the article. 00:19:03.040 --> 00:19:06.790 He started a chemical works in Western India. 00:19:06.790 --> 00:19:11.740 This is a drawing of the chemical works in the small 00:19:11.740 --> 00:19:13.040 town of [INAUDIBLE] 00:19:13.040 --> 00:19:15.300 in Kathiawar. 00:19:15.300 --> 00:19:16.940 You can just flip through that. 00:19:16.940 --> 00:19:20.590 This is a picture of Mahatma Gandhi and [INAUDIBLE] 00:19:20.590 --> 00:19:24.790 So here's Mahatma Gandhi and this is [INAUDIBLE]. 00:19:24.790 --> 00:19:26.910 So this is in 1950. 00:19:26.910 --> 00:19:30.750 Gandhi had just come back from South Africa. 00:19:30.750 --> 00:19:32.070 And [INAUDIBLE] 00:19:32.070 --> 00:19:36.560 was this person who was very interested in sending people 00:19:36.560 --> 00:19:40.355 to MIT, sent a number of his family members to MIT. 00:19:42.910 --> 00:19:46.930 And this is a young man I mentioned in the paper. 00:19:46.930 --> 00:19:53.370 Again, Gandhi was present at his wedding. 00:19:53.370 --> 00:19:56.740 And then, the next year, he went to MIT. 00:19:56.740 --> 00:19:59.810 And he was in the cooperative program in electrical 00:19:59.810 --> 00:20:02.110 engineering and he got a Bachelor's and Master's degree 00:20:02.110 --> 00:20:07.370 in electrical engineering and then returned to India. 00:20:07.370 --> 00:20:10.570 And in India, he had this double life, you could say. 00:20:10.570 --> 00:20:14.040 I would say he was probably one of the best trained 00:20:14.040 --> 00:20:17.720 engineers in electrical engineering in India, having 00:20:17.720 --> 00:20:21.540 this Master's degree in electrical engineering. 00:20:21.540 --> 00:20:26.400 But if you were to look at his career from a purely technical 00:20:26.400 --> 00:20:31.760 standpoint, he kind of under-utilized his education. 00:20:31.760 --> 00:20:34.190 He was very much involved in the Nationalist Movement. 00:20:34.190 --> 00:20:38.570 He was thrown into jail for his participation in the Salt 00:20:38.570 --> 00:20:39.950 Satyagraha. 00:20:39.950 --> 00:20:43.320 He later led a large strike at one of India's leading steel 00:20:43.320 --> 00:20:49.560 plants and was thrown into jail for 18 months after that. 00:20:49.560 --> 00:20:51.100 If you can just hit the next slide. 00:20:51.100 --> 00:20:53.440 Here's a picture of him at MIT again. 00:20:53.440 --> 00:21:00.910 He apparently got training in the military cadet program. 00:21:00.910 --> 00:21:06.020 And again, it was kind of intriguing to me-- 00:21:06.020 --> 00:21:08.890 after he was in jail for 18 months, he still maintained 00:21:08.890 --> 00:21:12.250 very good relations with his former MIT professors. 00:21:12.250 --> 00:21:15.840 He kept in touch with them, exchanged letters. 00:21:15.840 --> 00:21:20.750 So he didn't see some sort of dichotomy between his role as 00:21:20.750 --> 00:21:26.400 a protester for freedom, as a Gandhian, and his career as an 00:21:26.400 --> 00:21:30.340 engineer at MIT, or as MIT-trained engineer. 00:21:32.880 --> 00:21:37.350 This is the diwan, sort of the prime minister of a princely 00:21:37.350 --> 00:21:42.770 state of India in Bhavnagar in Western India. 00:21:42.770 --> 00:21:48.550 This man was an associate of Gandhi. 00:21:48.550 --> 00:21:51.110 India had these princely states, and he paid for a 00:21:51.110 --> 00:21:52.680 number of Indians to go to MIT. 00:21:55.380 --> 00:21:58.510 And then this is a kind of intriguing 00:21:58.510 --> 00:22:01.080 meeting in the late 1930s. 00:22:01.080 --> 00:22:04.870 The diwan, Prabhashankar Pattani is sitting down there 00:22:04.870 --> 00:22:05.810 in the turban. 00:22:05.810 --> 00:22:11.670 He came to MIT and he hosted all the Indian MIT students to 00:22:11.670 --> 00:22:14.150 have lunch at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. 00:22:14.150 --> 00:22:16.410 And so here they all are. 00:22:16.410 --> 00:22:19.420 One of them was married to an American woman. 00:22:19.420 --> 00:22:23.220 So you see this small collection of Indian students 00:22:23.220 --> 00:22:32.260 there at MIT around 1939. 00:22:32.260 --> 00:22:34.660 And then this is a young man, Bal Kalelkar. 00:22:34.660 --> 00:22:37.295 He was the young man who was raised in Gandhi's ashram. 00:22:41.590 --> 00:22:43.990 Here's Gandhi right here. 00:22:43.990 --> 00:22:49.620 And then this is Kalelkar right behind him. 00:22:49.620 --> 00:22:53.050 This is a letter that Kalelkar wrote. 00:22:53.050 --> 00:22:55.300 And Gandhi was a famous editor. 00:22:55.300 --> 00:22:57.360 He was an editor of a newspaper. 00:22:57.360 --> 00:23:03.390 And Kalelkar wrote this letter to GD Birla, who was one of 00:23:03.390 --> 00:23:04.890 India's richest businessmen. 00:23:04.890 --> 00:23:07.650 You might think of him as an analog of Bill 00:23:07.650 --> 00:23:08.870 Gates at the time. 00:23:08.870 --> 00:23:13.470 And Kalelkar wrote GD Birla, asking him to fund his 00:23:13.470 --> 00:23:15.300 education at MIT. 00:23:15.300 --> 00:23:20.530 And Gandhi edited the letter, helped him 00:23:20.530 --> 00:23:21.520 make the right approach. 00:23:21.520 --> 00:23:23.310 Gandhi was a friend of this man. 00:23:23.310 --> 00:23:26.770 And so he went through and make corrections and so on. 00:23:26.770 --> 00:23:33.160 This is something that I found in India, and this is the next 00:23:33.160 --> 00:23:33.640 part of it. 00:23:33.640 --> 00:23:37.430 This is, again, Gandhi's editing. 00:23:37.430 --> 00:23:42.000 He tells Kalelkar, incorporate these changes and send it off. 00:23:42.000 --> 00:23:46.160 But the point is, I would have thought the natural tendency 00:23:46.160 --> 00:23:50.400 of Gandhi would be to not be so enthusiastic about someone 00:23:50.400 --> 00:23:51.250 going to MIT. 00:23:51.250 --> 00:23:57.170 And he obviously could have refused to support him in 00:23:57.170 --> 00:23:58.650 seeking this funding. 00:23:58.650 --> 00:24:03.840 But Gandhi supported him to get this funding. 00:24:03.840 --> 00:24:06.960 Once, Gandhi had asked his friend to provide funding, 00:24:06.960 --> 00:24:08.580 once he had given him this letter, it would have been 00:24:08.580 --> 00:24:10.800 fairly hard for this person to resist. 00:24:10.800 --> 00:24:16.900 So Gandhi did not see someone going to MIT as a betrayal of 00:24:16.900 --> 00:24:20.630 his movement, as someone who was turning his back on him. 00:24:20.630 --> 00:24:23.990 He was willing to support him. 00:24:23.990 --> 00:24:30.740 And this is four Indians at MIT in about 1940 having fun 00:24:30.740 --> 00:24:34.460 in the snow and having a snowball fight. 00:24:34.460 --> 00:24:41.800 There was a fairly rich social life among the Indians in 00:24:41.800 --> 00:24:44.920 1920s and 1930s. 00:24:44.920 --> 00:24:47.840 There are records of a number of pranks that they did on 00:24:47.840 --> 00:24:50.500 each other and so on. 00:24:50.500 --> 00:24:57.540 After one of them completed doctoral examination, he 00:24:57.540 --> 00:25:01.770 invited a number of friends out to a restaurant out west 00:25:01.770 --> 00:25:03.020 of Cambridge. 00:25:03.020 --> 00:25:07.010 And then he and his friend snuck out and drove back home 00:25:07.010 --> 00:25:10.480 and stiffed everyone else and left them both rideless and 00:25:10.480 --> 00:25:12.040 having to pay the bill. 00:25:12.040 --> 00:25:16.460 And this caused a number of repercussions afterwards. 00:25:20.930 --> 00:25:26.810 This is a cartoon of Anant Pandya, who was the first 00:25:26.810 --> 00:25:29.590 Indian to get a Ph.D. from MIT. 00:25:29.590 --> 00:25:32.430 And then he became the first Indian principal of an 00:25:32.430 --> 00:25:34.200 engineering college in India. 00:25:34.200 --> 00:25:37.490 This was at college near Calcutta called the Bengal 00:25:37.490 --> 00:25:38.740 Engineering College. 00:25:38.740 --> 00:25:41.520 And again, it's hard to imagine what 00:25:41.520 --> 00:25:42.400 this would have meant. 00:25:42.400 --> 00:25:45.790 I think, generally, the Brits had to the general idea that 00:25:45.790 --> 00:25:49.840 they were superior, that in some ways, one of the aspects 00:25:49.840 --> 00:25:53.600 of colonialism was that the British, the Europeans were 00:25:53.600 --> 00:25:54.910 superior in technology. 00:25:54.910 --> 00:25:57.880 And that was in some ways the basis for colonialism. 00:25:57.880 --> 00:26:02.540 Once people like Anant Pandya came out and were able-- 00:26:02.540 --> 00:26:07.330 Pandya won this position as a principal of this college in 00:26:07.330 --> 00:26:10.870 an open competition with Brits-- 00:26:10.870 --> 00:26:13.660 and Brits then worked under him, it really made a 00:26:13.660 --> 00:26:16.630 statement that technology was not just something that was 00:26:16.630 --> 00:26:19.100 limited to Europeans and Euro-Americans. 00:26:22.090 --> 00:26:26.650 I mention in the paper, again, that one of the key moments 00:26:26.650 --> 00:26:28.960 before independence-- 00:26:28.960 --> 00:26:32.000 you think about technological nationalism-- 00:26:32.000 --> 00:26:35.440 was that, as India stood on the brink of independence, 00:26:35.440 --> 00:26:38.230 Indians began to say, we need something 00:26:38.230 --> 00:26:40.410 like an MIT for India. 00:26:40.410 --> 00:26:44.930 And so this was the committee report that established the 00:26:44.930 --> 00:26:47.720 Indian Institutes of Technology, which were, again, 00:26:47.720 --> 00:26:52.560 India's institutes analogous to MIT. 00:26:52.560 --> 00:26:56.350 Two Indian MIT graduates sat on this committee and helped 00:26:56.350 --> 00:26:59.450 establish this committee. 00:26:59.450 --> 00:27:01.580 This is, again, a picture of Anant Pandya. 00:27:01.580 --> 00:27:07.070 He had a position as the head of the major Indian aerospace 00:27:07.070 --> 00:27:10.900 company, and again, was the first Indian director of that. 00:27:13.940 --> 00:27:16.840 And then he died, tragically, in a car accident. 00:27:16.840 --> 00:27:20.720 And then he was at memorialized in a magazine 00:27:20.720 --> 00:27:23.620 that was talking about his career and his 00:27:23.620 --> 00:27:24.710 connection with MIT. 00:27:24.710 --> 00:27:27.030 And this seems to have had a big effect on a number of 00:27:27.030 --> 00:27:30.860 people, just making them want to become engineers and also 00:27:30.860 --> 00:27:33.175 making them want to go to MIT. 00:27:36.400 --> 00:27:41.930 Now, I just want to say a little bit about India and IT. 00:27:41.930 --> 00:27:47.100 One of the interesting things, I think, about globalization 00:27:47.100 --> 00:27:51.740 is I'd say globalization is, in some ways, based on 00:27:51.740 --> 00:27:54.690 similarities and differences between countries, that if you 00:27:54.690 --> 00:27:58.860 think of the boundary conditions-- 00:27:58.860 --> 00:28:01.920 if every country was exactly the same, there'd be no point 00:28:01.920 --> 00:28:04.290 in globalization, because India would be just like 00:28:04.290 --> 00:28:04.980 United States. 00:28:04.980 --> 00:28:09.800 There would be no point in moving work or doing things 00:28:09.800 --> 00:28:10.860 between countries. 00:28:10.860 --> 00:28:16.170 But if countries were diametrically opposed and had 00:28:16.170 --> 00:28:19.580 nothing in common, then they couldn't relate. 00:28:19.580 --> 00:28:22.160 They couldn't communicate technologically. 00:28:22.160 --> 00:28:24.780 They couldn't have this technological work done 00:28:24.780 --> 00:28:25.840 between them. 00:28:25.840 --> 00:28:30.190 And I guess what I'd say is that Indian graduates of MIT, 00:28:30.190 --> 00:28:34.550 especially in the 1950s and '60s and 1970s, were the key 00:28:34.550 --> 00:28:37.830 people who connected the United States and India in a 00:28:37.830 --> 00:28:42.530 technological way, that they had this possibility of 00:28:42.530 --> 00:28:44.550 joining these two countries together. 00:28:44.550 --> 00:28:45.980 They had knowledge. 00:28:45.980 --> 00:28:51.790 They were often from upper class parts of Indian society, 00:28:51.790 --> 00:28:56.290 had a lot of knowledge of India, and then, by virtue of 00:28:56.290 --> 00:28:57.970 their education, the United the States. 00:28:57.970 --> 00:29:00.280 They had a great knowledge of America and understanding of 00:29:00.280 --> 00:29:02.680 American technology. 00:29:02.680 --> 00:29:06.130 This is the first Indian IT company. 00:29:06.130 --> 00:29:08.970 It was called Tata Consultancy Services. 00:29:08.970 --> 00:29:12.010 And it was founded by three MIT graduates. 00:29:12.010 --> 00:29:16.060 They were basically in their early 20s. 00:29:16.060 --> 00:29:19.590 Tata is a large Indian business company that has a 00:29:19.590 --> 00:29:22.490 number of different business enterprises. 00:29:22.490 --> 00:29:24.180 And they said, we'd like you to start a 00:29:24.180 --> 00:29:25.820 computer business here. 00:29:25.820 --> 00:29:28.280 And they didn't really know what exactly they 00:29:28.280 --> 00:29:28.780 were going to do. 00:29:28.780 --> 00:29:32.480 They thought of it like an Arthur D. Little-- if you know 00:29:32.480 --> 00:29:34.940 what that is-- a consulting firm. 00:29:34.940 --> 00:29:35.840 So they started this. 00:29:35.840 --> 00:29:37.430 And you can see it. 00:29:37.430 --> 00:29:43.180 They started it almost on an American model, and it didn't 00:29:43.180 --> 00:29:44.430 work very well initially. 00:29:50.380 --> 00:29:54.800 This is their operation in Bombay. 00:29:54.800 --> 00:29:58.290 Again, they thought of it almost like as a very 00:29:58.290 --> 00:30:00.060 academic-oriented thing. 00:30:00.060 --> 00:30:04.250 And it wasn't too much concerned with profit making 00:30:04.250 --> 00:30:06.980 And finally, the Tatas got a little bit frustrated with it. 00:30:06.980 --> 00:30:09.100 And these three guys left. 00:30:09.100 --> 00:30:12.770 And they ended up hiring as the head of 00:30:12.770 --> 00:30:15.150 it another MIT graduate. 00:30:15.150 --> 00:30:18.670 This is a man by the name of FC Kohli, who is sometimes 00:30:18.670 --> 00:30:21.350 considered one of the key figures in the development of 00:30:21.350 --> 00:30:25.430 the information technology industry in India. 00:30:25.430 --> 00:30:29.470 And what he had was-- he had studied at MIT. 00:30:29.470 --> 00:30:34.240 He had a lot of connections in the United States by virtue of 00:30:34.240 --> 00:30:35.530 his time at MIT. 00:30:35.530 --> 00:30:39.370 But also, he understood India and was able to really develop 00:30:39.370 --> 00:30:44.590 a successful business doing software work in India for 00:30:44.590 --> 00:30:45.570 American companies. 00:30:45.570 --> 00:30:49.450 And so that stood him in very good stead and helped him 00:30:49.450 --> 00:30:51.140 become very successful. 00:30:51.140 --> 00:30:56.100 And one of the things I'd say about him is that when India 00:30:56.100 --> 00:30:58.630 started thinking about computer technology, a lot of 00:30:58.630 --> 00:31:01.070 Indians thought in terms of, let's try to 00:31:01.070 --> 00:31:02.340 make our own computers. 00:31:02.340 --> 00:31:05.210 Let's try to make our own computer business. 00:31:05.210 --> 00:31:08.470 Let's try to build all the hardware ourselves. 00:31:08.470 --> 00:31:12.230 And Kohli didn't think that way. 00:31:12.230 --> 00:31:15.900 I think he understood what American industry was capable 00:31:15.900 --> 00:31:19.320 of, and he knew India could never compete with United 00:31:19.320 --> 00:31:22.610 States in building computers-- that it was a very capital 00:31:22.610 --> 00:31:25.305 intensive business, that they would never have the volumes 00:31:25.305 --> 00:31:26.880 that America would have. 00:31:26.880 --> 00:31:30.960 And so it was a losing proposition to try to think of 00:31:30.960 --> 00:31:31.990 doing something like that. 00:31:31.990 --> 00:31:34.610 And he had the idea of, let's just write software. 00:31:34.610 --> 00:31:37.080 Let's not try to do all the computing work. 00:31:37.080 --> 00:31:38.000 Let's do software. 00:31:38.000 --> 00:31:41.260 That's something where we have an advantage. 00:31:41.260 --> 00:31:44.930 Our labor costs are much less than American costs. 00:31:44.930 --> 00:31:46.270 We can do that. 00:31:46.270 --> 00:31:48.490 And he had connections in America. 00:31:48.490 --> 00:31:52.030 I think people in America were willing to trust him because 00:31:52.030 --> 00:31:56.070 of his connections, because of his MIT education. 00:31:56.070 --> 00:32:00.620 And so he got a lot of business for this company, 00:32:00.620 --> 00:32:07.080 Tata Consultancy Services from the United States. 00:32:07.080 --> 00:32:10.800 This is another early IT information 00:32:10.800 --> 00:32:12.225 technology pioneer in India. 00:32:12.225 --> 00:32:14.520 His name is Narendra Patni. 00:32:14.520 --> 00:32:17.850 And again, he did a great job of connecting India and the 00:32:17.850 --> 00:32:20.950 United States at a time when there weren't a lot of 00:32:20.950 --> 00:32:21.680 connections. 00:32:21.680 --> 00:32:23.890 A lot of people in America didn't know 00:32:23.890 --> 00:32:24.790 that much about India. 00:32:24.790 --> 00:32:25.840 I could imagine-- 00:32:25.840 --> 00:32:28.710 this is in the late 1960s, 1970s-- 00:32:28.710 --> 00:32:35.020 that if you said I'm from India, I would like to do 00:32:35.020 --> 00:32:38.880 computer business for you, I think that's a pretty big 00:32:38.880 --> 00:32:40.770 stretch for a lot of people-- 00:32:40.770 --> 00:32:45.380 what they knew about India, what sort of confidence they 00:32:45.380 --> 00:32:46.440 have in Indians. 00:32:46.440 --> 00:32:50.190 But again, Patni had come to MIT. 00:32:50.190 --> 00:32:56.690 He had work with Jay Forrester, who was, as a great 00:32:56.690 --> 00:33:00.020 academic entrepreneurian, involved in a lot of things. 00:33:00.020 --> 00:33:03.940 And so he had the contacts that really enabled India to 00:33:03.940 --> 00:33:08.350 get this sort of business. 00:33:08.350 --> 00:33:11.250 And I think I have one final slide. 00:33:11.250 --> 00:33:14.220 So you see Bill Gates on the left there. 00:33:14.220 --> 00:33:15.780 And then the person on the right is 00:33:15.780 --> 00:33:17.690 named Narayana Murthy. 00:33:17.690 --> 00:33:21.570 And he's the founder of another big Indian IT company 00:33:21.570 --> 00:33:23.860 called Infosys. 00:33:23.860 --> 00:33:28.040 And Narayana Murthy never went to MIT, but he was influenced 00:33:28.040 --> 00:33:29.480 by MIT in a lot of ways. 00:33:29.480 --> 00:33:31.580 He went to this Indian Institute of 00:33:31.580 --> 00:33:33.500 Technology at Kanpur. 00:33:33.500 --> 00:33:38.510 And there, his mentors were Indians who had gone to MIT. 00:33:38.510 --> 00:33:43.550 Then he went to another school-- the Indian Institute 00:33:43.550 --> 00:33:44.190 of Management-- 00:33:44.190 --> 00:33:47.630 where his mentor there was another man, Indian, who had 00:33:47.630 --> 00:33:49.220 gone to MIT. 00:33:49.220 --> 00:33:53.230 Then he worked for Narendra Patni, the person that I had 00:33:53.230 --> 00:33:54.480 mentioned before. 00:33:56.500 --> 00:33:59.390 In a form to an American would appreciate, after he had 00:33:59.390 --> 00:34:04.030 worked with Narendra Patni for a while, he got tired and quit 00:34:04.030 --> 00:34:05.840 and started his own business. 00:34:05.840 --> 00:34:07.880 And this became Infosys. 00:34:07.880 --> 00:34:10.540 The point of this is he never could have done that on his 00:34:10.540 --> 00:34:13.460 own, but after he had worked with all these Indians who had 00:34:13.460 --> 00:34:15.980 gone to MIT, who had a lot of connections to the United 00:34:15.980 --> 00:34:19.210 States, he had these connections himself. 00:34:19.210 --> 00:34:25.219 And they really helped him to develop those connections. 00:34:25.219 --> 00:34:28.239 One other point-- 00:34:28.239 --> 00:34:31.920 in some ways, it's easy to see this is a great success story, 00:34:31.920 --> 00:34:34.290 the development of the Indian IT industry. 00:34:34.290 --> 00:34:38.179 One other point I feel like I have to mention as well-- 00:34:38.179 --> 00:34:43.250 the greatest industrial accident in world history 00:34:43.250 --> 00:34:46.610 happened in India at Bhopal in 1984. 00:34:46.610 --> 00:34:51.060 Union Carbide had a plant making methyl isocyanate. 00:34:51.060 --> 00:34:53.960 And there was a leak at this plant, and it killed-- 00:34:53.960 --> 00:34:55.590 we're still not exactly sure how many-- 00:34:55.590 --> 00:34:58.000 maybe 10,000 people. 00:34:58.000 --> 00:35:01.050 The manager of this plant was also an 00:35:01.050 --> 00:35:02.620 Indian graduate of MIT. 00:35:02.620 --> 00:35:07.560 And again, the point of this is in the 1960s and 1970s and 00:35:07.560 --> 00:35:11.080 1980s, where the United States and India were linked together 00:35:11.080 --> 00:35:15.560 in technology, generally speaking, you would often find 00:35:15.560 --> 00:35:18.320 an MIT graduate somewhere there. 00:35:18.320 --> 00:35:23.440 And so you see them in both of these contexts. 00:35:23.440 --> 00:35:28.270 And so finally, just one other thing I want to mention is 00:35:28.270 --> 00:35:36.430 MIT, as I said, has become for 50 years or so, a tractor beam 00:35:36.430 --> 00:35:39.960 for talent coming to the United States. 00:35:39.960 --> 00:35:44.740 Many Indians, as they go to school in the Indian 00:35:44.740 --> 00:35:48.820 Institutes of Technology, want to pursue their education. 00:35:48.820 --> 00:35:53.790 And for them, they see the best possible place to go to 00:35:53.790 --> 00:35:56.320 continue their education is MIT. 00:35:56.320 --> 00:35:57.820 You see it as a dream for them. 00:35:57.820 --> 00:36:00.810 Many of them, when they come to the United States, don't 00:36:00.810 --> 00:36:04.270 imagine that they're going to stay in the United States, but 00:36:04.270 --> 00:36:06.790 often they end up staying in United States. 00:36:06.790 --> 00:36:10.250 Sometimes their education, I'd say, unfits 00:36:10.250 --> 00:36:11.430 them for work in India. 00:36:11.430 --> 00:36:15.140 Sometimes they just get so caught up and see the 00:36:15.140 --> 00:36:17.670 opportunities in United States. 00:36:17.670 --> 00:36:21.810 But that seems to be a major trend. 00:36:21.810 --> 00:36:24.200 Now, there are some questions if it will continue, that 00:36:24.200 --> 00:36:27.860 there are enough opportunities in India that maybe Indians 00:36:27.860 --> 00:36:30.910 wouldn't feel such a strong need to come to the United 00:36:30.910 --> 00:36:34.290 States for graduate school. 00:36:34.290 --> 00:36:37.190 So these are some of that the basic themes. 00:36:41.060 --> 00:36:44.475 Most of it will be on the people who 00:36:44.475 --> 00:36:46.270 came from India, though. 00:36:46.270 --> 00:36:51.050 It wasn't until 1965 that there were immigration laws 00:36:51.050 --> 00:36:53.450 that really let Indians come to the United States on any 00:36:53.450 --> 00:36:55.700 sort of a fair basis. 00:36:55.700 --> 00:37:01.930 So you see Indians who are Indians Americans or second 00:37:01.930 --> 00:37:03.900 generation Indians-- 00:37:03.900 --> 00:37:06.610 you only see them starting to come to MIT in any 00:37:06.610 --> 00:37:07.660 numbers in the '80s. 00:37:07.660 --> 00:37:12.030 And then it is ramped up as more and more Indians are in 00:37:12.030 --> 00:37:12.780 the United States. 00:37:12.780 --> 00:37:16.130 So it's sort of a later part of the story. 00:37:20.190 --> 00:37:22.890 The two most prestigious fields you can go into are 00:37:22.890 --> 00:37:24.140 medicine or engineering. 00:37:26.470 --> 00:37:30.260 And in India there is, I'd say, almost an idea-- you 00:37:30.260 --> 00:37:32.250 don't think of what you want to do. 00:37:32.250 --> 00:37:34.980 You think of what you can do. 00:37:34.980 --> 00:37:38.430 And if you can get into an IIT, then you should do it, 00:37:38.430 --> 00:37:41.430 even if you were thinking you don't have an interest in 00:37:41.430 --> 00:37:43.380 engineering-- that you should just do it. 00:37:43.380 --> 00:37:49.210 But they're very, I guess I would say, focused on things 00:37:49.210 --> 00:37:53.910 that will make you a remunerative career. 00:37:53.910 --> 00:37:57.770 And there is a lot of skepticism, I would say, 00:37:57.770 --> 00:38:00.570 generally, that liberal arts will make you a 00:38:00.570 --> 00:38:01.770 remunerative career. 00:38:01.770 --> 00:38:09.240 There are some good liberal arts schools, but relatively 00:38:09.240 --> 00:38:11.610 few people go that route. 00:38:11.610 --> 00:38:15.790 Most people feel, in a country of a billion people, that 00:38:15.790 --> 00:38:20.300 competition is just so fierce for jobs that everyone feels 00:38:20.300 --> 00:38:26.430 the need to get into some area where they're sure that 00:38:26.430 --> 00:38:27.700 they'll have a good job. 00:38:27.700 --> 00:38:30.880 I spoke to a professor at one of the Indian Institutes of 00:38:30.880 --> 00:38:34.920 Technology whose daughter wanted to go into economics. 00:38:34.920 --> 00:38:38.460 And he was kind of horrified that she wanted to do this. 00:38:38.460 --> 00:38:42.530 And he wanted me to explain to him what economics was, what 00:38:42.530 --> 00:38:44.670 kind of job she would get. 00:38:44.670 --> 00:38:48.510 And he was half-convinced afterwards. 00:38:48.510 --> 00:38:52.360 He said, well, OK, maybe I'll let her do economics, but I'm 00:38:52.360 --> 00:38:55.000 never going to let her do liberal arts. 00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:59.650 That's drawing a line that that's not going to happen. 00:38:59.650 --> 00:39:03.510 And there's a very strong feeling that way, that 00:39:03.510 --> 00:39:04.440 engineering-- 00:39:04.440 --> 00:39:07.500 and even within engineering, there's a certain hierarchy. 00:39:07.500 --> 00:39:10.980 Computer science is at the highest level. 00:39:10.980 --> 00:39:14.640 And so these Indian Institutes of Technology-- 00:39:14.640 --> 00:39:19.480 entrance to the schools is determined by one exam called 00:39:19.480 --> 00:39:20.470 the joint entrance exam. 00:39:20.470 --> 00:39:25.260 You get a score on it and there might be 100,000 or it 00:39:25.260 --> 00:39:29.080 might be 300,000 people who take this exam. 00:39:29.080 --> 00:39:30.720 Your score on it is a rank. 00:39:30.720 --> 00:39:34.720 So you're ranked one to 300,000, say. 00:39:34.720 --> 00:39:41.190 And the person who scores one can choose their seat major in 00:39:41.190 --> 00:39:43.770 any of these Indian Institutes of Technology. 00:39:43.770 --> 00:39:52.080 And then the person who gets the last seat is forced to go 00:39:52.080 --> 00:39:55.380 wherever there's an open seat in a major. 00:39:55.380 --> 00:39:58.830 And so invariably, the number one student would take 00:39:58.830 --> 00:39:59.860 computer science. 00:39:59.860 --> 00:40:02.520 That's just what they do. 00:40:02.520 --> 00:40:04.910 And then there's a hierarchy of computer science, 00:40:04.910 --> 00:40:08.140 electrical engineering, chemical engineering, 00:40:08.140 --> 00:40:09.290 mechanical engineering-- 00:40:09.290 --> 00:40:13.610 civil engineering is one of the lowest of the engineering. 00:40:13.610 --> 00:40:16.100 And then there's naval architecture, which is a bit 00:40:16.100 --> 00:40:18.390 lower than that, too. 00:40:21.668 --> 00:40:23.660 AUDIENCE: In these institutions, the Indian 00:40:23.660 --> 00:40:27.644 Institutes of Technology, they're all funded by 00:40:27.644 --> 00:40:29.640 development or are they privately funded? 00:40:29.640 --> 00:40:34.010 ROSS BASSETT: So these are funded by the government< and 00:40:34.010 --> 00:40:37.440 the tuition is pretty low. 00:40:37.440 --> 00:40:42.410 And it's been kind of a political issue in India. 00:40:45.010 --> 00:40:49.670 One issue is how many seats should be reserved for people 00:40:49.670 --> 00:40:51.500 from what's called the scheduled 00:40:51.500 --> 00:40:53.170 caste or backward caste? 00:40:53.170 --> 00:40:57.970 So it would be a bit analogous to affirmative action, say. 00:40:57.970 --> 00:41:00.060 And so this has been very controversial. 00:41:00.060 --> 00:41:03.590 How many seats should be reserved for them? 00:41:03.590 --> 00:41:08.430 And then also people in the middle class have been 00:41:08.430 --> 00:41:10.110 clamoring for access to these. 00:41:10.110 --> 00:41:12.270 A lot of people have been shut out. 00:41:12.270 --> 00:41:16.050 There were originally five of these Indian Institutes of 00:41:16.050 --> 00:41:17.110 Technology. 00:41:17.110 --> 00:41:18.660 Then there were seven. 00:41:18.660 --> 00:41:20.860 And now, recently, they've doubled that. 00:41:20.860 --> 00:41:26.780 Each one has become the mentor to a new Indian Institute of 00:41:26.780 --> 00:41:27.065 Technology. 00:41:27.065 --> 00:41:29.770 And they've done this for political reasons, because 00:41:29.770 --> 00:41:36.610 there's such a great demand and so many people want to 00:41:36.610 --> 00:41:38.830 enter into these institutions. 00:41:38.830 --> 00:41:39.850 And it's very controversial. 00:41:39.850 --> 00:41:43.740 A lot of people associated with the Indian Institutes of 00:41:43.740 --> 00:41:46.780 Technology think they'll never be able to maintain the same 00:41:46.780 --> 00:41:50.780 quality in doubling the institutions that 00:41:50.780 --> 00:41:52.180 they've had so far. 00:41:52.180 --> 00:41:56.530 And so there's worry of brand dilution, if you use a 00:41:56.530 --> 00:42:00.520 business term of what that's going to do to these schools. 00:42:00.520 --> 00:42:07.120 More stay in India now, and more of the leaders, I'd say, 00:42:07.120 --> 00:42:14.360 from now have been mostly educated in India than in the 00:42:14.360 --> 00:42:16.650 '50s and '60s and so on. 00:42:16.650 --> 00:42:20.230 But the system is still-- at these IITs, they're very good 00:42:20.230 --> 00:42:22.040 undergraduate institutions. 00:42:22.040 --> 00:42:26.740 But if you want to do serious graduate research, there's no 00:42:26.740 --> 00:42:32.920 question that they are not at all competitive with MIT. 00:42:32.920 --> 00:42:35.850 There is this hierarchy. 00:42:35.850 --> 00:42:40.120 It turns out that at an IIT, if you go there, the best 00:42:40.120 --> 00:42:41.930 students are the undergraduates, and then the 00:42:41.930 --> 00:42:44.830 graduates are usually actually worse students than the 00:42:44.830 --> 00:42:45.690 undergraduates. 00:42:45.690 --> 00:42:51.250 They're students who are sort of percolating up from less 00:42:51.250 --> 00:42:54.800 prestigious institutions, and as they go to graduate school, 00:42:54.800 --> 00:42:57.430 they go to these IITs. 00:42:57.430 --> 00:43:01.200 But the people from the IITs who want to go to graduate 00:43:01.200 --> 00:43:05.050 school almost invariably go to the United States to go to 00:43:05.050 --> 00:43:06.090 graduate school. 00:43:06.090 --> 00:43:08.440 There's a clear understanding of-- 00:43:08.440 --> 00:43:11.140 they don't have research funding that American 00:43:11.140 --> 00:43:14.680 institutions have that would enable them to do the same 00:43:14.680 --> 00:43:19.900 kind of research that would be done in the United States. 00:43:19.900 --> 00:43:23.510 The system in both politics-- 00:43:23.510 --> 00:43:25.850 in politics, I don't think you would ever go to an IIT, 00:43:25.850 --> 00:43:29.190 because it's more about connections within India. 00:43:29.190 --> 00:43:32.280 And it's more about being a political player. 00:43:32.280 --> 00:43:33.530 In business. 00:43:35.790 --> 00:43:40.830 the environment is so dynamic, I don't think you need to have 00:43:40.830 --> 00:43:42.980 gone to an IIT There's many institutions 00:43:42.980 --> 00:43:45.050 where you can go to. 00:43:45.050 --> 00:43:47.810 The IIT-- 00:43:47.810 --> 00:43:52.430 you clearly can get into an American institution. 00:43:52.430 --> 00:43:57.930 IITs in some ways, for a long time, were paths 00:43:57.930 --> 00:43:59.330 to the United States-- 00:43:59.330 --> 00:44:02.120 the paths to American graduate school. 00:44:02.120 --> 00:44:05.230 Now, they're paths to American graduate schools, but they're 00:44:05.230 --> 00:44:12.960 also paths to Google in India or Microsoft in India or other 00:44:12.960 --> 00:44:15.620 multinational companies in India. 00:44:15.620 --> 00:44:20.010 So their paths to those types of jobs. 00:44:20.010 --> 00:44:23.870 But if you wanted to be an entrepreneur or something, 00:44:23.870 --> 00:44:27.550 many of them come from some of the wide diversity of other 00:44:27.550 --> 00:44:29.002 schools in India. 00:44:29.002 --> 00:44:32.030 PROFESSOR: And also, on that question, I think a little bit 00:44:32.030 --> 00:44:34.820 about one of the themes from your paper about different 00:44:34.820 --> 00:44:36.890 kinds of modernity. 00:44:36.890 --> 00:44:39.470 And it's interesting that we've talked a little bit 00:44:39.470 --> 00:44:42.190 about how, in this country, engineering is not as high 00:44:42.190 --> 00:44:44.150 social prestige as-- 00:44:44.150 --> 00:44:46.920 even to this day, to some degree-- law, possibly 00:44:46.920 --> 00:44:52.160 medicine are, and that the kind of modernism of this 00:44:52.160 --> 00:44:55.350 country coming out of the American Revolution had as 00:44:55.350 --> 00:44:59.300 much to do with both philosophy, legal philosophy, 00:44:59.300 --> 00:45:03.470 commerce, and that America was considered a very 00:45:03.470 --> 00:45:05.550 industrializing country in the 19th century. 00:45:05.550 --> 00:45:08.440 But it was still unprofessionalized. 00:45:08.440 --> 00:45:11.640 Whereas, as you see through this period of the 20th 00:45:11.640 --> 00:45:14.860 century, where one of the big issues for a developing 00:45:14.860 --> 00:45:17.230 country like India is how modern is it, how is it going 00:45:17.230 --> 00:45:18.430 to catch up with the West? 00:45:18.430 --> 00:45:23.070 And through these mechanisms, the whole idea of nationalism 00:45:23.070 --> 00:45:26.280 and building the country literally has this kind of 00:45:26.280 --> 00:45:27.430 engineering connotation. 00:45:27.430 --> 00:45:31.170 And I think that generated that level of prestige. 00:45:31.170 --> 00:45:33.290 It's interesting. 00:45:33.290 --> 00:45:36.370 I told an anecdote from Bob Siemens, who is an MIT grad, 00:45:36.370 --> 00:45:40.680 who came here about 1940, who was from an elite family and 00:45:40.680 --> 00:45:41.800 did his undergrad at Harvard. 00:45:41.800 --> 00:45:45.470 And his parents said, upper class boys 00:45:45.470 --> 00:45:47.110 just don't go to MIT. 00:45:47.110 --> 00:45:50.350 And here you have these students who are upper class 00:45:50.350 --> 00:45:53.290 boys from India coming to MIT during the '30s when most of 00:45:53.290 --> 00:45:55.990 the other students would have been pretty middle class, if 00:45:55.990 --> 00:45:58.660 not even still kind of blue collar. 00:45:58.660 --> 00:46:01.380 Did you see anything as far as differences? 00:46:01.380 --> 00:46:03.760 They look very finely dressed in the photographs you show. 00:46:03.760 --> 00:46:07.240 And they would, in addition to not having not been American, 00:46:07.240 --> 00:46:09.660 feel out of place in some way in that way 00:46:09.660 --> 00:46:11.050 during those years. 00:46:11.050 --> 00:46:14.290 ROSS BASSETT: So you do have very many wealthy Indian 00:46:14.290 --> 00:46:16.150 families sending kids to MIT. 00:46:16.150 --> 00:46:21.970 India has this system of family businesses, where the 00:46:21.970 --> 00:46:25.610 business is passed down from generation to generation. 00:46:25.610 --> 00:46:29.880 And the next generation takes very active part in managing 00:46:29.880 --> 00:46:30.880 the business. 00:46:30.880 --> 00:46:36.780 And very often, in the '50s and '60s, what some of these 00:46:36.780 --> 00:46:39.420 business families would do would be to send the heir 00:46:39.420 --> 00:46:43.340 apparent to the business to MIT to prepare them. 00:46:43.340 --> 00:46:47.950 So these people were billionaires and so on. 00:46:47.950 --> 00:46:53.970 And so you have, again, these people who are really of the 00:46:53.970 --> 00:47:03.300 highest social standing in India coming to MIT and 00:47:03.300 --> 00:47:10.810 studying, really, in some ways quite a bit differently, than 00:47:10.810 --> 00:47:12.060 American families. 00:47:17.970 --> 00:47:20.968 PROFESSOR: Are there questions, comments? 00:47:20.968 --> 00:47:26.940 AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask a question about the five IITs 00:47:26.940 --> 00:47:32.250 that are founded in India in the late '50s, early '60s. 00:47:32.250 --> 00:47:36.305 The interesting thing was that each of them was sponsored by 00:47:36.305 --> 00:47:38.560 a different country. 00:47:38.560 --> 00:47:42.760 And that raises a question with me about-- 00:47:42.760 --> 00:47:48.160 we talk about, in this discussion, MIT being the 00:47:48.160 --> 00:47:52.590 focal point for many of the elite young people that were 00:47:52.590 --> 00:47:53.220 coming here. 00:47:53.220 --> 00:47:56.950 But given the fact that the Indian government in 1946 is 00:47:56.950 --> 00:48:03.500 proposing that you sample from around the world, it's curious 00:48:03.500 --> 00:48:11.660 that the selections they made were so 00:48:11.660 --> 00:48:13.650 un-American in many ways. 00:48:13.650 --> 00:48:15.090 And what was the reasoning? 00:48:15.090 --> 00:48:18.270 Was it just that they wanted to see what was out there and 00:48:18.270 --> 00:48:21.230 then to draw the best? 00:48:21.230 --> 00:48:23.650 ROSS BASSETT: So it seems like part of it was maybe a 00:48:23.650 --> 00:48:25.660 strategy of-- 00:48:25.660 --> 00:48:28.310 India had this policy of non-alignment that they 00:48:28.310 --> 00:48:34.840 weren't going to really fly under the American flag or the 00:48:34.840 --> 00:48:35.460 Soviet flag. 00:48:35.460 --> 00:48:36.870 They were going to say we're not allied. 00:48:36.870 --> 00:48:39.040 There was this Cold War, but we're going to 00:48:39.040 --> 00:48:40.220 chart our own path. 00:48:40.220 --> 00:48:50.220 But part of it was using that to coerce a variety of 00:48:50.220 --> 00:48:51.310 countries to support them. 00:48:51.310 --> 00:48:56.565 So when they started this Indian Institute of Technology 00:48:56.565 --> 00:49:02.520 in Kanpur, the United States engineers at MIT and nine 00:49:02.520 --> 00:49:04.030 other schools supported it. 00:49:04.030 --> 00:49:06.460 And there was really the idea of we are going to make this 00:49:06.460 --> 00:49:07.900 the preeminent IIT. 00:49:07.900 --> 00:49:09.120 It is going to be the best. 00:49:09.120 --> 00:49:11.670 And so there was this competitive aspect. 00:49:11.670 --> 00:49:17.460 And I think the Indians purposely promoted this to get 00:49:17.460 --> 00:49:23.690 each of these countries to the table. 00:49:23.690 --> 00:49:27.390 For example, when the Brits supported their Indian 00:49:27.390 --> 00:49:30.660 Institute of Technology, they had the idea that if we can 00:49:30.660 --> 00:49:35.180 train Indian engineers according to our system, then 00:49:35.180 --> 00:49:39.410 maybe when they're out in companies, they'll buy British 00:49:39.410 --> 00:49:41.920 stuff and that will help us. 00:49:41.920 --> 00:49:44.370 And so they had that idea. 00:49:44.370 --> 00:49:48.060 That was part of why they were doing it. 00:49:48.060 --> 00:49:52.870 And the Soviets, I think, had the idea that this would be a 00:49:52.870 --> 00:49:58.580 model, that this would be a foot in the door into a way 00:49:58.580 --> 00:50:01.360 for them to influence the development of technology. 00:50:01.360 --> 00:50:04.810 So each country, I think, had that idea. 00:50:04.810 --> 00:50:09.090 And India encouraged them to have that idea. 00:50:09.090 --> 00:50:11.740 AUDIENCE: Why not the French? 00:50:11.740 --> 00:50:12.800 They're left out. 00:50:12.800 --> 00:50:16.190 And yet, the Grands Ecoles are there. 00:50:16.190 --> 00:50:19.510 ROSS BASSETT: So I think if you had the money and were 00:50:19.510 --> 00:50:23.110 willing to do it-- so I think it must have been that they 00:50:23.110 --> 00:50:25.190 weren't willing to put up the bucks-- 00:50:25.190 --> 00:50:25.648 AUDIENCE: Post war. 00:50:25.648 --> 00:50:26.106 ROSS BASSETT: Yeah. 00:50:26.106 --> 00:50:27.830 AUDIENCE: Yeah. 00:50:27.830 --> 00:50:32.370 ROSS BASSETT: The British we were always complaining that 00:50:32.370 --> 00:50:35.960 they didn't have the money to do anything on a scale that 00:50:35.960 --> 00:50:37.240 United States did. 00:50:37.240 --> 00:50:43.070 And so I could imagine that the French didn't either. 00:50:43.070 --> 00:50:44.690 I mention this in the article. 00:50:44.690 --> 00:50:47.310 There was a bit of an irony that the British were 00:50:47.310 --> 00:50:51.090 supporting the an IIT, because the British themselves 00:50:51.090 --> 00:50:54.860 admitted they had no MIT in Britain. 00:50:54.860 --> 00:50:58.830 So they were kind of trying to do in India what they hadn't 00:50:58.830 --> 00:51:01.200 done in England in a certain sense.