Unemployed engineering graduate

 I can see the movies Velai Illa Pattadari (VIP), and its sequel VIP2 any number of times, not because they are cinematically woke or because they are true blue masala movies.

My appreciation arises out of who I have become over the past nearly five decades of my life. I am a civil engineer. The protagonist, played by Dhanush, is a civil engineer. Now, if you understood, you understood wrong.

My appreciation of these two movies arise from just a few frames in which the issues that have bothered me for many years are mentioned in understated yet forceful ways.

In the first movie, the words of consequence come not out of the mouth of the protagonist but from that of his mother.

She says that her son, though he could get a job easily in an IT firm with a fat pay check, refuses to do so because, and take this, he had trained to be a civil engineer. Chalk one up for civil engineering!

This point is stressed in the screen play by showing Dhanush doing his job in an IT firm while being miserable. He quits after one month.

Now, I am employed – upon serving for more than two decades and retiring from a civil engineering consultancy firm – in the civil engineering department of a private university. I have been a civil engineer ever since I started my undergraduate studies in 1971. I did not choose civil engineering but it chose me! I was happy and after 49 years, I am still happy.

After a number of twists and turns that are reasonably well done, the movie ends with an optimistic prognosis for the profession.

Then, we come to the sequel; the same protagonist; but the anti-hero is actually a female. Good to know that there can be female villains too, played superbly by Kajol!

The villain has the money, inherited, and her aim is to crush the upstart, the hero. In one scene, the corporate honcho that Kajol is, asks disdainfully, “Why should I listen to him?”

That is about as realistic as realism can get. Engineers are never seated at the high table; never. Their task is not to help in taking decisions, though they are the true implementers of a project. Their task is to translate the decisions others take onto the ground. It is the person with the moolah or access to it who sets the agenda, however unrealistic the target and the demanded schedule maybe.

I speak from experience. One of the political masters demanded that she be shown progress on the ground in a project when the project had not got beyond the stage of foundation drawings. We just did a test pile merely for show and the political master was happy!

Power corridor speaks through the voice of finance.

The fact that services of engineers are essential for a brick-and-mortar project has not percolated up to the putative decision makers – politicians, bureaucrats and their hangers-on.

This is what gets the arrogant boss in the sequel to ignore technically sound advice. “I have the money; YOU LISTEN TO ME!”

I have read the London-based newspaper The Guardian in which one can identify the same critical tone – only money matters.

No wonder that disciplines other than IT, biotech are finding it hard to attract 17 or 18 years-old. This is not good for the country’s innovation ecosystem. Yes, I have fallen into the managementese trap!

Raghuram Ekambaram