Cancel culture – Go All-in

 I read an essay and I was dragged along in the wake of the thought – [Black History Month] has been commercialized, whitewashed and hijacked – that should have motivated it.

The essay talks about cancelling Black History Month celebrations in the US. It led me to some of the things that I would like to see cancelled in India.

Number one on my list: Cancel Teacher’s Day, celebrated to mark my birth day, September 5.

 Oh, I forgot, the day is not celebrated on account of that, but because Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan was also born on that my nativity, some years before I did.

I do not like this gentleman because he usurped what was genuinely mine!

Let me get serious. I was hell bent on doing Ph.D because I wanted to be a teacher (true, and my aim in life was not supported by my mother as she saw first hand how that profession in India locks you inside the cage of penury – my father had been nothing but a teacher all his life).

Things happened along the way that I got the degree when I was too old to be placed in academia at an attractive position and paid a salary that could sustain me. So, I took up a job as an engineering consultant and struggled. But, by the end of my tenure, I was happy how my career had gone.

Then, upon retirement, I got to be a teacher for the first time at the ripe old age of 60 years! The sad thing was both my parents had passed away by then.

It is in this so-called Deemed-to-be University, I realized what a low picking teaching profession is. It is not the salary, but the ecosystem (how I hate that word!), and students are a big part of it.

In my times it was at about finishing 40% of one’s academic load, students start thinking about what they would do upon graduation (in my case it was 60%, and that too with a heavy dose vagueness). Now. It is negative 50% (two years to joining college). Do not blame youngsters when it should lie on parents.

When the focus is on the moolah, one cares about and only about how much and how fast one can strike rich, teachers be damned. Let them have their day.

And they do. Where I work, one’s colleagues are the only ones who greet you on that day, Teacher’s Day – none else.

I want Teacher’s Day in India abolished. Simple.

I am an engineer, of the infra-dig civil engineering type.

We celebrate Engineer’s Day on September 15, ostensibly to celebrate the birth day of Sir Mokshagundam Visvesvaraya (Sir MV), a highly celebrated engineer-administrator. Here too, I was deprived of my own rightful position in the pantheon of civil engineers, by a mere 10 days!

Sir MV was a civil engineer, take that all you IT/ICT/AI wannabees! You can come back to me when Mr. Narayana Murthy is awarded Bharat Ratna; till then, hush!

Is that a chip on my shoulder, my antipathy towards IT? Perhaps it is, howsoever much I may try hiding it.

In engineering college, civil engineers were looked-down upon. They still are. Just think for a minute – without civil engineers you would be shitting in your backyard with your mobile in hand, of course!

That was not a cheap shot, though it hit below the belt.

Fact of the matter is, graduating civil engineers are not sold on the idea of being proud of the profession of one’s choice (though that choice is becoming more and more temporary and only as the means to satisfying one’s ambitions and not of the ends), nation building, humanity developing, and are falling for the Sirens of IT. Their entry level pay check is multiples of what the other engineering streams offer and that is enough. When the songs of the Sirens fade away, say in half a decade or less, they are stranded after hitting against the rocks. This is not doomsday scenario.

I truly have nothing against IT, but just imagine without HVAC engineers (mechanical and electrical engineers, take a bow) where would your datacentre be? In the Arctic? However, that too is heating up! You have no place to put down your thousands of terraflops-computers to execute your AI algorithms.

Why celebrate the birthday of an accomplished, celebrated civil engineer one day and abuse, at best discard, any lifelong cohort of his. Isn’t it honest of society to do away with celebrating Engineer’s Day?

Cancel Engineer’s Day!

The above are supposedly secular celebrations. There are also some other such celebrations that I would like cancelled, because and only because, they are falling into the trap of being commercialized, whitewashed and hijacked.

I am too late, you say. I do not disagree.

Just a thought – go all-in!

Cancel left, right and centre! Let anarchists unite!

Raghuram Ekambaram