The Pirates of the Curry-Brain
I finally decided to write this when I read a history paper shared by my friend Tanuj, which recounted the fascinating history of MIT’s involvement in establishing IIT Kanpur and BITS Pilani as elite technical institutions, and the perverse incentives that generated. Credits also to my friend Navaneeth Krishnan for pushing me to write a post that he wants to host on his website.
It’s been a while since I’ve written a post, almost a year now. I’ve been very busy for sure, life at Carnegie Mellon tends to get that way. Of course, I’ve had plenty of free time slots where I could’ve written a post, but not enough in one go that I’ve felt the compulsion to engage myself with non-academic pursuits. You might correctly point out how flawed that philosophy is — hobbies should be interwoven with everyday life, and not just something you do when on break. I’ve observed this to be a distinct feature of American culture that you wouldn’t typically see in Asian societies — a systematization and discipline to pursuing activities extraneous to survival, meant simply to add richness to life. So as I assimilate into American society, I promise to do better in that respect.
Okay, enough foreplay. What I want to discuss in this blog post is the persistent sociological problem of ‘Brain Drain’ that third-world countries can’t seem to shake off. I am a prime example (culprit?) of this phenomenon, and this causes me to feel morally conflicted. As is the theme of my blog (it’s in the name), I am attempting to discover my own world-view by writing it out, and in the process hopefully resolve any internal conflicts and thus clear my mind.
I attempt to answer nagging questions like — am I betraying my people, or is that an outdated notion? Am I needed, or is that a false sense of self-importance? I will end with a case study on my personal reflections, but I want to start off with describing why it’s so appealing for the best and the brightest to take flight.
First is the quality of life (QOL) consideration. IMO what differentiates the first world in terms of QOL is factors like the absence of everyday struggles, functional public infrastructure and law-and-order, vibrant leisure-culture, clean air and beautiful cities, unmatched outdoors life, and a general buzz of excitement in megacities. This is definitely an appealing environment to be in, and it shouldn’t be diminished how much baseline cortisol levels reduce when you can take the above for granted. Because let’s face it — Indian cities are getting really bad. They are dusty, polluted, unsafe for women, traffic is terrible, governance and urban planning are near non-existent, and why aren’t there any damn parks?! There’s also a very limited ability to buy your way out of these problems, unlike in the first world. Now don’t get me wrong, the cool, successful yuppies that make good money have ample scope for self-actualization, but this tiny set of people also has the potential to thrive the most in the megacities of the world — so there’s a huge opportunity cost to staying put.
The second, and perhaps primary consideration for most is the work itself. This is perhaps where Indian elite higher education plays a direct role in accelerating brain drain. The better these institutions have gotten at training their students, the more brain-drain has increased. Going through the IIT / BITS system typically renders kids overqualified for jobs at home and best prepared for graduate training and eventual employment abroad. Engineering employment that expects and rewards a high level of creative output is virtually non-existent within the country, outside of a small sliver of the tech industry.
More than three decades after the founding of IIT Kanpur, its graduates remained “the only high-tech product in which India is internationally competitive.” As a common witticism in India holds, “When a student enrolls at an IIT, his spirit is said to ascend to America. After graduation, his body follows.”
Exporting MIT: Science, Technology, and Nation-Building in India and Iran
Suffice it to say, there would have to be a damn good reason for the best and brightest to stay back right? Sure, for some people uprooting themselves and moving base is not an appealing scenario, but let us for a minute consider whether there’d be an altruistic reason to stay back. I mean how dysfunctional is it that obscene amounts of taxpayer money is poured into training these bright kids that then immediately pack up and leave for the US. Who’s going to pull the country out of the poverty-stricken, stagnant local minimum that it finds itself in?
As an illuminating example, let us consider the case of pure science — especially the fundamental kind. This is one such field where the discrepancies are the most acute. Doing pure science in India, when you could be working at a Princeton or a Harvard, is a massive sacrifice — not only in terms of pay and QOL, but in terms of the research output you’d be able to generate. India simply cannot afford to compete with the rest of the world in terms of scientific resources, nor does it actually need to — except to maintain some impression of scientific respectability. Because in the fundamental sciences, all findings are totally open-sourced, and no breakthroughs can really be retained or profited from as proprietary. It makes no tangible difference where the pure science that enables a ‘useful’ piece of technology was developed — whether at a Princeton or an IISc. Given the global, collaborative nature of the scientific effort, scientists are obligated to optimize for maximum research output if they are to be altruistic — and that tends to lead them abroad.
This is not the case only with the pure sciences. Majority of the fresh-faced engineers from elite colleges end up working as developers/analysts for this or that MNC in Bangalore taking home fat paychecks, yet generating very little primary impact on Indian society. While resisting the urge to take flight might seem like a noble choice, more often than not, every single line of code you write sitting in Bangalore flows through San Francisco on it’s way to serve an American clientele. This really robs away any altruistic or patriotic motivations, except whatever secondary stimulus benefits arise from paying taxes and spending wealth in the country. Which often is dwarfed by how much stimulus can be generated by regular remittances in USD — hell, the welfare economy of an entire large state in India is propped up by cash flowing back from abroad.
The problem is that India is a country of extremely smart individuals that has never quite been able to get its collective shit together. While I cannot stress this enough, we absolutely need to retain the smartest and bravest people, but it is key to remember that it is not a matter of where they work, but where their work manifests.
At this point in its development, I tend to think that India needs leaders much more than it does followers. The leaders are those forward-thinking, risk-taking visionaries that can sniff out long-term opportunity and facilitate entire ecosystems that serve as safe unobtrusive spaces for swarms of risk-averse, yet brilliant technologists to do what they do best — innovate. We need these leaders not only in IT services, but in every sector of society where the opportunity for disruption exists — whether that is technology, biotech, bureaucracy, the NGO space, or most important of all, politics.
I once met a wise man in the mountains — he had a flowing beard, deep baritone, and laugh lines — the kind of person you would ask for sage advice, which I did. I was very surprised when the advice he gave me was to work abroad for at least 3 years. He described (paraphrasing here) how that would round off my education, teach me how to adapt to different cultures, and give me perspective on alternative ways of doing things, which would ultimately make me a powerful asset to society. And then he chugged his whiskey. True story.
This is where the phenomenon of reverse brain-drain comes into the picture. China has been quite successful at attracting Chinese talent educated and trained in the United States back home. When they left they were just bright kids, but when they return they come with advanced skill-sets, years of experience, and strong connections with American industry. It’s no surprise that you see plenty of technology companies with twin HQs in Silicon Valley and Shenzhen — effectively creating a channel for American tech and VC money to flow back into China. It is high time that India awakens to how outsized the impacts of reverse brain gain may be, lest we lose out competitive advantage to China in yet another respect.
That being said, the question remains of what to do with me. My brain has been successfully drained, is that something I should feel guilty about? Let me git stash modesty for a second. By the time I graduate from Carnegie Mellon, I will have an advanced and directly applicable skill-set in robotics, the kind it would frankly have been impossible for me (personally) to attain in any Indian institute in two years. I would be an asset to any American tech company interested in autonomous systems, and I can reasonably predict a very stimulating and well-paid career building robots. This degree however constrains me to a highly specialized industry that only really makes business sense in a handful of advanced economies characterized by high labour costs, high monetary value on life, and a flush VC ecosystem that can think long-term. This effectively rules India out, which has neither of those things, which is reflected by how dismal the robotics industry looks. While I cannot stress enough how badly I want that to change, I don’t think I can be the change I want to see here. I’m no leader, I don’t have that skill, nor the inclination — I just want to build robots in peace and hope someone will pay me. Maybe that will change in the coming years, I might grow into a leader, or I might find someone I can follow. For now, I can only hope to continue my efforts with a single minded focus on becoming an expert, so that I never fall short on that axis when the time comes to give back.
