1 00:00:00,040 --> 00:00:02,470 The following content is provided under a Creative 2 00:00:02,470 --> 00:00:03,880 Commons license. 3 00:00:03,880 --> 00:00:06,920 Your support will help MIT OpenCourseWare continue to 4 00:00:06,920 --> 00:00:10,570 offer high quality educational resources for free. 5 00:00:10,570 --> 00:00:13,470 To make a donation or view additional materials from 6 00:00:13,470 --> 00:00:19,300 hundreds of MIT courses, visit MIT OpenCourseWare at 7 00:00:19,300 --> 00:00:20,550 ocw.mit.edu. 8 00:00:28,530 --> 00:00:29,270 OK. 9 00:00:29,270 --> 00:00:31,850 Let's get started. 10 00:00:31,850 --> 00:00:35,040 One announcement is a reminder. 11 00:00:35,040 --> 00:00:39,040 There is a paper due on April 4, and Michaela will be 12 00:00:39,040 --> 00:00:42,805 sending out a formal assignment about that within a 13 00:00:42,805 --> 00:00:43,320 day or two. 14 00:00:43,320 --> 00:00:47,490 So you can get started on that whenever you like. 15 00:00:47,490 --> 00:00:49,680 And we can talk about it more next week after the 16 00:00:49,680 --> 00:00:50,950 assignment comes out. 17 00:00:50,950 --> 00:00:56,260 But for the most part, what it's going to look like is an 18 00:00:56,260 --> 00:01:01,390 assignment to do a little more digging and some research 19 00:01:01,390 --> 00:01:07,410 into, basically, people, place, or thing in the part of 20 00:01:07,410 --> 00:01:09,750 the history of MIT that we've covered so far. 21 00:01:09,750 --> 00:01:11,530 So take a particular person-- 22 00:01:11,530 --> 00:01:14,280 maybe one of the signers of the charter or one of the 23 00:01:14,280 --> 00:01:18,600 early professors or an early student here-- 24 00:01:18,600 --> 00:01:22,760 a place, one particular building from the period up to 25 00:01:22,760 --> 00:01:24,970 1915 or so. 26 00:01:24,970 --> 00:01:28,480 And we say thing, but I think that could be an instrument or 27 00:01:28,480 --> 00:01:33,070 a laboratory that is of interest and do a little 28 00:01:33,070 --> 00:01:37,770 profile of that about what was it used for, what were people 29 00:01:37,770 --> 00:01:39,330 studying in the laboratory, and how were 30 00:01:39,330 --> 00:01:42,530 people being taught-- 31 00:01:42,530 --> 00:01:48,800 and basically, to focus on the first 65 years or so-- 32 00:01:48,800 --> 00:01:50,330 50 years or so. 33 00:01:50,330 --> 00:01:55,010 The 50th anniversary of MIT is 1911, so something from that 34 00:01:55,010 --> 00:01:56,270 early period that interests you. 35 00:01:56,270 --> 00:02:00,720 There's a lot of material, both online, but also in the 36 00:02:00,720 --> 00:02:04,020 MIT archives, in the libraries. 37 00:02:04,020 --> 00:02:06,310 Actually, a really good source is just, of the books that 38 00:02:06,310 --> 00:02:09,460 we've been assigning pieces of, you can just look further 39 00:02:09,460 --> 00:02:10,280 into those books. 40 00:02:10,280 --> 00:02:13,730 And Michaela will help you with that and actually have 41 00:02:13,730 --> 00:02:17,150 maybe a special session on some of the research methods 42 00:02:17,150 --> 00:02:19,740 and what to expect for that. 43 00:02:19,740 --> 00:02:21,400 So that's coming along. 44 00:02:21,400 --> 00:02:25,300 And next week, we'll have Ros Williams in, who will talk 45 00:02:25,300 --> 00:02:28,430 about a combination of things. 46 00:02:28,430 --> 00:02:30,860 She's a historian of technology as well. 47 00:02:30,860 --> 00:02:34,520 She's written about the history of MIT and the 48 00:02:34,520 --> 00:02:37,415 chemical engineering department, which happens to 49 00:02:37,415 --> 00:02:39,830 have been founded by her grandfather, who had a lot of 50 00:02:39,830 --> 00:02:42,830 interesting personalities on campus and things he was 51 00:02:42,830 --> 00:02:45,050 involved in. 52 00:02:45,050 --> 00:02:48,550 Today, we are lucky to have Ross Bassett with us who is a 53 00:02:48,550 --> 00:02:53,780 colleague of ours from NC State, has written a very good 54 00:02:53,780 --> 00:02:58,020 book on the history of CMOS technology and the equation of 55 00:02:58,020 --> 00:03:01,380 the semiconductor integrated circuits. 56 00:03:01,380 --> 00:03:03,880 And now, he's working on this book part of the assignment, 57 00:03:03,880 --> 00:03:09,660 which was the reading today on the Indian students at MIT. 58 00:03:09,660 --> 00:03:12,000 And he's going to talk to us a little bit about that. 59 00:03:12,000 --> 00:03:14,990 And over lunch, it was just becoming clear how many of the 60 00:03:14,990 --> 00:03:17,790 issues that were raised both in the readings and also in 61 00:03:17,790 --> 00:03:20,800 the response papers for today are, as some of you pointed 62 00:03:20,800 --> 00:03:23,400 out, relevant for issues on campus. 63 00:03:23,400 --> 00:03:26,080 We happened to be sitting two tables down from Tom Mangnati, 64 00:03:26,080 --> 00:03:28,560 who's the former dean of engineering here and the 65 00:03:28,560 --> 00:03:32,430 president of the new university in Singapore that 66 00:03:32,430 --> 00:03:36,090 MIT has founded based on the principle of 67 00:03:36,090 --> 00:03:39,250 organizing around design. 68 00:03:39,250 --> 00:03:43,880 And so as many of you will have heard from a variety of 69 00:03:43,880 --> 00:03:46,600 things, MIT's relationships with the rest of the world-- 70 00:03:46,600 --> 00:03:50,380 its profile abroad is very much a topic of conversation 71 00:03:50,380 --> 00:03:51,890 at MIT these days. 72 00:03:51,890 --> 00:03:55,220 How many of you work in a lab that has some connection with 73 00:03:55,220 --> 00:03:59,340 Singapore or some other international research group? 74 00:03:59,340 --> 00:04:01,620 So a few of you do. 75 00:04:01,620 --> 00:04:05,430 And how many of you were born and raised in the US versus-- 76 00:04:05,430 --> 00:04:06,400 so yeah. 77 00:04:06,400 --> 00:04:07,680 Undergraduates-- 78 00:04:07,680 --> 00:04:12,290 very much more American-based. 79 00:04:12,290 --> 00:04:16,089 The undergraduate population is capped at about 8% 80 00:04:16,089 --> 00:04:18,730 international students, whereas the graduate student 81 00:04:18,730 --> 00:04:20,760 population is probably-- 82 00:04:20,760 --> 00:04:22,380 I don't know the exact number-- 83 00:04:22,380 --> 00:04:24,785 50% or 60% international students. 84 00:04:28,710 --> 00:04:34,140 But even of the US-born, US-raised undergraduate 85 00:04:34,140 --> 00:04:37,170 students, many come from families, first generation 86 00:04:37,170 --> 00:04:37,990 immigrants or whatnot. 87 00:04:37,990 --> 00:04:41,140 We've talked about that a little bit before. 88 00:04:41,140 --> 00:04:44,750 So Ros will talk to us a little bit about Indian 89 00:04:44,750 --> 00:04:45,890 students at MIT. 90 00:04:45,890 --> 00:04:47,455 It's a very interesting case. 91 00:04:47,455 --> 00:04:49,540 There's a lot of interesting reasons to be interested in 92 00:04:49,540 --> 00:04:53,860 India and MIT's relationships there-- but also not 93 00:04:53,860 --> 00:04:56,610 necessarily typical, but representative of MIT's 94 00:04:56,610 --> 00:05:03,670 relationships with Japan, China, Iran, Middle East-- 95 00:05:03,670 --> 00:05:06,020 lots of different places around the world. 96 00:05:06,020 --> 00:05:09,970 All of them are a little bit special, but they're certainly 97 00:05:09,970 --> 00:05:12,290 part of a longer story here. 98 00:05:12,290 --> 00:05:15,490 So he's going to talk for a little bit, put the article in 99 00:05:15,490 --> 00:05:17,650 the context of a larger project that he's working on, 100 00:05:17,650 --> 00:05:20,220 and then we can pick up the discussion there. 101 00:05:20,220 --> 00:05:23,770 And I think that'll naturally segue into also this 102 00:05:23,770 --> 00:05:26,370 particular period that we've come into-- 103 00:05:26,370 --> 00:05:29,090 turn of the century up through the beginning of World War II, 104 00:05:29,090 --> 00:05:32,120 the technology plan, relationships with industry. 105 00:05:32,120 --> 00:05:35,710 Again, so many of the issues from the reading that were on 106 00:05:35,710 --> 00:05:39,700 the table in 1915, 1930 are still issues that are on the 107 00:05:39,700 --> 00:05:42,956 table today in some form or another. 108 00:05:42,956 --> 00:05:46,270 ROSS BASSETT: Thanks, David and Roe and Michaela. 109 00:05:46,270 --> 00:05:49,170 I think it's a good strategy to start out by sucking up to 110 00:05:49,170 --> 00:05:49,700 your audience. 111 00:05:49,700 --> 00:05:51,460 So let me do that. 112 00:05:51,460 --> 00:05:54,090 I've got my Ph.D. from Princeton. 113 00:05:54,090 --> 00:05:55,670 And there was a Professor, Michael 114 00:05:55,670 --> 00:05:57,450 Borden, who went to Harvard. 115 00:05:57,450 --> 00:06:01,020 And when he went to Harvard, he had a roommate at Harvard 116 00:06:01,020 --> 00:06:03,140 who was of Indian ancestry. 117 00:06:03,140 --> 00:06:08,760 And Michael reported that his roommate told him how all his 118 00:06:08,760 --> 00:06:12,360 family back in India were all so proud that they had someone 119 00:06:12,360 --> 00:06:16,860 in their family who went to a school near MIT. 120 00:06:16,860 --> 00:06:22,010 And it gives you an idea, I think, of what the sense of 121 00:06:22,010 --> 00:06:24,170 MIT is in India. 122 00:06:24,170 --> 00:06:26,830 And so I've been to India a lot and I've 123 00:06:26,830 --> 00:06:28,520 seen that first hand. 124 00:06:28,520 --> 00:06:34,540 So a couple things, just to put this in context and why 125 00:06:34,540 --> 00:06:36,650 I'm interested in this. 126 00:06:36,650 --> 00:06:39,700 I've been interested in India for a long time, and I'm also 127 00:06:39,700 --> 00:06:41,710 interested in globalization, of course. 128 00:06:41,710 --> 00:06:44,900 That's a big buzz word these days. 129 00:06:44,900 --> 00:06:48,850 But one of the ways I think about history and how we can 130 00:06:48,850 --> 00:06:51,580 find interesting history topics is sort of a thought 131 00:06:51,580 --> 00:06:52,230 experiment. 132 00:06:52,230 --> 00:06:57,530 Imagine, say, what would surprise someone coming to the 133 00:06:57,530 --> 00:06:59,970 year 2011 from, say, 100 years ago? 134 00:06:59,970 --> 00:07:02,560 Say, President Maclaurin-- 135 00:07:02,560 --> 00:07:05,890 what would surprise them about the world 136 00:07:05,890 --> 00:07:08,200 today if they saw it? 137 00:07:08,200 --> 00:07:12,160 And so I think about that, I guess, especially 138 00:07:12,160 --> 00:07:13,230 with regard to India. 139 00:07:13,230 --> 00:07:15,370 And let me just say some of the things that I think would 140 00:07:15,370 --> 00:07:17,050 be pretty surprising. 141 00:07:17,050 --> 00:07:20,250 I guess anything involving Indians in the United States 142 00:07:20,250 --> 00:07:24,300 would be surprising, because they were actually laws 143 00:07:24,300 --> 00:07:30,100 limiting Indians from staying permanently in America. 144 00:07:30,100 --> 00:07:32,820 It was very questionable whether an Indian, someone 145 00:07:32,820 --> 00:07:35,720 from India, could even become a citizen of the United States 146 00:07:35,720 --> 00:07:36,926 until 1920. 147 00:07:36,926 --> 00:07:41,240 Until 1965, the United States had laws which basically said, 148 00:07:41,240 --> 00:07:44,280 we really don't want Indians in the United States. 149 00:07:44,280 --> 00:07:46,770 There was an annual quota of 100 people. 150 00:07:46,770 --> 00:07:51,230 But let me tell you some things about the world of 2011 151 00:07:51,230 --> 00:07:54,090 that is sort of surprising in that regard. 152 00:07:54,090 --> 00:07:56,330 Silicon Valley-- 153 00:07:56,330 --> 00:07:57,130 my apologies-- 154 00:07:57,130 --> 00:07:58,710 but the most dynamic 155 00:07:58,710 --> 00:08:01,570 technological area in the world. 156 00:08:01,570 --> 00:08:05,270 It's commonly said that Silicon Valley runs on ICs. 157 00:08:05,270 --> 00:08:07,050 And that doesn't mean integrated circuits. 158 00:08:07,050 --> 00:08:09,560 It means Indians and Chinese. 159 00:08:09,560 --> 00:08:13,060 People understand that Indian and Chinese entrepreneurs are 160 00:08:13,060 --> 00:08:15,670 some of the key figures who really start businesses 161 00:08:15,670 --> 00:08:20,560 successfully, help move the technology along. 162 00:08:20,560 --> 00:08:26,100 I think of that school down the road a bit. 163 00:08:26,100 --> 00:08:30,290 They just appointed a new dean of their business school. 164 00:08:30,290 --> 00:08:36,929 His name is Nitin Nohria, an Indian who came to Harvard. 165 00:08:36,929 --> 00:08:40,890 MIT itself, the former dean of engineering, Subra Suresh, 166 00:08:40,890 --> 00:08:42,419 also from India. 167 00:08:42,419 --> 00:08:45,430 Now he's the head of the National Science Foundation, 168 00:08:45,430 --> 00:08:50,230 one of the leading funders of science and technological 169 00:08:50,230 --> 00:08:53,570 research in the United States, setting the agenda for 170 00:08:53,570 --> 00:08:55,170 scientific research. 171 00:08:55,170 --> 00:08:56,520 I think of-- 172 00:08:56,520 --> 00:08:59,200 do you know the building that's right across Vassar 173 00:08:59,200 --> 00:09:02,350 Street from the Stata Center, the Institute for Brain 174 00:09:02,350 --> 00:09:05,780 Research, that the train tracks go 175 00:09:05,780 --> 00:09:08,370 through the middle of? 176 00:09:08,370 --> 00:09:11,480 That was designed by Charles Correa, an Indian, someone 177 00:09:11,480 --> 00:09:15,010 who's the leading Indian architect. 178 00:09:15,010 --> 00:09:17,520 And so he lives in India. 179 00:09:17,520 --> 00:09:22,970 This was his first commission ever in the United States for 180 00:09:22,970 --> 00:09:24,960 an American client. 181 00:09:24,960 --> 00:09:28,220 And so the point of this is that Indians play a very 182 00:09:28,220 --> 00:09:32,070 prominent role in technology in the United States today, 183 00:09:32,070 --> 00:09:34,710 which I think would have been very, very surprising to 184 00:09:34,710 --> 00:09:37,500 anyone 100 years ago. 185 00:09:37,500 --> 00:09:40,100 And then if we look at India itself, there are a number of 186 00:09:40,100 --> 00:09:43,520 things, I think, that are surprising as well. 187 00:09:43,520 --> 00:09:45,910 We're used to seeing everything that we buy from 188 00:09:45,910 --> 00:09:48,660 Walmart or Target or whatever having a "made in 189 00:09:48,660 --> 00:09:52,110 China" stamp on it. 190 00:09:52,110 --> 00:09:55,840 We can't really judge the provenance of software code or 191 00:09:55,840 --> 00:09:56,630 something like that. 192 00:09:56,630 --> 00:10:00,500 But if could, we'd probably be surprised at how much software 193 00:10:00,500 --> 00:10:03,600 would have the tag "coded in India." 194 00:10:03,600 --> 00:10:09,530 And I was in India in October and visited a place where they 195 00:10:09,530 --> 00:10:14,000 made transmission components for Fords and GMs in a place 196 00:10:14,000 --> 00:10:15,840 in Pune, India. 197 00:10:15,840 --> 00:10:22,150 Another big Indian company is set to, I think this year, 198 00:10:22,150 --> 00:10:25,920 begin selling its model SUV in the United States. 199 00:10:25,920 --> 00:10:30,120 So India is playing a remarkable technological role 200 00:10:30,120 --> 00:10:32,700 in United States. 201 00:10:32,700 --> 00:10:35,980 We might have considered that inconceivable 100 202 00:10:35,980 --> 00:10:37,660 years ago or so. 203 00:10:37,660 --> 00:10:41,140 So that's what I've been interested in looking at. 204 00:10:41,140 --> 00:10:47,820 And the way I decided to do this was I was trying to look 205 00:10:47,820 --> 00:10:50,340 for some way to understand the relationship between the 206 00:10:50,340 --> 00:10:52,860 United States and India. 207 00:10:52,860 --> 00:10:56,870 And the way I finally decided to do it was that I found that 208 00:10:56,870 --> 00:11:00,280 MIT has a series of commencement programs that 209 00:11:00,280 --> 00:11:02,230 they publish with every commencement 210 00:11:02,230 --> 00:11:03,920 that lists every graduate. 211 00:11:03,920 --> 00:11:07,230 And they've listed the hometown of every graduate. 212 00:11:07,230 --> 00:11:09,590 And so they have these available for 213 00:11:09,590 --> 00:11:11,170 the whole 20th century. 214 00:11:11,170 --> 00:11:13,030 So what I did is I made a database. 215 00:11:13,030 --> 00:11:16,270 I went through these and pulled out every single Indian 216 00:11:16,270 --> 00:11:21,310 who graduated from MIT in the 20th century. 217 00:11:21,310 --> 00:11:23,260 So I have this database, and I kind of think 218 00:11:23,260 --> 00:11:26,010 of this as a filter. 219 00:11:26,010 --> 00:11:29,740 India is a country with a population now of a billion 220 00:11:29,740 --> 00:11:31,410 people or so. 221 00:11:31,410 --> 00:11:34,290 We can't look at all 1 billion people. 222 00:11:34,290 --> 00:11:37,790 So what I'm looking at is those Indians throughout the 223 00:11:37,790 --> 00:11:39,610 century who came to MIT. 224 00:11:39,610 --> 00:11:43,970 And so again, we can't look at every student at MIT from the 225 00:11:43,970 --> 00:11:44,710 20th century. 226 00:11:44,710 --> 00:11:45,940 But we can look at-- 227 00:11:45,940 --> 00:11:47,550 this is a rather small group. 228 00:11:47,550 --> 00:11:50,330 It's about 1,500 people or so. 229 00:11:50,330 --> 00:11:54,150 And so let's look at these students and say, how did they 230 00:11:54,150 --> 00:11:59,440 end up getting from India, 7,000 miles away, to MIT? 231 00:11:59,440 --> 00:12:00,270 How did that happen? 232 00:12:00,270 --> 00:12:03,360 And then what happened to them afterwards? 233 00:12:03,360 --> 00:12:04,690 What did they do? 234 00:12:04,690 --> 00:12:07,610 Did they make any difference in India? 235 00:12:07,610 --> 00:12:10,520 What were their careers like? 236 00:12:10,520 --> 00:12:11,880 And so that's what I've been doing. 237 00:12:11,880 --> 00:12:14,460 And so in the last five years or so, I've been running 238 00:12:14,460 --> 00:12:20,400 around India trying to track down Indian graduates of MIT, 239 00:12:20,400 --> 00:12:23,490 their family and so on, just to find out some 240 00:12:23,490 --> 00:12:24,920 things about them. 241 00:12:24,920 --> 00:12:29,010 And so a couple of general themes that 242 00:12:29,010 --> 00:12:32,570 come up from this-- 243 00:12:32,570 --> 00:12:36,250 one is the idea of a technological nationalism, I 244 00:12:36,250 --> 00:12:42,710 would say, and then also the development of the information 245 00:12:42,710 --> 00:12:46,020 technology industry in India and globalization. 246 00:12:46,020 --> 00:12:48,640 Then also-- 247 00:12:48,640 --> 00:12:51,840 in Star Trek, they have this tractor beam that sometimes 248 00:12:51,840 --> 00:12:54,380 will pull things into the spaceship. 249 00:12:54,380 --> 00:12:57,850 You could say MIT has been a tractor beam for global 250 00:12:57,850 --> 00:13:01,560 talent, that it's pulled international talent into the 251 00:13:01,560 --> 00:13:06,000 United States, and very often it's stayed in the United 252 00:13:06,000 --> 00:13:09,790 States after it's gotten there. 253 00:13:09,790 --> 00:13:15,680 So these are some of the things that I'm touching on in 254 00:13:15,680 --> 00:13:18,720 what I'm doing. 255 00:13:18,720 --> 00:13:24,560 And so one of the things that you do see is students who 256 00:13:24,560 --> 00:13:29,670 went to MIT in the early 20th century-- 257 00:13:29,670 --> 00:13:32,090 very often, going to MIT, you could say, was 258 00:13:32,090 --> 00:13:33,720 a nationalist act. 259 00:13:33,720 --> 00:13:39,910 India was a British colony, and most people, in some ways, 260 00:13:39,910 --> 00:13:43,860 the intuitive thing to do would be to make ties with the 261 00:13:43,860 --> 00:13:47,760 British, British society, with Britain. 262 00:13:47,760 --> 00:13:52,580 So those who went to MIT were in some ways doing something 263 00:13:52,580 --> 00:13:56,550 that didn't make a lot of sense in some ways, having 264 00:13:56,550 --> 00:13:58,940 ties with the British. 265 00:13:58,940 --> 00:14:02,870 And so that that's a big theme that I've discovered. 266 00:14:02,870 --> 00:14:06,980 And one of the other aspects of this that has been kind of 267 00:14:06,980 --> 00:14:08,110 intriguing-- 268 00:14:08,110 --> 00:14:11,110 what do you think of when you think of Mahatma Gandhi? 269 00:14:11,110 --> 00:14:13,270 What sorts of things come to your mind? 270 00:14:13,270 --> 00:14:14,760 What sort of images? 271 00:14:14,760 --> 00:14:16,830 What kind of things do you think of? 272 00:14:19,776 --> 00:14:21,740 AUDIENCE: Small, peaceful man. 273 00:14:21,740 --> 00:14:24,200 ROSS BASSETT: Small, peaceful man. 274 00:14:24,200 --> 00:14:28,710 Anything else you think of about Gandhi? 275 00:14:28,710 --> 00:14:30,290 AUDIENCE: He was fairly well to do and then 276 00:14:30,290 --> 00:14:31,820 he gave it all up. 277 00:14:31,820 --> 00:14:33,140 ROSS BASSETT: He was a very wealthy 278 00:14:33,140 --> 00:14:36,602 lawyer, gave it all up. 279 00:14:36,602 --> 00:14:37,520 AUDIENCE: Spiritualism. 280 00:14:37,520 --> 00:14:37,930 ROSS BASSETT: Pardon? 281 00:14:37,930 --> 00:14:38,847 AUDIENCE: Spiritualism. 282 00:14:38,847 --> 00:14:40,097 ROSS BASSETT: Spiritualism. 283 00:14:44,920 --> 00:14:46,460 Anyone else? 284 00:14:46,460 --> 00:14:48,700 So we have those images of Gandhi. 285 00:14:48,700 --> 00:14:52,600 One of the intriguing things about this research-- 286 00:14:52,600 --> 00:14:57,750 when I look at the Indians who went to MIT in the 1920s and 287 00:14:57,750 --> 00:15:00,580 1930s and try to look at the networks of people they're 288 00:15:00,580 --> 00:15:04,500 involved in, where they come from, one of the things that I 289 00:15:04,500 --> 00:15:07,150 find is, if I try to identify where is the 290 00:15:07,150 --> 00:15:09,500 heart of these people-- 291 00:15:09,500 --> 00:15:11,090 what sort of, again, networks are they 292 00:15:11,090 --> 00:15:14,240 involved in and so on-- 293 00:15:14,240 --> 00:15:17,920 if you look at a large number of them, you get connected 294 00:15:17,920 --> 00:15:22,090 back to Gandhi, that a large percentage of Indians were 295 00:15:22,090 --> 00:15:26,280 from the part of India where Gandhi was from. 296 00:15:26,280 --> 00:15:28,380 A large number of them actually had 297 00:15:28,380 --> 00:15:29,390 connections with Gandhi. 298 00:15:29,390 --> 00:15:35,790 One young man who grew up in Gandhi's ashram went to MIT. 299 00:15:35,790 --> 00:15:40,230 And so this has been the intriguing thing. 300 00:15:40,230 --> 00:15:43,280 And it's suggested some things to me. 301 00:15:43,280 --> 00:15:46,240 I've gone back and looked at Gandhi's papers. 302 00:15:46,240 --> 00:15:52,920 And Gandhi has often been, I'd say, captured by political 303 00:15:52,920 --> 00:15:53,510 historians-- 304 00:15:53,510 --> 00:15:56,480 most people who are interested in him are people interested 305 00:15:56,480 --> 00:16:01,500 in political history, Gandhi's spiritualism, his philosophy, 306 00:16:01,500 --> 00:16:04,300 his philosophy of nonviolence, and things like that. 307 00:16:04,300 --> 00:16:07,645 But Gandhi was very interested in technology himself. 308 00:16:10,510 --> 00:16:14,290 Maybe the most common image of him being interested in 309 00:16:14,290 --> 00:16:16,340 technology, of course, is handspinning. 310 00:16:16,340 --> 00:16:19,960 And it's easy to see that as very 311 00:16:19,960 --> 00:16:22,900 regressive, you might say-- 312 00:16:22,900 --> 00:16:23,910 very archaic. 313 00:16:23,910 --> 00:16:26,980 But he was really very interested in efficiency, as 314 00:16:26,980 --> 00:16:29,200 he was interested in spinning. 315 00:16:29,200 --> 00:16:32,470 If you were a contemporary of Gandhi's and you told him you 316 00:16:32,470 --> 00:16:36,790 spun, he would ask you what your production rate was. 317 00:16:36,790 --> 00:16:40,320 And he was very concerned about increasing production. 318 00:16:40,320 --> 00:16:44,520 His magazine had statistics all the time about what 319 00:16:44,520 --> 00:16:47,090 people's spinning production was and so on. 320 00:16:47,090 --> 00:16:52,970 And so it seems like Gandhi had this-- and I think this 321 00:16:52,970 --> 00:16:55,420 term has come across before in some of your other readings. 322 00:16:55,420 --> 00:16:58,830 He was almost tailoristic is taken some of his ways, that 323 00:16:58,830 --> 00:17:01,510 he was very concerned about efficiency. 324 00:17:01,510 --> 00:17:06,109 He once wrote a piece in his newspaper-- 325 00:17:06,109 --> 00:17:09,410 20 rules that anyone who was going to meet him at the 326 00:17:09,410 --> 00:17:11,630 railroad station should follow. 327 00:17:11,630 --> 00:17:17,280 And he was kind of upset in this that he said, a lot of 328 00:17:17,280 --> 00:17:21,560 people who met him at the train station would block his 329 00:17:21,560 --> 00:17:23,940 path of going out of the train station. 330 00:17:23,940 --> 00:17:26,250 He said, normally, it should take me five minutes, but now 331 00:17:26,250 --> 00:17:27,740 all these people are there. 332 00:17:27,740 --> 00:17:28,930 It's taking me 30 minutes. 333 00:17:28,930 --> 00:17:30,470 I'm wasting all this time. 334 00:17:30,470 --> 00:17:32,540 And so he was very frustrated with that. 335 00:17:32,540 --> 00:17:35,790 And so he was very interested in efficiency. 336 00:17:35,790 --> 00:17:41,640 And it seems one young man who grew up in Gandhi's ashram 337 00:17:41,640 --> 00:17:45,960 basically said later on, I became an engineer at the 338 00:17:45,960 --> 00:17:46,850 hands of Gandhi. 339 00:17:46,850 --> 00:17:48,400 Gandhi made me an engineer. 340 00:17:48,400 --> 00:17:52,240 And again, it seems, in some ways, fairly counterintuitive. 341 00:17:52,240 --> 00:17:57,530 But that was what he said he saw and that was how he became 342 00:17:57,530 --> 00:17:58,110 an engineer. 343 00:17:58,110 --> 00:18:03,040 And so many of these people went to MIT as this act of 344 00:18:03,040 --> 00:18:04,760 technological nationalism. 345 00:18:04,760 --> 00:18:08,600 They saw that if India was going to be an independent 346 00:18:08,600 --> 00:18:12,380 country, they needed to have a technological base. 347 00:18:12,380 --> 00:18:14,680 They needed to have technological capabilities so 348 00:18:14,680 --> 00:18:18,500 they wouldn't be relying on British people, Americans, 349 00:18:18,500 --> 00:18:20,880 that they could develop their own technological 350 00:18:20,880 --> 00:18:21,990 infrastructure. 351 00:18:21,990 --> 00:18:25,750 And so that seems to have been a very big theme among Indians 352 00:18:25,750 --> 00:18:31,450 who went to MIT in the early part of the 20th century. 353 00:18:31,450 --> 00:18:33,580 I want to flip through some of these-- 354 00:18:33,580 --> 00:18:34,260 PROFESSOR: We can if you want. 355 00:18:34,260 --> 00:18:36,700 ROSS BASSETT: Sure, that'd be great. 356 00:18:36,700 --> 00:18:39,410 This is Alfred Marshall, the British economist. 357 00:18:42,230 --> 00:18:44,560 One man had studied at Cambridge-- 358 00:18:44,560 --> 00:18:49,340 an Indian man-- and Alfred Marshall told him, as I 359 00:18:49,340 --> 00:18:52,820 mentioned in the paper, that he thought Indians should not 360 00:18:52,820 --> 00:18:54,730 be going to Cambridge, but instead 361 00:18:54,730 --> 00:18:56,550 should be going to MIT. 362 00:18:56,550 --> 00:19:00,050 This is [INAUDIBLE] 363 00:19:00,050 --> 00:19:03,040 who I mentioned in the article. 364 00:19:03,040 --> 00:19:06,790 He started a chemical works in Western India. 365 00:19:06,790 --> 00:19:11,740 This is a drawing of the chemical works in the small 366 00:19:11,740 --> 00:19:13,040 town of [INAUDIBLE] 367 00:19:13,040 --> 00:19:15,300 in Kathiawar. 368 00:19:15,300 --> 00:19:16,940 You can just flip through that. 369 00:19:16,940 --> 00:19:20,590 This is a picture of Mahatma Gandhi and [INAUDIBLE] 370 00:19:20,590 --> 00:19:24,790 So here's Mahatma Gandhi and this is [INAUDIBLE]. 371 00:19:24,790 --> 00:19:26,910 So this is in 1950. 372 00:19:26,910 --> 00:19:30,750 Gandhi had just come back from South Africa. 373 00:19:30,750 --> 00:19:32,070 And [INAUDIBLE] 374 00:19:32,070 --> 00:19:36,560 was this person who was very interested in sending people 375 00:19:36,560 --> 00:19:40,355 to MIT, sent a number of his family members to MIT. 376 00:19:42,910 --> 00:19:46,930 And this is a young man I mentioned in the paper. 377 00:19:46,930 --> 00:19:53,370 Again, Gandhi was present at his wedding. 378 00:19:53,370 --> 00:19:56,740 And then, the next year, he went to MIT. 379 00:19:56,740 --> 00:19:59,810 And he was in the cooperative program in electrical 380 00:19:59,810 --> 00:20:02,110 engineering and he got a Bachelor's and Master's degree 381 00:20:02,110 --> 00:20:07,370 in electrical engineering and then returned to India. 382 00:20:07,370 --> 00:20:10,570 And in India, he had this double life, you could say. 383 00:20:10,570 --> 00:20:14,040 I would say he was probably one of the best trained 384 00:20:14,040 --> 00:20:17,720 engineers in electrical engineering in India, having 385 00:20:17,720 --> 00:20:21,540 this Master's degree in electrical engineering. 386 00:20:21,540 --> 00:20:26,400 But if you were to look at his career from a purely technical 387 00:20:26,400 --> 00:20:31,760 standpoint, he kind of under-utilized his education. 388 00:20:31,760 --> 00:20:34,190 He was very much involved in the Nationalist Movement. 389 00:20:34,190 --> 00:20:38,570 He was thrown into jail for his participation in the Salt 390 00:20:38,570 --> 00:20:39,950 Satyagraha. 391 00:20:39,950 --> 00:20:43,320 He later led a large strike at one of India's leading steel 392 00:20:43,320 --> 00:20:49,560 plants and was thrown into jail for 18 months after that. 393 00:20:49,560 --> 00:20:51,100 If you can just hit the next slide. 394 00:20:51,100 --> 00:20:53,440 Here's a picture of him at MIT again. 395 00:20:53,440 --> 00:21:00,910 He apparently got training in the military cadet program. 396 00:21:00,910 --> 00:21:06,020 And again, it was kind of intriguing to me-- 397 00:21:06,020 --> 00:21:08,890 after he was in jail for 18 months, he still maintained 398 00:21:08,890 --> 00:21:12,250 very good relations with his former MIT professors. 399 00:21:12,250 --> 00:21:15,840 He kept in touch with them, exchanged letters. 400 00:21:15,840 --> 00:21:20,750 So he didn't see some sort of dichotomy between his role as 401 00:21:20,750 --> 00:21:26,400 a protester for freedom, as a Gandhian, and his career as an 402 00:21:26,400 --> 00:21:30,340 engineer at MIT, or as MIT-trained engineer. 403 00:21:32,880 --> 00:21:37,350 This is the diwan, sort of the prime minister of a princely 404 00:21:37,350 --> 00:21:42,770 state of India in Bhavnagar in Western India. 405 00:21:42,770 --> 00:21:48,550 This man was an associate of Gandhi. 406 00:21:48,550 --> 00:21:51,110 India had these princely states, and he paid for a 407 00:21:51,110 --> 00:21:52,680 number of Indians to go to MIT. 408 00:21:55,380 --> 00:21:58,510 And then this is a kind of intriguing 409 00:21:58,510 --> 00:22:01,080 meeting in the late 1930s. 410 00:22:01,080 --> 00:22:04,870 The diwan, Prabhashankar Pattani is sitting down there 411 00:22:04,870 --> 00:22:05,810 in the turban. 412 00:22:05,810 --> 00:22:11,670 He came to MIT and he hosted all the Indian MIT students to 413 00:22:11,670 --> 00:22:14,150 have lunch at the Ritz Carlton Hotel. 414 00:22:14,150 --> 00:22:16,410 And so here they all are. 415 00:22:16,410 --> 00:22:19,420 One of them was married to an American woman. 416 00:22:19,420 --> 00:22:23,220 So you see this small collection of Indian students 417 00:22:23,220 --> 00:22:32,260 there at MIT around 1939. 418 00:22:32,260 --> 00:22:34,660 And then this is a young man, Bal Kalelkar. 419 00:22:34,660 --> 00:22:37,295 He was the young man who was raised in Gandhi's ashram. 420 00:22:41,590 --> 00:22:43,990 Here's Gandhi right here. 421 00:22:43,990 --> 00:22:49,620 And then this is Kalelkar right behind him. 422 00:22:49,620 --> 00:22:53,050 This is a letter that Kalelkar wrote. 423 00:22:53,050 --> 00:22:55,300 And Gandhi was a famous editor. 424 00:22:55,300 --> 00:22:57,360 He was an editor of a newspaper. 425 00:22:57,360 --> 00:23:03,390 And Kalelkar wrote this letter to GD Birla, who was one of 426 00:23:03,390 --> 00:23:04,890 India's richest businessmen. 427 00:23:04,890 --> 00:23:07,650 You might think of him as an analog of Bill 428 00:23:07,650 --> 00:23:08,870 Gates at the time. 429 00:23:08,870 --> 00:23:13,470 And Kalelkar wrote GD Birla, asking him to fund his 430 00:23:13,470 --> 00:23:15,300 education at MIT. 431 00:23:15,300 --> 00:23:20,530 And Gandhi edited the letter, helped him 432 00:23:20,530 --> 00:23:21,520 make the right approach. 433 00:23:21,520 --> 00:23:23,310 Gandhi was a friend of this man. 434 00:23:23,310 --> 00:23:26,770 And so he went through and make corrections and so on. 435 00:23:26,770 --> 00:23:33,160 This is something that I found in India, and this is the next 436 00:23:33,160 --> 00:23:33,640 part of it. 437 00:23:33,640 --> 00:23:37,430 This is, again, Gandhi's editing. 438 00:23:37,430 --> 00:23:42,000 He tells Kalelkar, incorporate these changes and send it off. 439 00:23:42,000 --> 00:23:46,160 But the point is, I would have thought the natural tendency 440 00:23:46,160 --> 00:23:50,400 of Gandhi would be to not be so enthusiastic about someone 441 00:23:50,400 --> 00:23:51,250 going to MIT. 442 00:23:51,250 --> 00:23:57,170 And he obviously could have refused to support him in 443 00:23:57,170 --> 00:23:58,650 seeking this funding. 444 00:23:58,650 --> 00:24:03,840 But Gandhi supported him to get this funding. 445 00:24:03,840 --> 00:24:06,960 Once, Gandhi had asked his friend to provide funding, 446 00:24:06,960 --> 00:24:08,580 once he had given him this letter, it would have been 447 00:24:08,580 --> 00:24:10,800 fairly hard for this person to resist. 448 00:24:10,800 --> 00:24:16,900 So Gandhi did not see someone going to MIT as a betrayal of 449 00:24:16,900 --> 00:24:20,630 his movement, as someone who was turning his back on him. 450 00:24:20,630 --> 00:24:23,990 He was willing to support him. 451 00:24:23,990 --> 00:24:30,740 And this is four Indians at MIT in about 1940 having fun 452 00:24:30,740 --> 00:24:34,460 in the snow and having a snowball fight. 453 00:24:34,460 --> 00:24:41,800 There was a fairly rich social life among the Indians in 454 00:24:41,800 --> 00:24:44,920 1920s and 1930s. 455 00:24:44,920 --> 00:24:47,840 There are records of a number of pranks that they did on 456 00:24:47,840 --> 00:24:50,500 each other and so on. 457 00:24:50,500 --> 00:24:57,540 After one of them completed doctoral examination, he 458 00:24:57,540 --> 00:25:01,770 invited a number of friends out to a restaurant out west 459 00:25:01,770 --> 00:25:03,020 of Cambridge. 460 00:25:03,020 --> 00:25:07,010 And then he and his friend snuck out and drove back home 461 00:25:07,010 --> 00:25:10,480 and stiffed everyone else and left them both rideless and 462 00:25:10,480 --> 00:25:12,040 having to pay the bill. 463 00:25:12,040 --> 00:25:16,460 And this caused a number of repercussions afterwards. 464 00:25:20,930 --> 00:25:26,810 This is a cartoon of Anant Pandya, who was the first 465 00:25:26,810 --> 00:25:29,590 Indian to get a Ph.D. from MIT. 466 00:25:29,590 --> 00:25:32,430 And then he became the first Indian principal of an 467 00:25:32,430 --> 00:25:34,200 engineering college in India. 468 00:25:34,200 --> 00:25:37,490 This was at college near Calcutta called the Bengal 469 00:25:37,490 --> 00:25:38,740 Engineering College. 470 00:25:38,740 --> 00:25:41,520 And again, it's hard to imagine what 471 00:25:41,520 --> 00:25:42,400 this would have meant. 472 00:25:42,400 --> 00:25:45,790 I think, generally, the Brits had to the general idea that 473 00:25:45,790 --> 00:25:49,840 they were superior, that in some ways, one of the aspects 474 00:25:49,840 --> 00:25:53,600 of colonialism was that the British, the Europeans were 475 00:25:53,600 --> 00:25:54,910 superior in technology. 476 00:25:54,910 --> 00:25:57,880 And that was in some ways the basis for colonialism. 477 00:25:57,880 --> 00:26:02,540 Once people like Anant Pandya came out and were able-- 478 00:26:02,540 --> 00:26:07,330 Pandya won this position as a principal of this college in 479 00:26:07,330 --> 00:26:10,870 an open competition with Brits-- 480 00:26:10,870 --> 00:26:13,660 and Brits then worked under him, it really made a 481 00:26:13,660 --> 00:26:16,630 statement that technology was not just something that was 482 00:26:16,630 --> 00:26:19,100 limited to Europeans and Euro-Americans. 483 00:26:22,090 --> 00:26:26,650 I mention in the paper, again, that one of the key moments 484 00:26:26,650 --> 00:26:28,960 before independence-- 485 00:26:28,960 --> 00:26:32,000 you think about technological nationalism-- 486 00:26:32,000 --> 00:26:35,440 was that, as India stood on the brink of independence, 487 00:26:35,440 --> 00:26:38,230 Indians began to say, we need something 488 00:26:38,230 --> 00:26:40,410 like an MIT for India. 489 00:26:40,410 --> 00:26:44,930 And so this was the committee report that established the 490 00:26:44,930 --> 00:26:47,720 Indian Institutes of Technology, which were, again, 491 00:26:47,720 --> 00:26:52,560 India's institutes analogous to MIT. 492 00:26:52,560 --> 00:26:56,350 Two Indian MIT graduates sat on this committee and helped 493 00:26:56,350 --> 00:26:59,450 establish this committee. 494 00:26:59,450 --> 00:27:01,580 This is, again, a picture of Anant Pandya. 495 00:27:01,580 --> 00:27:07,070 He had a position as the head of the major Indian aerospace 496 00:27:07,070 --> 00:27:10,900 company, and again, was the first Indian director of that. 497 00:27:13,940 --> 00:27:16,840 And then he died, tragically, in a car accident. 498 00:27:16,840 --> 00:27:20,720 And then he was at memorialized in a magazine 499 00:27:20,720 --> 00:27:23,620 that was talking about his career and his 500 00:27:23,620 --> 00:27:24,710 connection with MIT. 501 00:27:24,710 --> 00:27:27,030 And this seems to have had a big effect on a number of 502 00:27:27,030 --> 00:27:30,860 people, just making them want to become engineers and also 503 00:27:30,860 --> 00:27:33,175 making them want to go to MIT. 504 00:27:36,400 --> 00:27:41,930 Now, I just want to say a little bit about India and IT. 505 00:27:41,930 --> 00:27:47,100 One of the interesting things, I think, about globalization 506 00:27:47,100 --> 00:27:51,740 is I'd say globalization is, in some ways, based on 507 00:27:51,740 --> 00:27:54,690 similarities and differences between countries, that if you 508 00:27:54,690 --> 00:27:58,860 think of the boundary conditions-- 509 00:27:58,860 --> 00:28:01,920 if every country was exactly the same, there'd be no point 510 00:28:01,920 --> 00:28:04,290 in globalization, because India would be just like 511 00:28:04,290 --> 00:28:04,980 United States. 512 00:28:04,980 --> 00:28:09,800 There would be no point in moving work or doing things 513 00:28:09,800 --> 00:28:10,860 between countries. 514 00:28:10,860 --> 00:28:16,170 But if countries were diametrically opposed and had 515 00:28:16,170 --> 00:28:19,580 nothing in common, then they couldn't relate. 516 00:28:19,580 --> 00:28:22,160 They couldn't communicate technologically. 517 00:28:22,160 --> 00:28:24,780 They couldn't have this technological work done 518 00:28:24,780 --> 00:28:25,840 between them. 519 00:28:25,840 --> 00:28:30,190 And I guess what I'd say is that Indian graduates of MIT, 520 00:28:30,190 --> 00:28:34,550 especially in the 1950s and '60s and 1970s, were the key 521 00:28:34,550 --> 00:28:37,830 people who connected the United States and India in a 522 00:28:37,830 --> 00:28:42,530 technological way, that they had this possibility of 523 00:28:42,530 --> 00:28:44,550 joining these two countries together. 524 00:28:44,550 --> 00:28:45,980 They had knowledge. 525 00:28:45,980 --> 00:28:51,790 They were often from upper class parts of Indian society, 526 00:28:51,790 --> 00:28:56,290 had a lot of knowledge of India, and then, by virtue of 527 00:28:56,290 --> 00:28:57,970 their education, the United the States. 528 00:28:57,970 --> 00:29:00,280 They had a great knowledge of America and understanding of 529 00:29:00,280 --> 00:29:02,680 American technology. 530 00:29:02,680 --> 00:29:06,130 This is the first Indian IT company. 531 00:29:06,130 --> 00:29:08,970 It was called Tata Consultancy Services. 532 00:29:08,970 --> 00:29:12,010 And it was founded by three MIT graduates. 533 00:29:12,010 --> 00:29:16,060 They were basically in their early 20s. 534 00:29:16,060 --> 00:29:19,590 Tata is a large Indian business company that has a 535 00:29:19,590 --> 00:29:22,490 number of different business enterprises. 536 00:29:22,490 --> 00:29:24,180 And they said, we'd like you to start a 537 00:29:24,180 --> 00:29:25,820 computer business here. 538 00:29:25,820 --> 00:29:28,280 And they didn't really know what exactly they 539 00:29:28,280 --> 00:29:28,780 were going to do. 540 00:29:28,780 --> 00:29:32,480 They thought of it like an Arthur D. Little-- if you know 541 00:29:32,480 --> 00:29:34,940 what that is-- a consulting firm. 542 00:29:34,940 --> 00:29:35,840 So they started this. 543 00:29:35,840 --> 00:29:37,430 And you can see it. 544 00:29:37,430 --> 00:29:43,180 They started it almost on an American model, and it didn't 545 00:29:43,180 --> 00:29:44,430 work very well initially. 546 00:29:50,380 --> 00:29:54,800 This is their operation in Bombay. 547 00:29:54,800 --> 00:29:58,290 Again, they thought of it almost like as a very 548 00:29:58,290 --> 00:30:00,060 academic-oriented thing. 549 00:30:00,060 --> 00:30:04,250 And it wasn't too much concerned with profit making 550 00:30:04,250 --> 00:30:06,980 And finally, the Tatas got a little bit frustrated with it. 551 00:30:06,980 --> 00:30:09,100 And these three guys left. 552 00:30:09,100 --> 00:30:12,770 And they ended up hiring as the head of 553 00:30:12,770 --> 00:30:15,150 it another MIT graduate. 554 00:30:15,150 --> 00:30:18,670 This is a man by the name of FC Kohli, who is sometimes 555 00:30:18,670 --> 00:30:21,350 considered one of the key figures in the development of 556 00:30:21,350 --> 00:30:25,430 the information technology industry in India. 557 00:30:25,430 --> 00:30:29,470 And what he had was-- he had studied at MIT. 558 00:30:29,470 --> 00:30:34,240 He had a lot of connections in the United States by virtue of 559 00:30:34,240 --> 00:30:35,530 his time at MIT. 560 00:30:35,530 --> 00:30:39,370 But also, he understood India and was able to really develop 561 00:30:39,370 --> 00:30:44,590 a successful business doing software work in India for 562 00:30:44,590 --> 00:30:45,570 American companies. 563 00:30:45,570 --> 00:30:49,450 And so that stood him in very good stead and helped him 564 00:30:49,450 --> 00:30:51,140 become very successful. 565 00:30:51,140 --> 00:30:56,100 And one of the things I'd say about him is that when India 566 00:30:56,100 --> 00:30:58,630 started thinking about computer technology, a lot of 567 00:30:58,630 --> 00:31:01,070 Indians thought in terms of, let's try to 568 00:31:01,070 --> 00:31:02,340 make our own computers. 569 00:31:02,340 --> 00:31:05,210 Let's try to make our own computer business. 570 00:31:05,210 --> 00:31:08,470 Let's try to build all the hardware ourselves. 571 00:31:08,470 --> 00:31:12,230 And Kohli didn't think that way. 572 00:31:12,230 --> 00:31:15,900 I think he understood what American industry was capable 573 00:31:15,900 --> 00:31:19,320 of, and he knew India could never compete with United 574 00:31:19,320 --> 00:31:22,610 States in building computers-- that it was a very capital 575 00:31:22,610 --> 00:31:25,305 intensive business, that they would never have the volumes 576 00:31:25,305 --> 00:31:26,880 that America would have. 577 00:31:26,880 --> 00:31:30,960 And so it was a losing proposition to try to think of 578 00:31:30,960 --> 00:31:31,990 doing something like that. 579 00:31:31,990 --> 00:31:34,610 And he had the idea of, let's just write software. 580 00:31:34,610 --> 00:31:37,080 Let's not try to do all the computing work. 581 00:31:37,080 --> 00:31:38,000 Let's do software. 582 00:31:38,000 --> 00:31:41,260 That's something where we have an advantage. 583 00:31:41,260 --> 00:31:44,930 Our labor costs are much less than American costs. 584 00:31:44,930 --> 00:31:46,270 We can do that. 585 00:31:46,270 --> 00:31:48,490 And he had connections in America. 586 00:31:48,490 --> 00:31:52,030 I think people in America were willing to trust him because 587 00:31:52,030 --> 00:31:56,070 of his connections, because of his MIT education. 588 00:31:56,070 --> 00:32:00,620 And so he got a lot of business for this company, 589 00:32:00,620 --> 00:32:07,080 Tata Consultancy Services from the United States. 590 00:32:07,080 --> 00:32:10,800 This is another early IT information 591 00:32:10,800 --> 00:32:12,225 technology pioneer in India. 592 00:32:12,225 --> 00:32:14,520 His name is Narendra Patni. 593 00:32:14,520 --> 00:32:17,850 And again, he did a great job of connecting India and the 594 00:32:17,850 --> 00:32:20,950 United States at a time when there weren't a lot of 595 00:32:20,950 --> 00:32:21,680 connections. 596 00:32:21,680 --> 00:32:23,890 A lot of people in America didn't know 597 00:32:23,890 --> 00:32:24,790 that much about India. 598 00:32:24,790 --> 00:32:25,840 I could imagine-- 599 00:32:25,840 --> 00:32:28,710 this is in the late 1960s, 1970s-- 600 00:32:28,710 --> 00:32:35,020 that if you said I'm from India, I would like to do 601 00:32:35,020 --> 00:32:38,880 computer business for you, I think that's a pretty big 602 00:32:38,880 --> 00:32:40,770 stretch for a lot of people-- 603 00:32:40,770 --> 00:32:45,380 what they knew about India, what sort of confidence they 604 00:32:45,380 --> 00:32:46,440 have in Indians. 605 00:32:46,440 --> 00:32:50,190 But again, Patni had come to MIT. 606 00:32:50,190 --> 00:32:56,690 He had work with Jay Forrester, who was, as a great 607 00:32:56,690 --> 00:33:00,020 academic entrepreneurian, involved in a lot of things. 608 00:33:00,020 --> 00:33:03,940 And so he had the contacts that really enabled India to 609 00:33:03,940 --> 00:33:08,350 get this sort of business. 610 00:33:08,350 --> 00:33:11,250 And I think I have one final slide. 611 00:33:11,250 --> 00:33:14,220 So you see Bill Gates on the left there. 612 00:33:14,220 --> 00:33:15,780 And then the person on the right is 613 00:33:15,780 --> 00:33:17,690 named Narayana Murthy. 614 00:33:17,690 --> 00:33:21,570 And he's the founder of another big Indian IT company 615 00:33:21,570 --> 00:33:23,860 called Infosys. 616 00:33:23,860 --> 00:33:28,040 And Narayana Murthy never went to MIT, but he was influenced 617 00:33:28,040 --> 00:33:29,480 by MIT in a lot of ways. 618 00:33:29,480 --> 00:33:31,580 He went to this Indian Institute of 619 00:33:31,580 --> 00:33:33,500 Technology at Kanpur. 620 00:33:33,500 --> 00:33:38,510 And there, his mentors were Indians who had gone to MIT. 621 00:33:38,510 --> 00:33:43,550 Then he went to another school-- the Indian Institute 622 00:33:43,550 --> 00:33:44,190 of Management-- 623 00:33:44,190 --> 00:33:47,630 where his mentor there was another man, Indian, who had 624 00:33:47,630 --> 00:33:49,220 gone to MIT. 625 00:33:49,220 --> 00:33:53,230 Then he worked for Narendra Patni, the person that I had 626 00:33:53,230 --> 00:33:54,480 mentioned before. 627 00:33:56,500 --> 00:33:59,390 In a form to an American would appreciate, after he had 628 00:33:59,390 --> 00:34:04,030 worked with Narendra Patni for a while, he got tired and quit 629 00:34:04,030 --> 00:34:05,840 and started his own business. 630 00:34:05,840 --> 00:34:07,880 And this became Infosys. 631 00:34:07,880 --> 00:34:10,540 The point of this is he never could have done that on his 632 00:34:10,540 --> 00:34:13,460 own, but after he had worked with all these Indians who had 633 00:34:13,460 --> 00:34:15,980 gone to MIT, who had a lot of connections to the United 634 00:34:15,980 --> 00:34:19,210 States, he had these connections himself. 635 00:34:19,210 --> 00:34:25,219 And they really helped him to develop those connections. 636 00:34:25,219 --> 00:34:28,239 One other point-- 637 00:34:28,239 --> 00:34:31,920 in some ways, it's easy to see this is a great success story, 638 00:34:31,920 --> 00:34:34,290 the development of the Indian IT industry. 639 00:34:34,290 --> 00:34:38,179 One other point I feel like I have to mention as well-- 640 00:34:38,179 --> 00:34:43,250 the greatest industrial accident in world history 641 00:34:43,250 --> 00:34:46,610 happened in India at Bhopal in 1984. 642 00:34:46,610 --> 00:34:51,060 Union Carbide had a plant making methyl isocyanate. 643 00:34:51,060 --> 00:34:53,960 And there was a leak at this plant, and it killed-- 644 00:34:53,960 --> 00:34:55,590 we're still not exactly sure how many-- 645 00:34:55,590 --> 00:34:58,000 maybe 10,000 people. 646 00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:01,050 The manager of this plant was also an 647 00:35:01,050 --> 00:35:02,620 Indian graduate of MIT. 648 00:35:02,620 --> 00:35:07,560 And again, the point of this is in the 1960s and 1970s and 649 00:35:07,560 --> 00:35:11,080 1980s, where the United States and India were linked together 650 00:35:11,080 --> 00:35:15,560 in technology, generally speaking, you would often find 651 00:35:15,560 --> 00:35:18,320 an MIT graduate somewhere there. 652 00:35:18,320 --> 00:35:23,440 And so you see them in both of these contexts. 653 00:35:23,440 --> 00:35:28,270 And so finally, just one other thing I want to mention is 654 00:35:28,270 --> 00:35:36,430 MIT, as I said, has become for 50 years or so, a tractor beam 655 00:35:36,430 --> 00:35:39,960 for talent coming to the United States. 656 00:35:39,960 --> 00:35:44,740 Many Indians, as they go to school in the Indian 657 00:35:44,740 --> 00:35:48,820 Institutes of Technology, want to pursue their education. 658 00:35:48,820 --> 00:35:53,790 And for them, they see the best possible place to go to 659 00:35:53,790 --> 00:35:56,320 continue their education is MIT. 660 00:35:56,320 --> 00:35:57,820 You see it as a dream for them. 661 00:35:57,820 --> 00:36:00,810 Many of them, when they come to the United States, don't 662 00:36:00,810 --> 00:36:04,270 imagine that they're going to stay in the United States, but 663 00:36:04,270 --> 00:36:06,790 often they end up staying in United States. 664 00:36:06,790 --> 00:36:10,250 Sometimes their education, I'd say, unfits 665 00:36:10,250 --> 00:36:11,430 them for work in India. 666 00:36:11,430 --> 00:36:15,140 Sometimes they just get so caught up and see the 667 00:36:15,140 --> 00:36:17,670 opportunities in United States. 668 00:36:17,670 --> 00:36:21,810 But that seems to be a major trend. 669 00:36:21,810 --> 00:36:24,200 Now, there are some questions if it will continue, that 670 00:36:24,200 --> 00:36:27,860 there are enough opportunities in India that maybe Indians 671 00:36:27,860 --> 00:36:30,910 wouldn't feel such a strong need to come to the United 672 00:36:30,910 --> 00:36:34,290 States for graduate school. 673 00:36:34,290 --> 00:36:37,190 So these are some of that the basic themes. 674 00:36:41,060 --> 00:36:44,475 Most of it will be on the people who 675 00:36:44,475 --> 00:36:46,270 came from India, though. 676 00:36:46,270 --> 00:36:51,050 It wasn't until 1965 that there were immigration laws 677 00:36:51,050 --> 00:36:53,450 that really let Indians come to the United States on any 678 00:36:53,450 --> 00:36:55,700 sort of a fair basis. 679 00:36:55,700 --> 00:37:01,930 So you see Indians who are Indians Americans or second 680 00:37:01,930 --> 00:37:03,900 generation Indians-- 681 00:37:03,900 --> 00:37:06,610 you only see them starting to come to MIT in any 682 00:37:06,610 --> 00:37:07,660 numbers in the '80s. 683 00:37:07,660 --> 00:37:12,030 And then it is ramped up as more and more Indians are in 684 00:37:12,030 --> 00:37:12,780 the United States. 685 00:37:12,780 --> 00:37:16,130 So it's sort of a later part of the story. 686 00:37:20,190 --> 00:37:22,890 The two most prestigious fields you can go into are 687 00:37:22,890 --> 00:37:24,140 medicine or engineering. 688 00:37:26,470 --> 00:37:30,260 And in India there is, I'd say, almost an idea-- you 689 00:37:30,260 --> 00:37:32,250 don't think of what you want to do. 690 00:37:32,250 --> 00:37:34,980 You think of what you can do. 691 00:37:34,980 --> 00:37:38,430 And if you can get into an IIT, then you should do it, 692 00:37:38,430 --> 00:37:41,430 even if you were thinking you don't have an interest in 693 00:37:41,430 --> 00:37:43,380 engineering-- that you should just do it. 694 00:37:43,380 --> 00:37:49,210 But they're very, I guess I would say, focused on things 695 00:37:49,210 --> 00:37:53,910 that will make you a remunerative career. 696 00:37:53,910 --> 00:37:57,770 And there is a lot of skepticism, I would say, 697 00:37:57,770 --> 00:38:00,570 generally, that liberal arts will make you a 698 00:38:00,570 --> 00:38:01,770 remunerative career. 699 00:38:01,770 --> 00:38:09,240 There are some good liberal arts schools, but relatively 700 00:38:09,240 --> 00:38:11,610 few people go that route. 701 00:38:11,610 --> 00:38:15,790 Most people feel, in a country of a billion people, that 702 00:38:15,790 --> 00:38:20,300 competition is just so fierce for jobs that everyone feels 703 00:38:20,300 --> 00:38:26,430 the need to get into some area where they're sure that 704 00:38:26,430 --> 00:38:27,700 they'll have a good job. 705 00:38:27,700 --> 00:38:30,880 I spoke to a professor at one of the Indian Institutes of 706 00:38:30,880 --> 00:38:34,920 Technology whose daughter wanted to go into economics. 707 00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:38,460 And he was kind of horrified that she wanted to do this. 708 00:38:38,460 --> 00:38:42,530 And he wanted me to explain to him what economics was, what 709 00:38:42,530 --> 00:38:44,670 kind of job she would get. 710 00:38:44,670 --> 00:38:48,510 And he was half-convinced afterwards. 711 00:38:48,510 --> 00:38:52,360 He said, well, OK, maybe I'll let her do economics, but I'm 712 00:38:52,360 --> 00:38:55,000 never going to let her do liberal arts. 713 00:38:55,000 --> 00:38:59,650 That's drawing a line that that's not going to happen. 714 00:38:59,650 --> 00:39:03,510 And there's a very strong feeling that way, that 715 00:39:03,510 --> 00:39:04,440 engineering-- 716 00:39:04,440 --> 00:39:07,500 and even within engineering, there's a certain hierarchy. 717 00:39:07,500 --> 00:39:10,980 Computer science is at the highest level. 718 00:39:10,980 --> 00:39:14,640 And so these Indian Institutes of Technology-- 719 00:39:14,640 --> 00:39:19,480 entrance to the schools is determined by one exam called 720 00:39:19,480 --> 00:39:20,470 the joint entrance exam. 721 00:39:20,470 --> 00:39:25,260 You get a score on it and there might be 100,000 or it 722 00:39:25,260 --> 00:39:29,080 might be 300,000 people who take this exam. 723 00:39:29,080 --> 00:39:30,720 Your score on it is a rank. 724 00:39:30,720 --> 00:39:34,720 So you're ranked one to 300,000, say. 725 00:39:34,720 --> 00:39:41,190 And the person who scores one can choose their seat major in 726 00:39:41,190 --> 00:39:43,770 any of these Indian Institutes of Technology. 727 00:39:43,770 --> 00:39:52,080 And then the person who gets the last seat is forced to go 728 00:39:52,080 --> 00:39:55,380 wherever there's an open seat in a major. 729 00:39:55,380 --> 00:39:58,830 And so invariably, the number one student would take 730 00:39:58,830 --> 00:39:59,860 computer science. 731 00:39:59,860 --> 00:40:02,520 That's just what they do. 732 00:40:02,520 --> 00:40:04,910 And then there's a hierarchy of computer science, 733 00:40:04,910 --> 00:40:08,140 electrical engineering, chemical engineering, 734 00:40:08,140 --> 00:40:09,290 mechanical engineering-- 735 00:40:09,290 --> 00:40:13,610 civil engineering is one of the lowest of the engineering. 736 00:40:13,610 --> 00:40:16,100 And then there's naval architecture, which is a bit 737 00:40:16,100 --> 00:40:18,390 lower than that, too. 738 00:40:21,668 --> 00:40:23,660 AUDIENCE: In these institutions, the Indian 739 00:40:23,660 --> 00:40:27,644 Institutes of Technology, they're all funded by 740 00:40:27,644 --> 00:40:29,640 development or are they privately funded? 741 00:40:29,640 --> 00:40:34,010 ROSS BASSETT: So these are funded by the government< and 742 00:40:34,010 --> 00:40:37,440 the tuition is pretty low. 743 00:40:37,440 --> 00:40:42,410 And it's been kind of a political issue in India. 744 00:40:45,010 --> 00:40:49,670 One issue is how many seats should be reserved for people 745 00:40:49,670 --> 00:40:51,500 from what's called the scheduled 746 00:40:51,500 --> 00:40:53,170 caste or backward caste? 747 00:40:53,170 --> 00:40:57,970 So it would be a bit analogous to affirmative action, say. 748 00:40:57,970 --> 00:41:00,060 And so this has been very controversial. 749 00:41:00,060 --> 00:41:03,590 How many seats should be reserved for them? 750 00:41:03,590 --> 00:41:08,430 And then also people in the middle class have been 751 00:41:08,430 --> 00:41:10,110 clamoring for access to these. 752 00:41:10,110 --> 00:41:12,270 A lot of people have been shut out. 753 00:41:12,270 --> 00:41:16,050 There were originally five of these Indian Institutes of 754 00:41:16,050 --> 00:41:17,110 Technology. 755 00:41:17,110 --> 00:41:18,660 Then there were seven. 756 00:41:18,660 --> 00:41:20,860 And now, recently, they've doubled that. 757 00:41:20,860 --> 00:41:26,780 Each one has become the mentor to a new Indian Institute of 758 00:41:26,780 --> 00:41:27,065 Technology. 759 00:41:27,065 --> 00:41:29,770 And they've done this for political reasons, because 760 00:41:29,770 --> 00:41:36,610 there's such a great demand and so many people want to 761 00:41:36,610 --> 00:41:38,830 enter into these institutions. 762 00:41:38,830 --> 00:41:39,850 And it's very controversial. 763 00:41:39,850 --> 00:41:43,740 A lot of people associated with the Indian Institutes of 764 00:41:43,740 --> 00:41:46,780 Technology think they'll never be able to maintain the same 765 00:41:46,780 --> 00:41:50,780 quality in doubling the institutions that 766 00:41:50,780 --> 00:41:52,180 they've had so far. 767 00:41:52,180 --> 00:41:56,530 And so there's worry of brand dilution, if you use a 768 00:41:56,530 --> 00:42:00,520 business term of what that's going to do to these schools. 769 00:42:00,520 --> 00:42:07,120 More stay in India now, and more of the leaders, I'd say, 770 00:42:07,120 --> 00:42:14,360 from now have been mostly educated in India than in the 771 00:42:14,360 --> 00:42:16,650 '50s and '60s and so on. 772 00:42:16,650 --> 00:42:20,230 But the system is still-- at these IITs, they're very good 773 00:42:20,230 --> 00:42:22,040 undergraduate institutions. 774 00:42:22,040 --> 00:42:26,740 But if you want to do serious graduate research, there's no 775 00:42:26,740 --> 00:42:32,920 question that they are not at all competitive with MIT. 776 00:42:32,920 --> 00:42:35,850 There is this hierarchy. 777 00:42:35,850 --> 00:42:40,120 It turns out that at an IIT, if you go there, the best 778 00:42:40,120 --> 00:42:41,930 students are the undergraduates, and then the 779 00:42:41,930 --> 00:42:44,830 graduates are usually actually worse students than the 780 00:42:44,830 --> 00:42:45,690 undergraduates. 781 00:42:45,690 --> 00:42:51,250 They're students who are sort of percolating up from less 782 00:42:51,250 --> 00:42:54,800 prestigious institutions, and as they go to graduate school, 783 00:42:54,800 --> 00:42:57,430 they go to these IITs. 784 00:42:57,430 --> 00:43:01,200 But the people from the IITs who want to go to graduate 785 00:43:01,200 --> 00:43:05,050 school almost invariably go to the United States to go to 786 00:43:05,050 --> 00:43:06,090 graduate school. 787 00:43:06,090 --> 00:43:08,440 There's a clear understanding of-- 788 00:43:08,440 --> 00:43:11,140 they don't have research funding that American 789 00:43:11,140 --> 00:43:14,680 institutions have that would enable them to do the same 790 00:43:14,680 --> 00:43:19,900 kind of research that would be done in the United States. 791 00:43:19,900 --> 00:43:23,510 The system in both politics-- 792 00:43:23,510 --> 00:43:25,850 in politics, I don't think you would ever go to an IIT, 793 00:43:25,850 --> 00:43:29,190 because it's more about connections within India. 794 00:43:29,190 --> 00:43:32,280 And it's more about being a political player. 795 00:43:32,280 --> 00:43:33,530 In business. 796 00:43:35,790 --> 00:43:40,830 the environment is so dynamic, I don't think you need to have 797 00:43:40,830 --> 00:43:42,980 gone to an IIT There's many institutions 798 00:43:42,980 --> 00:43:45,050 where you can go to. 799 00:43:45,050 --> 00:43:47,810 The IIT-- 800 00:43:47,810 --> 00:43:52,430 you clearly can get into an American institution. 801 00:43:52,430 --> 00:43:57,930 IITs in some ways, for a long time, were paths 802 00:43:57,930 --> 00:43:59,330 to the United States-- 803 00:43:59,330 --> 00:44:02,120 the paths to American graduate school. 804 00:44:02,120 --> 00:44:05,230 Now, they're paths to American graduate schools, but they're 805 00:44:05,230 --> 00:44:12,960 also paths to Google in India or Microsoft in India or other 806 00:44:12,960 --> 00:44:15,620 multinational companies in India. 807 00:44:15,620 --> 00:44:20,010 So their paths to those types of jobs. 808 00:44:20,010 --> 00:44:23,870 But if you wanted to be an entrepreneur or something, 809 00:44:23,870 --> 00:44:27,550 many of them come from some of the wide diversity of other 810 00:44:27,550 --> 00:44:29,002 schools in India. 811 00:44:29,002 --> 00:44:32,030 PROFESSOR: And also, on that question, I think a little bit 812 00:44:32,030 --> 00:44:34,820 about one of the themes from your paper about different 813 00:44:34,820 --> 00:44:36,890 kinds of modernity. 814 00:44:36,890 --> 00:44:39,470 And it's interesting that we've talked a little bit 815 00:44:39,470 --> 00:44:42,190 about how, in this country, engineering is not as high 816 00:44:42,190 --> 00:44:44,150 social prestige as-- 817 00:44:44,150 --> 00:44:46,920 even to this day, to some degree-- law, possibly 818 00:44:46,920 --> 00:44:52,160 medicine are, and that the kind of modernism of this 819 00:44:52,160 --> 00:44:55,350 country coming out of the American Revolution had as 820 00:44:55,350 --> 00:44:59,300 much to do with both philosophy, legal philosophy, 821 00:44:59,300 --> 00:45:03,470 commerce, and that America was considered a very 822 00:45:03,470 --> 00:45:05,550 industrializing country in the 19th century. 823 00:45:05,550 --> 00:45:08,440 But it was still unprofessionalized. 824 00:45:08,440 --> 00:45:11,640 Whereas, as you see through this period of the 20th 825 00:45:11,640 --> 00:45:14,860 century, where one of the big issues for a developing 826 00:45:14,860 --> 00:45:17,230 country like India is how modern is it, how is it going 827 00:45:17,230 --> 00:45:18,430 to catch up with the West? 828 00:45:18,430 --> 00:45:23,070 And through these mechanisms, the whole idea of nationalism 829 00:45:23,070 --> 00:45:26,280 and building the country literally has this kind of 830 00:45:26,280 --> 00:45:27,430 engineering connotation. 831 00:45:27,430 --> 00:45:31,170 And I think that generated that level of prestige. 832 00:45:31,170 --> 00:45:33,290 It's interesting. 833 00:45:33,290 --> 00:45:36,370 I told an anecdote from Bob Siemens, who is an MIT grad, 834 00:45:36,370 --> 00:45:40,680 who came here about 1940, who was from an elite family and 835 00:45:40,680 --> 00:45:41,800 did his undergrad at Harvard. 836 00:45:41,800 --> 00:45:45,470 And his parents said, upper class boys 837 00:45:45,470 --> 00:45:47,110 just don't go to MIT. 838 00:45:47,110 --> 00:45:50,350 And here you have these students who are upper class 839 00:45:50,350 --> 00:45:53,290 boys from India coming to MIT during the '30s when most of 840 00:45:53,290 --> 00:45:55,990 the other students would have been pretty middle class, if 841 00:45:55,990 --> 00:45:58,660 not even still kind of blue collar. 842 00:45:58,660 --> 00:46:01,380 Did you see anything as far as differences? 843 00:46:01,380 --> 00:46:03,760 They look very finely dressed in the photographs you show. 844 00:46:03,760 --> 00:46:07,240 And they would, in addition to not having not been American, 845 00:46:07,240 --> 00:46:09,660 feel out of place in some way in that way 846 00:46:09,660 --> 00:46:11,050 during those years. 847 00:46:11,050 --> 00:46:14,290 ROSS BASSETT: So you do have very many wealthy Indian 848 00:46:14,290 --> 00:46:16,150 families sending kids to MIT. 849 00:46:16,150 --> 00:46:21,970 India has this system of family businesses, where the 850 00:46:21,970 --> 00:46:25,610 business is passed down from generation to generation. 851 00:46:25,610 --> 00:46:29,880 And the next generation takes very active part in managing 852 00:46:29,880 --> 00:46:30,880 the business. 853 00:46:30,880 --> 00:46:36,780 And very often, in the '50s and '60s, what some of these 854 00:46:36,780 --> 00:46:39,420 business families would do would be to send the heir 855 00:46:39,420 --> 00:46:43,340 apparent to the business to MIT to prepare them. 856 00:46:43,340 --> 00:46:47,950 So these people were billionaires and so on. 857 00:46:47,950 --> 00:46:53,970 And so you have, again, these people who are really of the 858 00:46:53,970 --> 00:47:03,300 highest social standing in India coming to MIT and 859 00:47:03,300 --> 00:47:10,810 studying, really, in some ways quite a bit differently, than 860 00:47:10,810 --> 00:47:12,060 American families. 861 00:47:17,970 --> 00:47:20,968 PROFESSOR: Are there questions, comments? 862 00:47:20,968 --> 00:47:26,940 AUDIENCE: I'd like to ask a question about the five IITs 863 00:47:26,940 --> 00:47:32,250 that are founded in India in the late '50s, early '60s. 864 00:47:32,250 --> 00:47:36,305 The interesting thing was that each of them was sponsored by 865 00:47:36,305 --> 00:47:38,560 a different country. 866 00:47:38,560 --> 00:47:42,760 And that raises a question with me about-- 867 00:47:42,760 --> 00:47:48,160 we talk about, in this discussion, MIT being the 868 00:47:48,160 --> 00:47:52,590 focal point for many of the elite young people that were 869 00:47:52,590 --> 00:47:53,220 coming here. 870 00:47:53,220 --> 00:47:56,950 But given the fact that the Indian government in 1946 is 871 00:47:56,950 --> 00:48:03,500 proposing that you sample from around the world, it's curious 872 00:48:03,500 --> 00:48:11,660 that the selections they made were so 873 00:48:11,660 --> 00:48:13,650 un-American in many ways. 874 00:48:13,650 --> 00:48:15,090 And what was the reasoning? 875 00:48:15,090 --> 00:48:18,270 Was it just that they wanted to see what was out there and 876 00:48:18,270 --> 00:48:21,230 then to draw the best? 877 00:48:21,230 --> 00:48:23,650 ROSS BASSETT: So it seems like part of it was maybe a 878 00:48:23,650 --> 00:48:25,660 strategy of-- 879 00:48:25,660 --> 00:48:28,310 India had this policy of non-alignment that they 880 00:48:28,310 --> 00:48:34,840 weren't going to really fly under the American flag or the 881 00:48:34,840 --> 00:48:35,460 Soviet flag. 882 00:48:35,460 --> 00:48:36,870 They were going to say we're not allied. 883 00:48:36,870 --> 00:48:39,040 There was this Cold War, but we're going to 884 00:48:39,040 --> 00:48:40,220 chart our own path. 885 00:48:40,220 --> 00:48:50,220 But part of it was using that to coerce a variety of 886 00:48:50,220 --> 00:48:51,310 countries to support them. 887 00:48:51,310 --> 00:48:56,565 So when they started this Indian Institute of Technology 888 00:48:56,565 --> 00:49:02,520 in Kanpur, the United States engineers at MIT and nine 889 00:49:02,520 --> 00:49:04,030 other schools supported it. 890 00:49:04,030 --> 00:49:06,460 And there was really the idea of we are going to make this 891 00:49:06,460 --> 00:49:07,900 the preeminent IIT. 892 00:49:07,900 --> 00:49:09,120 It is going to be the best. 893 00:49:09,120 --> 00:49:11,670 And so there was this competitive aspect. 894 00:49:11,670 --> 00:49:17,460 And I think the Indians purposely promoted this to get 895 00:49:17,460 --> 00:49:23,690 each of these countries to the table. 896 00:49:23,690 --> 00:49:27,390 For example, when the Brits supported their Indian 897 00:49:27,390 --> 00:49:30,660 Institute of Technology, they had the idea that if we can 898 00:49:30,660 --> 00:49:35,180 train Indian engineers according to our system, then 899 00:49:35,180 --> 00:49:39,410 maybe when they're out in companies, they'll buy British 900 00:49:39,410 --> 00:49:41,920 stuff and that will help us. 901 00:49:41,920 --> 00:49:44,370 And so they had that idea. 902 00:49:44,370 --> 00:49:48,060 That was part of why they were doing it. 903 00:49:48,060 --> 00:49:52,870 And the Soviets, I think, had the idea that this would be a 904 00:49:52,870 --> 00:49:58,580 model, that this would be a foot in the door into a way 905 00:49:58,580 --> 00:50:01,360 for them to influence the development of technology. 906 00:50:01,360 --> 00:50:04,810 So each country, I think, had that idea. 907 00:50:04,810 --> 00:50:09,090 And India encouraged them to have that idea. 908 00:50:09,090 --> 00:50:11,740 AUDIENCE: Why not the French? 909 00:50:11,740 --> 00:50:12,800 They're left out. 910 00:50:12,800 --> 00:50:16,190 And yet, the Grands Ecoles are there. 911 00:50:16,190 --> 00:50:19,510 ROSS BASSETT: So I think if you had the money and were 912 00:50:19,510 --> 00:50:23,110 willing to do it-- so I think it must have been that they 913 00:50:23,110 --> 00:50:25,190 weren't willing to put up the bucks-- 914 00:50:25,190 --> 00:50:25,648 AUDIENCE: Post war. 915 00:50:25,648 --> 00:50:26,106 ROSS BASSETT: Yeah. 916 00:50:26,106 --> 00:50:27,830 AUDIENCE: Yeah. 917 00:50:27,830 --> 00:50:32,370 ROSS BASSETT: The British we were always complaining that 918 00:50:32,370 --> 00:50:35,960 they didn't have the money to do anything on a scale that 919 00:50:35,960 --> 00:50:37,240 United States did. 920 00:50:37,240 --> 00:50:43,070 And so I could imagine that the French didn't either. 921 00:50:43,070 --> 00:50:44,690 I mention this in the article. 922 00:50:44,690 --> 00:50:47,310 There was a bit of an irony that the British were 923 00:50:47,310 --> 00:50:51,090 supporting the an IIT, because the British themselves 924 00:50:51,090 --> 00:50:54,860 admitted they had no MIT in Britain. 925 00:50:54,860 --> 00:50:58,830 So they were kind of trying to do in India what they hadn't 926 00:50:58,830 --> 00:51:01,200 done in England in a certain sense.