Curiosity, Chaos & Real Education

Q1 The first thing that I wanted to ask you is really as a leading academician of one of the leading institutions of the country, I see you actually having a platform and a conversation of the kind of ideas and your own vulnerabilities, right? Is something that you put up up there, right? And what’s the real driver for that?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (00:52.01)

Well, the motivation goes back to my student days. So as you probably know, I was a student here at IIT Kharagpur itself, an undergraduate student, and then I did my PhD also here. So all through my 20s, I have been in close contact with professors much more than I have been with my parents. One thing which I noticed was that, and this I could actually contrast because of my experience with the same set of professors as an undergraduate student as well as a PhD student. I noticed that sometimes there is a big communication gap between the professors and the students. We have to remember that professors are also very much flesh and blood human beings. This is something which is sometimes not quite appreciated by the student community. So we have our faults, we have our hopes and aspirations, we…absolutely have our jealousies and all the human flaws that come with it. So when you when you when as a student, you look at a professor, you probably don’t think about these things, but maybe it will have a better appreciation of it. If we can just, I mean, set aside the curtain, let you have a glimpse of what goes on behind. So that was one motivation that if I speak about a little bit, maybe students will have a better understanding of what professors also feel about.

Swami (02:24.206)

I think it’s a lovely point. The curtains really falling down is also a way of getting closer to your students and maybe the way they will then reach out to you and have a conversation will probably change. So did you see that after you put up things like this?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (02:47.254)

So one of the things which I saw from the comments in the YouTube videos that I put up, as well as from my conversations with the students, some of them I get to interact with on a daily basis, they actually expressed their genuine surprise that, “Sir, I did not know that this was actually happening”. And I have maybe mentioned this at some points that behind every one hour of lecture, there goes in about four or five hours of effort into it. So they were very surprised. This told me that, we thought that you just came into class and started speaking. yeah. So those were the kinds of things that I think maybe have managed to give a better glimpse to the students.

Swami (03:43.374)

Fantastic. 

Q2 I wanted to talk about one thing that you really talk about, is learning how to learn. You are somebody who I found the work that you do, the content that you actually build and provide. There’s a lot of talk and I think you’re very passionate about how to know, learning to learn is an area that you focus about. Why do you think it’s very important and how does it impact anybody across their student days, across their work life? How is it important and why do you think it’s critical for understanding and applying some of the principles that you talked about? We’ll talk about the principles first, but I would like to talk to you about why is it important learning how to learn?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (04:42.378)

Yeah, this is a very important question. So the motivation behind this is actually very simple. So we know of that little story where somebody is very hungry. He wants food, and people give him food. But then a wise man comes along and teaches him how to fish. And he has solved the problem forever. So you teach a hungry man how to fish, you have solved his problem forever, So I mean, learning how to learn is along the same spirit. So no matter how many degrees you have, no matter how much bookish knowledge you have accumulated, but if you have actually unlocked the ability to learn for yourself unaided, then the whole world is there opening up in front of you. It is as simple as that. You do not need anything else.

Swami (05:39.31)

So, where do you see the challenge for people learning unaided? Because you actually make a point in your math video that I saw that you just practice without understanding, right? Go through the pain of learning it is what almost you say and then you say, then practice it. So why is that important and what does that do to learnability?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (06:08.148)

Right, so now this is always a pain point which many of us academicians feel is the, I mean, it’s kind of a necessary evil in this day and age, the curse of coaching. So as human beings, were supposed to evolve into higher and better forms, but it seems that collectively we have managed to regress to something which is backwards.

I mean, you see, I mean, maybe during our parents time or maybe even our grandparents time, people with just a matriculation degree were really mature. They could figure things out in life for themselves. But that ability has kind of magically disappeared. Like a 16-year old kid now. It is really a kid. So. I mean, he may know a lot of formulas. He may be very adept at doing so-called problem solving, competitive examinations and this and that. But this ability to unlock things for himself and to carve out things for himself or herself. So this is something which is solely missing in the mass group of students. I mean, of course, there are students who are doing absolutely brilliantly well for themselves, but I think on an average we have regressed to a lower form. 

So this is something which I personally feel and I share this feeling with many of my colleagues that we need to bring this message home to the students that look, the way that you prepared for these competitive examinations where it was kind of given to you in capsule form and you, I wouldn’t say you mugged up things because there was definitely an application of your brain, but it was presented to you in such a very, I mean, like a plugged in organized fashion. That is not how it is supposed to work. It has to be the knowledge, which is not at your fingertips. It is supposed to be in a very amorphous, very unclean form from which you have to extract the things which you need to learn. So where is that ability?

So when they come from that 10 plus two stage, from high school stage to the undergraduate stage, and they no longer have coaching at their disposal, and we try to treat them like adults, they do not respond like adults. Because the moment there is a little bit of an uncertainty regarding any sort of knowledge, they feel completely lost. Whereas that is the real truth.

In the real world, the knowledge or whatever the thing, the pieces of information, it is never well organized and puts, mean, nicely, nicely junketed in front of you. It is never like that. You have to, I mean, search for yourself. You have to find it out for yourself. So where will that ability come from if you have not developed the muscle to learn for yourself? So this was probably an ability which was earlier a little bit honed greater in amongst high school students, I day by day it is falling down.

Q3 So if I were somebody saying, I’ve gone through this process and I would like to start applying some principles on the way you are talking about learning to learn. What are the things that I should be doing? Because I saw your blog when you were 30, like you said, I never did trekking, I never did, I would never went for a picnic, I never saw a cricket match live, okay…and it was a fantastic blog according to me. And the way I saw it was there are so many people who probably also have learned the same way. Right. So which means that if I have to apply some of these principles, okay, how do I start, you know, learning to learn? So what are the principles? How do you, how do I really start? Because I may be working in an organization, right. And suddenly I am thrown this it’s not like a standard pack that’s given to me. They say go figure it out. Okay, and So how do how and where should I start?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (10:45.952)

So this is like muscle. Okay. You cannot just expect yourself to be an expert in this overnight just because your boss expects you to. This is my feeling. So this has to be developed gradually. So a kid who is in maybe in class six, class seven, now he has in front of him as his first duty to study from his textbooks and that is very neatly packaged. But if he just applies his mind a little bit, he will or she will just discover for herself that there are certain aspects to it where there is a little bit of vagueness. There is a little bit of that nebulous quality which is often swept under the carpet. And that is an opportunity which is present right in front of their eyes in their textbooks itself.

Now why not pull at that thread? Instead of sweeping it under the carpet, why not pull at that?

Now, searching for something is so very easy. In fact, it is so very easy that it is hard to decide what to take. Right? 

So my suggestion is that students should make it a point right from their high school to start exploring things on their own. So this is like the very primitive form of a research kind of thing I’m suggesting to them.

They should absolutely develop a habit of reading the newspaper. Like the actual newspaper. And I don’t mean the Facebook news feed. The actual newspaper which is serious news. I’m not saying that you follow politics. Maybe set aside for your 30s and 40s. But look at the business page. Look at the science page. Maybe look at the geopolitics page and you will see that it is littered with uncertainty. That is how the world works. So if in your high school, you acclimatize your mind, you develop your mental muscles to get familiar with that kind of an uncertainty later on, when you have to deal with the real world, when your boss says go figure it out, you will not feel that you have been thrown without knowing swimming into the deep end of the pool.

So that thing has to be developed. So this is my feeling. I mean, these are some little things which every student can do right from their high school. They can open their textbook. They can pull at various hints of vagueness. They can open up the newspaper, accept the uncertainty, the chaos that is lying all around them, and get going from there.

Swami (13:21.678)

Okay.

Swami (13:47.928)

So tell me, can you explain it with an example, the vagueness that’s lying underneath for you know, for me to understand how do you define the vagueness. So for example, when I did differential equations, okay, I had a certain method, I solve it, I get out of it, but I had no clue what does this mean in the real world, right? Or probably I had no view of what does this mean? Why am I doing all of this, right? So is that the vagueness that you’re talking about? Or do you, would you have expected me to, you know, go explore what does this really mean?

Where do I apply this? Is that the vagueness that you talking about?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (14:27.574)

So the example that you have given is from maths is simultaneously the best and the worst example. The reason is there are certain parts to maths which are absolutely beautifully organised. So the pure parts of it, maybe the algebra side and things like this, that is absolutely beautifully organised. There is no doubt, no ambiguity about it. It is as clean as they come and as diverse from the real world as they come. So which is why a student who is quote unquote, good in studies has a natural inclination to maths when they are young because it is so very definite, so very well organized. Nothing is as well organized as this. At the same time, maths is full of uncertainties. So this is from the point of view of applied mathematics. So students at the high school level, they are not exposed to these differences of pure maths and applied maths. But if you just think about it, some of the word problems which are posed in high school may be as part of linear simultaneous equations, maybe quadratic equations. Some of those word problems which involve maybe the ages of family members, maybe something to do with prices, markets, things like this. These have.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (16:07.22)

These have absolutely, I mean, some uncertainty baked into them. Now, it would be the hallmark of an absolutely brilliant and excellent teacher who probably highlight these kinds of uncertainties to the students before actually launching into the illustration of that or the use of that problem for solving the equation. I fear that is not so most of the cases because most of the teachers are so pressed for time, they would they would rather utilize the time to illustrate the maths and not just go into a philosophical rant behind it. But maybe once in a while, if they could just do this and maybe even the students can do it for themselves that look, here is a real world problem and it has been actually shorn off of all the uncertainties of all the real world Jamelas. And then it has been nicely organized into a beautiful problem. But somebody had to do it. Somebody had to do it. There was a leap of the level of abstraction from the real world thing to this nice, organized, beautiful piece of math that has been presented to them. But then I’m afraid maybe a high school student may not be mature enough to do that, which is why probably biology is a very nice thing to give as an example.

Now, many students hate biology, myself included. I I hated it more than history. So but biology is actually beautiful. mean, once you start appreciating it when you’re a little bit older. So my suggestion is that maybe look at the biological things. See that if you look around you, there is biology all around you. just imagine the kind of the, I mean, the leveling up of abstractions that people had to go through to make sense out of all of this. All the classifications, all the…

I mean, encoding into various kinds of groups, all these various things that were done by decades and decades of scientists’ effort, how much people had to learn and figure things out on their own. So from this vagueness, from this uncertainty, maybe from this confused mess, something meaningful can be taken out. It’s right in front of them.

Swami (18:30.958)

That’s interesting. That’s interesting. 

Q4 You also write in the blog that I never studied Shakespeare, you know, and so, so actually what does, and I’m sure you’re reflecting on some of the stuff that you did as an youngster, but now when you’re, you know, when you’re looking back, maybe you are now, you know, figuring out some of these classics and novels and things like that. And what does it tell you and what are the learnings that you’re having when you’re actually doing deep research work that you’re doing today? How is it helping you?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (19:10.742)

So when I was doing my PhD, my PhD advisor, he told me that from school, the two most important things that we are using on a day-to-day basis is just Maths and English. It’s not science. It’s maths and English. I mean, that’s the kind of work that I was doing. So it’s mostly Maths and, to a certain extent, maybe physics and a little bit of chemistry. But it was mostly Maths and English that we were doing for writing our papers.

Now, setting that aside from the actual jobs perspective…

if we just think about it, see, the way that we interact with the knowledge world is through words. I mean, all this communication that is happening right now is through words. And if we don’t have a way about us with words, we can’t access anything, we can’t unlock anything. And the way to do it, I think, is to learn from the masters. And masters means read the novels, read the absolute great books that have been written. Now, that said, everyone doesn’t have access to a very good English medium education. That is the reality that we have to contend with. Nevertheless, I think, again, it’s a question of mental muscles. Reading writing, understanding words, I don’t think it is necessarily limited to just English. So it can be Hindi. It could be Bengali. But what needs to develop in the student’s mind is this development of the literary ability. No matter how much interested you may be in maths or science, you absolutely need to first have developed this literary ability to interact with the world.

If young students are listening to this, I want to put this message out to them that when we read scientific papers, this is my personal experience. I have seen that applied mathematicians, they are capable of writing absolutely beautiful English. So when I’m yes. So this came as a very big surprise to me. So nowadays, what I do is that when I start working on something new, I always make it a point first to read a paper not from the domain expert scientists of that field, rather from the paper written by an applied mathematician who is doing some modeling work in that field. Because they have a way of communicating it in a very, very nice and organized fashion. 

So.

Swami (21:56.6)

So clearly what you’re saying is explore interdisciplinary learnings also is what you’re saying, right? Because I saw in one place where you were talking about your own department, mechanical engineering, and you were actually saying that mechanical engineering has got…

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (22:07.411)

Absolutely.

Swami (22:19.726)

say interdisciplinary applications, right? Which means that then your ability to understand biology and mechanical engineering, okay, is a very interesting space because then you’re exploring two different subjects and that I think is the real way to start thinking because you’re not going to apply just one single subject because it’s got a lot of interconnections, right?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (22:41.844)

Right, absolutely. And we have this idea that mechanical engineering is all about steel, hammer, nuts, and bolts. But the fundamentals of mechanics, this has always been intrinsically connected to the biological world. So a lot of the things which people understood in the very early days in fluid mechanics, it came from an inspiration of trying to understand what was happening in blood vessels.

So this is actually a historical thing. So this is not something newfangled that, OK, we have now stepped into the late decade of the 20th century or the early decades of the 21st century, and we are trying for new ways to publish papers, so which is why we are applying mechanical engineering to biology. It’s not that. Historically, it has been so that biology has inspired the mechanics which led to developments in mechanical engineering.

Q5 So because of this challenge of I do not know how to learn, therefore I have some gaps as I’ve been built over years, is this the reason that sometimes a country like India, even though we produce so many great engineers, of course your institution itself becoming one of the premier ones, our ability to do breakthrough technologies that have world impact and having patents that are absolutely, I would say will give the developed nations a run for its money. Is that one of the challenges and therefore do we face that as a problem? Do you believe so?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (24:22.332)

No, I don’t believe so. There is something more systemic at work here. This is my personal belief. So the thing is that see, I have been a part of this mechanical engineering department since, I mean, I was, mean, since, since forever, since forever, let’s, put it like that. And when I look back at it, it was a fabulous education that I, that I had the privilege of getting it, but

at the same time, if I look at it in a slightly critical way, then the emphasis was so much on a way which was much more mathematically inclined that I feel now looking back, it was more like an applied mathematician’s training and less like a mechanical engineer’s training. This is my feeling, which is why ironically, I ended up doing my postdocs. So that’s the thing that we did after our PhD. Yeah. So I did it both in the math departments. So that was my basic training, so to speak. It was like in a very applied math kind of way. So going back to your question. So this is an issue that we have endemically I think in India. 

Whenever it comes to a question of coming to the nuts and bolts of things, dealing with the actual steel, we sometimes shy away from it. When I was abroad, I saw that people who had nothing to do with mechanical engineering, they were much more conversant than me in dealing with engines. They had this passion that they would open up the engine, they would tinker with it. And I mean, they had nothing, their entire family had nothing to do with engineering, but this was something which was baked into their psyche. And unfortunately, India, we don’t have that culture. Somehow we don’t have, I don’t know whether courage is the right word to use here, but sometimes I feel that we just don’t have that mentality to tinker with things.

Swami (26:27.694)

Mmm.

Swami (26:38.796)

Hmm. So, so is that the reason you believe so? Because the…

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (26:44.736)

This is my personal belief and I may be completely completely way off.

Swami (26:48.182)

No, 100 % no, because you deal with the best of the best students and then, you know, they go abroad, they work in, you know, in top institutions, they work on fundamental research and then you realize that they do such a great job, right? So therefore, is it the environment? Is it the art of curiosity and questioning that happens there? And therefore, it’s all reason.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (27:11.304)

None of that is lacking. None of that is lacking. Absolutely not. I mean, our our students are curious. They are scientifically minded. And I’m talking about the best of the best students here. But what is lacking is actually, I mean, this mental block of picking up the courage to build things for oneself. And this was absolutely missing in me. Like I did not have, truly speaking, an engineer’s bone in my body.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (27:41.238)

Yeah, I mean… I mean…

I’ve never built a machine. I have never built a machine. I have solved so many differential equations in my life. I mean, I am living my life almost like a mathematician, like an applied mathematician, and which gives me great pleasure because it ties in very beautifully with the kind of undergraduate education that I’ve had. So later on my junior batches, so now among the students that I’m teaching, we have a small group of students who are very much interested in the real nuts and bolts kinds of things. They are building cars here. We have a team car team and truth be told, I mean, they don’t come close to me in terms of the formal mechanical engineering knowledge because they were born 20 years later than me. But in terms of actual hands on knowledge of building things, they are far ahead in life than me. These are just 20 year old kids, 21 year old kids… they are much, much more advanced than I am in terms of actually building things, making things from scratch and absolutely wonderful. I feel so proud of them.

Swami (28:51.722)

Okay. So, so therefore what you are saying is really, you know, allow yourself, one is, you know, tinkering around with things which is really about saying

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (29:04.062)

Absolutely, we should give ourselves this permission and as parents they should give them give their kids this permission that it is okay to break stuff not out of malice but out of curiosity.

Swami (29:14.848)

Hmm, that’s interesting. And therefore what then happens is it actually starts hitting you even at the workplace, right? Because clearly, you know, even if you’re a mechanical engineer with the kind of background and the education that probably we have from the top institutions, I’ll go and do some computer programming, right? I don’t do the hard stuff of say maybe robotics or building a new device or, you know, stuff that actually…maybe, just imagine that, can I build an alternative to steel? Kind of questions, which then starts actually building in you a certain way of thinking, which is very critical. So is that something that we can incubate it at the…

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (29:59.115)

Right. Absolutely.

Swami (30:07.054)

you know, at the Institute or because you’ve actually seen it because now a lot of institutions are, you know, first, if you look at our conversation, you said, you know, change the way we learn or, you know, reimagine the way we learn. The second one that you talked about was really about this whole thing about, you know, the fact that have some curiosity, then learn to tinker around with things, right? Have the courage to do it, okay? And the third is now, if I really move back and say, if I have to do that, then do I incubate it in my institutions or do you think we also need a different way of building it right from our…you know, kindergarten schools, the way we get teachers in, the way we make them, you know, start thinking, is there a different method that we need to start looking at the education system itself?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (31:07.872)

So you are absolutely right. The way you have posed that, I mean, you asked questions, but you have kind of answered them. So if you just remove the question mark, that’s the answer. So yeah, so see, at a place like IIT Kharagpur or the IITs, we already have a nice incubation system in place. I mean, it is working, and I’m sure it will work great with these kids, their enthusiasm and everything. 

We have new faculty members joining who are really good at tinkering with stuff, building stuff. So I’m not that much worried about a place like IIT Kharagpur. It’ll take care of itself. They don’t, yeah, they don’t need me to give wise opinions. Yeah. So, but as you said, maybe we need a mind shift in the schools.

We absolutely need a mind shift in the schools. See, my kid is now, he’s not even seven. And no disrespect to the school that he’s going to. But it still seems to me that some of the things that they are made to learn and the way that they are made to learn, I have to question to what end?

And even when I see them learning like this and I wonder about the kind of things that I spent so much time learning back at school, to what point was that? I simply cannot fathom the answer. Maybe that time would have been better utilized maybe just playing, nothing else. Maybe just playing or maybe just curiously, I mean, rummaging through to some encyclopedias or something like that out of fun. In social sciences, I remember we had to remember, I mean, actually memorize the natural resources and the weather conditions in various states. I don’t remember anything from that. I know much more about that by reading the newspaper and by just interacting with the whole world.

Similarly, about so many different countries, learned about the natural resources, the coniferous trees and this and that deciduous trees, this and that. To what end was I memorizing those things? I’m not saying that we should spend that time learning about higher level maths in class eight, but could we not have maybe utilize that in trying to build something with our own hands?

Swami (33:52.046)

So true, so true, Jeevan. think it’s a fantastic point. 

Q6 And the second one is really about even a method of grading teachers, right? Because we just don’t have the right teachers to inspire these kids. Because leave the IITs. you probably, take care of the students, take care of themselves. They’re anyway, you know intelligent students, they’ve got some kind of you know, inspiration from somewhere, they’ve been able to do that. Okay. I’ll come back to some other challenges that is there, but clearly, I think it takes care of itself. But there’s a vast majority of students, okay, who probably are uninspired, right? Because not just they don’t have the potential, but they just are unable to understand, right?

So is there a need for a whole grading of teachers? Which means that it’s not just about me coming and teaching math in a school, but it’s about how you teach, how you grade yourself, like how students are actually being graded. I think there is a time for teachers to be graded is my sense. What do you think of that?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (35:07.656)

Absolutely. see, we are all a product of our history. So the way that I teach now, no matter how much self-awareness I inculcate regarding the need of practical things, I still do end up teaching like an applied mathematician. Because that has been my history. mean, I cannot come out of it. I mean, just by clicking, I mean, like that. OK, so in a similar fashion, our teachers in the schools, they are also very much a product of their own history and we cannot just wish them into changing their methods overnight. And there is in a country like ours with such a huge variety of things and the requirements of standardization, it is very easy to sit in an AC room and speak about these things, big, big things. 

But you see them in the there’s such a huge chunk of students who are now even going to Anganwadi to learn their foundational skills. I mean, you see the difference in scale. Okay. So them learning the basics of arithmetic is an achievement. And here we are talking about something at a higher level of abstraction. So we have to take those things into account also, I believe. Having said that, having said that, yes, it is certainly true that there is a massive scope, I believe, for revision in maybe training our teachers to teach the kids in a better fashion.

Swami (36:45.88)

Fantastic. 

Q7 The other question that I have is, one of the challenges that I have seen is that we are in an interesting age where if I look at the workplace, there are at least three generations of people with experience, right? Which is the youngsters, the middle-aged managers and then there are these senior leaders and these three generations have three different ways of working, right? That’s one. The second one I realize is that when I look at a profession like doctors, okay, what happens is that they have something called a continuing medical education. If I’m a doctor, it’s not enough if I actually become a doctor.

Every year there is a certain amount of number of hours that I need to spend to keep my license as a doctor. And that is a prerogative for me actually practicing my profession. Is there a need for a continuous medical engineering education? Where, I have passed as an engineer, but what is important is, I did not have AI when I graduated out of electrical engineering. Or I probably did not ever think of a lithium ion battery, which was something that’s going to change the way cars are being built or maybe… how maybe power plants are going to be using solar panels and things like that. So therefore, there are so much of change that what I also find is the curiosity to learn over my career because that’s affecting organizations. Is that something that, and maybe the world is not doing it, but maybe as a country where we have an ambition to be amongst the developed nations of the world. Maybe there are some changes that we need to bring at the school level, at the education level. Is it important for us to build these kinds of new mental models?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (39:01.79)

Right. The lazy answer to that would be that since India is part of the capitalist system, capitalism will take care of everything and competition will enforce people, so aging engineers to, I mean, to necessarily upscale themselves, learn new things so that they are relevant and they don’t get chucked out of the by the youngsters. So capitalism will take care of everything. That would be the lazy answer. And now to not give the lazy answer would be that, yes, it would be very nice to have something in place like that, where people are actually encouraged to spend a formal amount of their professional time, a set formal amount of their time in continuously upgrading themselves. And not by these kinds of completely revolutionary changes like AI, but in general, in a very steady fashion that you keep on upgrading yourself, you invest some time in your upskilling, in your learning. And that’s where learning how to learn would be that ability would be most effective. And again, from the academic world, when I was doing my postdoc, I mean, it was a regular occurrence to meet a number of faculty members from China who were already older than I was back then. I asked them, why is it so common to see you guys here? So they told me, our government has this system. So we necessarily have to spend time in the good universities abroad. So I thought that this was something that they were doing out of their own accord. And no, it was not. So it was actually enforced by the government, by their government that they would visit places like Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and it would be completely government funding and they would spend a year there, year and a half and go back with the upgraded knowledge and skills.

Swami (41:09.71)

Fantastic. Really, Jeevan, what you’re really saying is a method for the higher edgy, the NITs and IITs and any engineering institutions or universities really find a way of doing it, getting the early education system in some kind of a manner where you really look at for example, if you have a CIBIL rating for us to take loans, why can’t we have a CIBIL rating for actually for learning, right?

Yeah.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (41:48.02)

I mean that is truly emblematic of your podcast named ContraMinds.

Swami (41:53.23)

So, because otherwise I don’t think like how you have said, you know, the Chinese actually enforcing a certain way of go learn from the best and bring it back to our country, right? That’s something that they do. It’s been institutionalized. Similarly, if I was working somewhere, you know, you are given certain amount of budgets, okay, as a part of your CTC, where you have to go and spend a couple of days in say, you know, I may come from a

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (42:06.186)

Yes, that has been institutionalized.

Swami (42:22.978)

tier three institute, but I go to a tier one institute. And I actually, I’m challenged in a form that when I come back, I basically then get better, right? Because I’m hungry, you know, I’m actually looking. So I think if we have to take your principle of… how do we learn to learn? Some of these, I would say, different aspects of thinking need to be brought in if we really have to excel and be the best in the world in terms of leading it. Today, for example, is rationing of GPUs. And as a country, are we ready to actually lead it? Because if we did have the first principles thinking, maybe that’s really where it could have got us. But we are now going to be 20 years behind, which means that how do you get ahead? These are some of the challenges that I see. And would you agree with me on that?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (43:21.27)

Absolutely, absolutely. And just to go back to that point regarding the continuous training, actually, I’m not so much worried about the academic institutions in India because as things stand, we do have quite a few programs where we are encouraged for going for these kinds of things. But maybe at the non-academic professional world, I don’t know what the system is. You can probably tell that better.

So if there is such a more formalized institutionalized system, then I think it would be really, really helpful.

Swami (43:59.308)

No, there’s nothing like that. So which means that, you know, I have a training budget and it’s a part of the training budget, which is, it’s almost like how I did my schooling, right? I know there is a school, you know, you know, I have a son and just drop him in the school and he has to pass. I don’t really care whether he learns or not. That’s how I went through my school. Right. And, you know, by God’s grace, I think I passed and by luck I actually was successful. Right. It’s all by accident. Right.

So I think institutionalizing and therefore organizations need this institutionalization. This whole thing about STEM education that you talk about the way you need to really then get people to actually put hands-on working into their lives and building some kind of a, I would call it, rating system, which really is not about penalizing you but actually motivating you to actually be relevant because I think there’s a very big discussion somewhere I read saying that it’s no more about because the life cycle of organizations are actually getting lower than the professional life of people.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (45:18.038)

That is scary.

Swami (45:21.006)

Yeah, which means that if I actually, you know, if my company actually has a life cycle of only 15 years while I’m going to work for 60 years and I’m working in a top company and some technology disrupts my company, there is actually a budget that they’re talking about in the CTC or in the package where I have to give to, because some certain jobs will actually vanish.

Right. Which means that I have to reskill myself. Right. And therefore, as a part of your severance, I think you also have to give a budget for reskilling. So there are new ways in which we need to start building this, because what got built in the 1900s and the 1800s is not what’s going to take us to the next, you know, 2000s, you know… 2030s and the 2050s. So clearly some of the stuff that you talk about, is educating parents, educating students, looking at learning in a different way, I think is just fantastic. And I think this is just the, I would say the first part of our conversation and it was lovely talking to you. And I just want to end with probably a set of rapid five questions for you. So the first,

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (46:39.67)

All right.

Q8 The first question that I have for you is how do you define success?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (46:49.546)

Well, impressing myself.

Swami (46:53.934)

It’s an internal validation of yourself, right? Fantastic. 

Q9 The second question is, what would be your advice to an 18-year-old in a university today?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (47:12.874)

Pass all the subjects… on a more serious note. So learn time management. That solves everything. Absolutely everything. It’s a cliche. It sounds like an Instagram post. But learn time management. It will solve all problems. And be realistic.

Q10 Beautiful. Beautiful. If you were to have a dream dinner from whom you, with people who are living or not living, who you would have loved to meet, okay, who are those two or three people who you would like to sit and have a conversation?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (47:55.083)

You’re going to make me cry. So from my personal life, I would bring back my grandparents. I’d bring back my grandparents and tell them that I have done all right.

Swami (48:02.306)

Fantastic. Okay.

Swami (48:08.437)

Okay, beautiful.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (48:09.84)

and if I had to go to some historical character

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (48:17.918)

I’m from Mechanical Engineering.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (48:22.432)

Can I have, can I have three people? So Sir Isaac Newton, Leonard Euler and Cauchy, Augustin Cauchy.

Swami (48:25.249)

Yeah, of course.

Okay. Why Isaac Newton? I understand, but the rest of the two people, why?

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (48:35.574)

Yes. So Euler was a mathematician, but he had tremendous influence in mechanical engineering as well as many of the other applied sciences and the kind of things that I personally do. Euler, he was the greatest of them all. And Cauchy is like, he was solid mechanics. So I’m solid mechanics guy. So, and he did not find, I mean, too much kindliness from his colleagues back in the day because…I mean, he was a different kind of teacher, but he was an absolutely fantastic researcher. So I would very much like to have maybe a piece of more, but.

Swami (49:12.558)

Brilliant. 

Q11 What’s one piece of advice that you got? You must have got lots, but that you still remember and value even today.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (49:25.63)

Right. 

So I have actually made a video about this in YouTube. So as an undergraduate student from one of my seniors who was not very much academically inclined, he told me that make the best use of your classes. So include that as you as part of your plans, go to class and actually try to learn. So don’t you don’t waste that time. All the study that you plan later on will be bonus, but first try to learn the things right in the class itself… that’s for the students and later for professional life, well, mean, try to be a little bit realistic and be a little bit at the edge sometimes so you can push it a little bit further. Unless you are an absolute maverick, then don’t listen to me.

Swami (50:14.958)

Great. 

So thanks, Jeevan. It was lovely talking to you. And I think, as I said, this is just the beginning of our conversation. There’s so much that we had to talk about. But I think it was lovely. And the perspective that you provided was just fantastic. Thank you very much.

Jeevanjyoti Chakraborty (50:57.953)

Thank you so much. It was absolutely, absolutely wonderful talking to you. Yes.