......... ......... ......... ......... ......... ......... (.................... The original version of an essay ........... .........................published in ......... ......................Prospect April 2004 .......) Pontificators at smart dining tables in London and Washington D.C. hopelessly confuse cause and effect in debating outsourcing and the reasons for India’s rise to prominence as a source of software brainpower. “It all began with those Indians in Silicon Valley, didn’t it?” they say. Or, “Of course it’s those Indian technical colleges, those IITs – what, half a dozen clones of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology? – turning out programmers and computer scientists by the container load.” The best that can be said of these attempts at explanation is that they are an advance on the idée fixe of a year ago, which was that Western companies were only paying Indians and Indian companies to write and design software because they are cheap – because programmers and software engineers in India can be hired for roughly a fifth of what they would earn in America. The actual reasons for India’s soaring stock in software are complicated, border on the bizarre, and are rooted in the subcontinent’s earliest intellectual and pedagogical traditions. Software is ubiquitous and all-pervasive. It is at the core of processes and tools in every strategic industry – from banking and finance to microchips and defence. The depth of India’s comparative advantage in software suggests that India poses a far more interesting challenge to the Western economies than even China does. China, strong in manufacturing and evolving into a powerhouse in computer hardware production, has been almost as unimpressive in software as Japan – and India the reverse. No underdeveloped country has ever taken on the developed world in a craft as sophisticated and important as software. Indian software aptitude rests on an unlikely pair of factors: an emphasis on learning by rote in Indian schools, and a facility and reverence for abstract thought. These biases of Indian education are all but mutually exclusive in the modern West, where a capacity for abstraction is closely associated with creativity and stimulating, inspirational learning. In India, learning by rote is seen by many, if not most conventional teachers, as essential grounding for creativity – like Picasso’s mastery of perspective and anatomy in his youth – and for unbounded invention and speculation. An educational tradition that spans learning by heart and exalting excellence in higher mathematics and physics as the height of academic accomplishment is just right for software. It perfectly fits the mentality of computers. These are, after all, machines so rigidly conformist as to refuse to send email with a missing hyphen or full stop in an address. Yet no product on earth is more abstract, boundlessly complex and flexible as software, which cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted or touched – is, to borrow from Vladimir Nabokov’s take on chess, a game invented in India, “a spectral art.” India’s software accomplishments to date reflect those extremes. At one pole, Indian firms overwhelmingly dominate a world élite of over 120 companies recognised for producing outstandingly accurate software – having earned a CMM Level-5 tag, or software’s equivalent of the Michelin 3-star rating for restaurants. These establishments – of which America has less than half the Indian total – are formally certified to be following an exacting, tediously detail-obsessed methodology developed at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh for producing reliable code. At the other pole, most of the world’s reigning American technology giants – Microsoft, General Electric, Texas Instruments, Intel, Oracle and Sun Microsystems – have established software development facilities and even R&D laboratories doing fundamental research on the subcontinent. They see India as a bargain basement for an unlikely commodity, world-class technical and scientific brains – engineers, computer scientists and researchers. A top electrical engineering graduate from an Indian Institute of Technology earns about an eighth of the starting salary of an American counterpart. The most far-sighted Brahmin sage of circa 1500 B.C. – roughly when the earliest of the Vedas, Hinduism’s sacred über-texts, are thought to have been written down – could not have envisioned any such application of the teaching conventions born at the same time. Exactitude was of the essence of the pedagogy of the Brahmins, fiercely exclusionary scholar-priests, because their pupils were not merely acolytes but, effectively, human zip disks – data storage media. The Vedas were preserved and passed down orally for many centuries (some Indian scholars claim, thousands of years) before they became texts. That meant that an exemplary Brahmin scholar of the time had to be capable of holding in his head the equivalent of several books of the Bible and scholarly commentaries on them and an entire Sanskrit thesaurus. Preservation aside, exactness in memorization mattered because, as Nicholas Ostler of the Foundation for Endangered Languages has explained, Sanskrit mantras “are Vedic hymns used as incantations,” or as “sacred formulae whose incessant repetition was held to have important mystical effects.” A priestly acolyte had to be capable of not just a word- but phone-perfect (as in phoneme) recitation of them, with the proper intonation – because different sounds corresponded to different spiritual purposes. The precise, specialised languages we use to program computers are, like hieratic Sanskrit, deployed to get absolutely specific results considered vital by their users – even if they serve largely economic ends, and mantras religious ones. Many details of computer languages and their rules – and variations of these for different contexts – have to be memorized by computer programmers. The ability to retain details of large chunks of indigestible information is just as critical for a programmer as for traditional Brahmin scholars. Although Indian children no longer learn by rote to serve as zip disks, and Sanskrit – when it is taught in modern Indian schools – has much the same museum quality as Latin and Greek in British classrooms, rote learning still holds tremendous sway on the subcontinent. As newspaper editorials routinely attest, the most common lament about the state of Indian education is about the continuing reign of rote. Children commit facts to memory for an edge in examinations, and defenders of rote among educators argue that the effort involved acts as a sort of bench press for the brain. The cerebral equivalent of Arnold Schwarznegger’s bulges, and the discipline it takes to acquire them, have served Indian programmers well in adapting to the structured and tightly controlled processes essential to producing the exceptionally accurate software that has earned Indian companies CMM Level-5 certification. Most Western programmers scorn those methods as mental straitjackets. Frederick Brooks, a revered American authority on their craft, has captured what they love best about it, which is software’s rarefied dimensions: “The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. The media of creation are so flexible . . . so readily capable of realising grand conceptual structures.” Yet “pure thought stuff” is also a perfect encapsulation of ancient India’s contributions to the world’s scientific heritage – which are marked by a bias towards abstraction unencumbered by empiricism. Some schools of physics in India developed, in about 600 B.C., atomic theories entirely separate from Greek atomism, constructions that many Western physicists scoff at for not being based on experiment but purely on intuition and logic. But others marvel at how much closer the imaginative speculations of Brahmin atomic theory have come to current ideas in theoretical physics than those of any other pre-modern civilisation – something no one has ever been able to explain. “The Indians advanced astronomy by mathematics rather than by deductions elicited from nature,” the science writer Dick Teresi has noted in Lost Discoveries. But Indian mathematics was also distinctively airy-fairy. Whereas Greek mathematics was largely extrapolated from mensuration and geometry, it was abstract number theory in which the ancient Indians distinguished themselves. Zero, infinity, negative and irrational numbers – all concepts that the Greeks dismissed for centuries as ludicrous – were Indian conceptions. Spatial extension and quantities of objects were far less interesting to pioneering Indian mathematical minds. In fact, the Indian leaning towards abstraction – so deep-seated that, to this day, theoretical physicists and mathematicians outrank every other sort of egghead in status on the subcontinent – explains India’s relatively poor showing, historically, in more practical kinds of science. The sinologist Joseph Needham observed that their study would have entailed defying Indian caste rules about contamination, and about contact between Brahmins and artisinal workers. The progress of ancient Indian knowledge of physiology, biology and anatomy was held back by the religious taboo on contact with dead bodies. It was the supreme pragmatists, the Chinese – whose intellectual traditions all favoured practicality and action over airy speculation – who were the technological geniuses of antiquity. They invented paper, seismographs, the magnetic compass, the wheelbarrow, irrigation, ink and porcelain. But reasoning for its own sake was of so little interest to them that, unlike the Greeks and Indians, they never developed any system of formal logic. It hardly seems accidental that it is through the mass-manufacture of physical objects – including nearly every sort of computer hardware, from keyboards and circuit boards to fully assembled personal computers – that China is making its mark today and India, on the ethereal plane of software. The biggest check on excessive optimism about India’s economic prospects is the abysmal state of the country’s material infrastructure – its pot-holed roads, chronic power failures and foul waterways and air. Yet, as The Economist reported in February, the subcontinent’s successes in outsourcing and software are stimulating critical reforms and progress in manufacturing industry – a stubborn under-performer for most of the six decades since Indian independence. Their power as catalysts is out of all proportion to the attention-getters’ smallness, in statistical terms. Information technology accounts for just 3 per cent of Indian GDP, and in 2002-3, the $9.5 billion total for software and services exports, including outsourcing revenues, amounted to less than a third of Microsoft’s sales of $32 billion in the year to last June. Yet, not least because virtually every recent commentary by domestic or foreign analysts on India’s future in software has mentioned the infrastructure problems as a serious bottleneck, improvements have begun – slowly, but in earnest. If India ever has smooth roads and lights that can be counted to stay on, software and outsourcing will deserve a disproportionate share of the credit. An incisive observer once remarked about Calcutta that if only the city’s intractable problems could be reassigned from the realm of the concrete to the abstract, keen Indian minds would solve them overnight. Stretch that idea across the subcontinent, consider software, and there is a sense in which cerebration really does appear to be redeeming obdurate matter. Cheryll Barron postgutenberg@gmail.com
