Tainted Genius

The word "engineer", as any reliable source will tell you (as will Wiki), is derived from the Latin word for cleverness which incidentally is the same root for genius, ingenious, ingenuity and all other such related words that mean some extraordinary mental capacity that is inherent and/or in-born.

So, at the end of this otherwise ordinary week which, just for the record, contained Engineer's Day, celebrated on the birth anniversary of the legendary Visvesvaraya (this, incidentally, being his 150th) as well as Vishwakarma Puja (one of the rare fixed festivals of Hinduism, Vishwakarma being the chief engineer of sorts as per the religion and is revered by engineers, architects and craftspeople), I present to you a 4-part series called "Philistineering?" - a product of the personal experiences, observations and detailed, fool-proof research undertaken by the engineering student in me:

Part I - A Taboo Called Engineering

Part II - Engineer Equals Philistine

Part III - Sad But True

Part IV - Bitter Pill

And while it definitely rankles that people from mostly similar backgrounds such as architects go ahead and deride their technically purer counterparts, I guess it can be forgiven to an extent since this drastic change in attitude can be, like most other things young and urban, traced back to the diet of heavily Americanized popular culture that we have grown used to being fed over the past couple of decades. Then again, is that really something that can be so easily forgotten and should the perpetrators be just as easily forgiven?

That's an intensely personal choice, I guess. But what is definitely not a matter of opinion - and this regardless of how much you buy the multiple intelligence theory - is that there is no substitute for sheer genius, no matter how much mud you sling.