When I was young, I disassembled watches, clocks, those times (in 1980’s) it was all mechanical, I could understand how it worked. But when I opened a radio set, I was puzzled. No matter what I did, I could not find how it worked, it just puzzled me, the same stuff happened when I opened a quartz watch and hand held games, there was big black lump with wires from it, and it worked.

I took up Electronics and Communication Engineering in my college, theoretically I did learn how they worked, but though my degree says I am a first class engineer, I know I am not. I don’t know how to make a PCB, I can’t even solder a resistor to PCB, leave alone soldering a temperature sensitive Zener diode. Though I finished studying electronics engineering., I could not repair a single electronics device in my home. Shame.

I am sure none of the staff in my college Panimalar Engineering had a tie-up with engineering firms, they were out of sync with practicality. I am afraid any of them can implement this. It’s not just a problem in my college, it’s a problem India faces, and is facing for decades.

It is said that when my family was in Gandhinagar, Adyar, my granddad rented out apartments, in one of them there was IIT professor of electronics. A sony radio in my home got repaired, and my granddad took it to him, that guy did not say that he cannot repair, he just had the radio in his home for a long time, realizing that he was not an electronics engineer as he claimed, my granddad got the radio back from him and got it repaired from a local shop.

I wonder, if engineer is not useful to community, why you call that one a engineer? Why should that person exist in the first place? Won’t it be good if his body is cremated or buried so that he or she will serve as fertilizer?

So why am I writing this blog? I went into engineering thinking that I can at least repair a radio set, but I came out without even knowing to create a PCB, or to solder a resistor to a PCB. There was nothing seriously practical in my college. I was dismayed. Recently I was searching on the internet to buy a discarded silicon wafer, I did not work in chip manufacturing, I never will, no matter how much I desire, so I thought why can’t I buy a discarded silicon wafer, frame it and hang it on my wall. The miracle of silicon tech is earning me money, I want to honor it and remember it.

I searched ebay, and I searched amazon India, and to my surprise they do sell blank silicon wafers, here is a n-type one, they are so cheap, colleges can stockpile it and if they can build a small fab, can teach students how to create a small chips. It will be a excellent learning for electronics students.

I also saw raw silicon been sold. For th humongous fees colleges demand today, these investments per student is nothing. They can buy it, and along with a induction furnace, graphite crucible and molds, try to cast their own wafers!!! It won’t be perfect, but they can try.

May be if a colleges does this, may be students now and in future may not feel void when they come out of engineering, they will feel they are engineers. They might be able to solve industrial problems, say when they are in their 3rd year of engineering.

Skeptical

I am sure all engineering colleges are here to extract money from rich parents, definitely they won’t be doing it. May be students should form groups, should pool in investment of say 1 to 5 lakhs, think of problems to solve using electronics, think of how they can build IC’s on wafers, wafers from silicon, buy or forge the instruments need to do it and execute it. Else even 100 years from now, Indian engineers will be waste.