Think locally, act globally

I just heard that Ratan Tata gave MIT a whole lot of money to create a new Tata Center for Technology and Design. The mandate of the Tata center is to design and build technology that addresses Indian needs. I believe that at one point he was considering giving the same money to IISc.

One might ask why such a center doesn’t exist at an IIT or at the Indian Institute of Science. The reason is simple: we don’t know how to design and build technology for India. Certainly not the robust, scalable systems that India needs anyway. It’s both sad and true that we need to go half way across the world to solve problems that afflict us. No amount of nationalist sentiment can hide this fact.