How I Stumbled Into Engineering

By: Nikhil Jali

Growing up, I never really aspired to be an engineer. That is one less title I wanted to be bucketed into. But I was very curious about what made my toys move, and what brought these toys to life. So curious that, all my toys essentially were often pried open with butter-knives and bare hands. And while I did my best to put them back together, I often had to reconcile with a toy that was broken, albeit with an understanding of how it worked.

Before long, I had accumulated enough spare parts of plastic gears, battery cases, motors, lights, and interesting mechanical mechanisms that each performed a certain action, be it translation, rotation or oscillation. I held these very close and made arbitrary contraptions out of these. And these I began to put to good use to make simple pulleys that lift things up, often just lifting ‘welcome home’ paper notes to my weary parents who would’ve just returned from work.

And this continued for sometime. The pivotal moment for me was when the solar lamp at my grandpa’s place broke down. It consisted of a solar panel that was placed out in the sun, with a long wire that came and charged a light inside the living room. We had quite a few power-cuts during the monsoon season due to downed trees, and this light served the much needed illumination. I took the chance to reroute the wires into my room, where I began experimenting with electricity, albeit safe levels of DC-voltage. I was able to power my contraptions without the use of batteries. And with this something profoundly clicked inside me. It was how energy from the batteries was somehow similar to the energy coming from the solar-panels and could power each of my contraptions. This electricity was like a “currency” that I could use for many things like turn on tiny lights, power motors and if wired just correctly, could power my toys without batteries, at least till the sun was up. And this set in motion a quest to understand things beyond just toys.

With each learning, I’ve grown to appreciate how human ingenuity has led up to the building of each new thing. No one starts completely afresh, and is privileged to stand on the work of the collective body of knowledge that man has accumulated. Even the words I use here have evolved over thousands of years. I say this because, pursuing interests in S.T.E.M doesn’t automatically mean that one must cure cancer, or invent something. Inventions are rare and that isn’t a prerequisite to appreciating the sciences. It is just like, one doesn’t need to win the olympic gold medal in swimming if one were to learn swimming. The point is, learn to find joy in learning. No pressure, and pursue where your interests lead.

Fast forward since that moment in my early days, I’ve since worked on animation, open-cockpit racing cars, robots, and now am trying to bring autonomous vehicles to reality. Like most, the journey has been long, and each one’s journey is very different from the other. And it is not right to gauge success in this journey, for the journey is the prize.

For those starting out in the pursuit of the various sciences, I would say be prepared for entering a truly mystical world. A world far more complex and beautiful than the magical tales we’ve grown up to be reading. The physical world around us is governed by simple rules of cause-and-effect. But from those simple rules emerge a reality that is very grand and complex. It is filled with mysteries that are known to man, but are awaiting for you to discover for yourself.