partly to do with our culture. Everything is interdependent. In the western society, this inter-dependency is not there. For example, during school time the child depends on the mother. Even when you come to do your ALs, you depend too much on your friends or the tuition master and then you come to the university. Then again, you depend on your group mates. I have been teaching in University of Cardiff for different levels for a couple of years, and I have seen the differences. There, the students, even though they work in groups, they have a very strong independent working culture. They work individually, where as in our case, all you want is to make sure that the entire group is getting good marks doing the same thing. But, towards the end and by the time you graduate, you are going to realize that you cannot survive as an interdependent person. Then only you slowly become an independent person and start building up your career.
However since it comes partly with the culture, it’ s a little difficult to change things. That is how we grew up and that’ s how we do things. So, if you want to see someone progressing, this‘ independence’ that we are talking about should come out. And the other thing is the way things are happening- this competition- the huge competition; it’ s killing the students. From what I have been seeing, the present generations don’ t have time to enjoy the childhood. They don’ t have time to be creative. We talk about novelty and creativity. We want people to invent things. But, if you don’ t have creativity from the beginning, you can’ t create things.
Recalling my childhood, I could remember once I completely dismantled an entire Roneo machine. It took me three months to put it back to working stage. But I had time. While studying and all, I still had time. So, in my opinion, we need some room to build up the creativity of our young children- which is unfortunately not happening. That is where all these things should start and when you are creative, you will start becoming independent and that is when you know that you are a useful individual to the society.
In your eyes, what shapes up a better engineer? What are the qualities or practices that one should cultivate to be a better engineer? A better engineer starts from acquiring a good fundamental knowledge and certain other skills. But, unfortunately, what is happening today is people believe that you don’ t need to know any of the fundamentals. The reason behind this is the availability of computer packages where these fundamentals are embedded. So, they think it’ s fine if you can get a computer package and manage to run that. But very soon, the people who have developed these computer packages might pass away, they are now old. So who is going to create these computer packages for you? That is why the engineers should learn the fundamentals properly. When you know the fundamentals, you should be able to apply that fundamental to any application. It doesn’ t matter whether it is rocket science or a very simple engineering problem- everywhere it is fundamentals. I think learning fundamentals properly is the key to be a better engineer. Once you know the fundamentals you can understand anything else quite easily.
Do you believe that the current undergraduates are on the right track? If not, what are the things that you suggest that they should change? Well, I believe that depends on the curriculum. We try to push the fundamentals as much as possible. But then one needs to understand that the present students are more used to digital world than us. So they like to work with the computers more. That’ s why we need to keep the balance between teaching the fundamentals and giving the skills of using these digital devices.
I think, at least at Peradeniya, we try to keep that balance( I don’ t know about other places). This is one thing that I have been always saying. When our students go to the industry, they may not shine at the very first day, because they don’ t probably know the entirely fancy world that the industry expects. But slowly, they will show that they know the fundamentals and that they can adapt to any new situation and come up with a solution. That is when they start shining. However, that is partly the fault of our industry too. Our industry thinks that an engineer, who just graduated from a university here, should be moulded to their industry the next day. I think what they should be doing is that they should be recruiting this engineer and then moulding them to meet the requirements of their industry after a few months. Sadly, this is not what is happening in our case.
Where will you see the Sri Lankan power system in a few years’ time?( smiles) It’ s kind of hard to see. I think it will be like this. There will be bits and pieces of renewables coming up here- up to a few hundreds of MW s. And then we will decide, all of a sudden we must go for‘ this’ technology. I don’ t know what that technology is going to be because that technology is yet to come. It could be L & G, it could be Coal with Carbon Capture and Storage, or it could be diesel. Right now, we are going through a grey area of our power system planning. So I’ m a little reluctant to predict about how our power system will look like in a few years’ time. But of course, as you see, there will surely be more PV on roof tops.
And finally, we’ d like to ask you about the fellow membership of IEEE that you received recently. What are your thoughts on that? That is a prestigious award. There’ s absolutely no doubt about that. Only 0.1 % of the membership is getting this fellowship. The main difference is, I’ m a fellow IESL( Institution of Engineers Sri Lanka), and I’ m a fellow IET( Institution of Engineering and Technology), where I had to apply for both the fellowships. But for this one, it was not me who applied. Somebody had to nominate me. Then, of course, so many fellows have to support you. The IEEE has a very rigorous process of evaluating the
24 University of Peradeniya Gauge Magazine