** Engineers - we love and hate! **

Tarun Nongthombam *

In Manipur, engineers are the most misunderstood lot. Engineers to common people belong to a tribe who only drinks, who puts public money in his pocket, who builds big mansions when his neighbors live in tin sheds and someone who has many wives. This negative perception public has, nobody else, but engineers themselves to blame. They have allowed few bad apples to tarnish the image of their community.

Engineers on the contrary are generally introverts. Fancy things, clothes are his lowest priority and they just can't date girls. Many people would employ deceitful methods to create false impression of attractiveness. Engineers are just incapable of placing appearance above quality and function. They are the one who don't know how to speak, write, express and this has not done any good to their image. But, they are the people who love challenges and are problem solvers. Throw an engineer into a dirt pit; they will come up with a solution to clean the dirt. Leave an engineer without any challenges, he will wither away and die.

In an interview to The New York Times, Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape said "Believe it or not, this goes deep into the interior mentality of the engineer, which is very truth-oriented. When you're dealing with machines or anything that you build, it either works or it doesn't, no matter how good of a salesman you are. So engineers not only don't care about the surface appearance, but they view attempts to kind of be fake on the surface as fundamentally dishonest".

This is a community which can bring change in Manipur but sadly in complete disarray. They are caught between politicians and hostile naharols groups. Manipur PWD was without a chief engineer for many periods as nobody was willing to take up the job, too risky to be the chief. Engineers in Manipur are now a demoralized lot and no other group has been affected as badly as them.

In my work trip to a hill district in Manipur, I met a team of engineers working and innocently asked them, "Sirs, you all work in a place where there is natural beauty, hills and rivers with pine trees all along; don't you have a great time here?" Their reply left me confused. One of them said, "Son, you are right, this place looks beautiful but when night falls everything changes. This is Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. This place is not safe at night, so all of us daily drive for hours back home even if we have to spend half of our salary in buying petrol". In the leikai where I live, three chief engineers of the state were shot dead. Recent killing of Public Health Engineering Department (PHED) staff, father and son duo is the testimony for how stressful and risky their job has become.

Of late, engineers have built magnificent structures like new assembly building, Ima keithel, new tribal market and many others which Manipur has never seen and had. At this moment when you are reading this article, a group of people are digging holes in a very hostile environment, both natural and man made. They are a team of engineers working hard to bring train to Imphal!

When an army company moves everything gets arranged, be it schools for their children, housing and even to the extent of providing helpers and cooks. For engineers, except for public companies, they do everything themselves. It is the love of their job and the challenges it bring, they stay and work in such unfriendly environment.

Engineers not only build, they also make things operate and work. We all are so used to what we get and have taken everything for granted. If you have some free time, make a visit to one of the pump stations of PHED and see how people are working tirelessly to get the river water, purify it, make it portable and supply it daily through pipes or tankers so that we all can get drinking water. What they get in return, they get shot at!

Many engineers are working in high voltage dangerous environment and in many substations so that we all can get power supply for our daily needs. Mobile phone which we flaunt and talk to our near and dear ones; there is a team of engineers working so that we don't get a network breakdown.

There is a different facet of engineers which we all fail to see. Surgeons after performing a successful surgery take all the credit and a lawyer after a successful court verdict, the glory is his. Engineers are very different from other professionals and this is the sweetest thing they do. They work day in and out for years and when they complete their job, they hand over their child whom they had raised for years to political leaders and bureaucrats, go behind the curtain and quietly walk off. In recent inauguration of our new Assembly Building, we see only politicians and bureaucrats; this is same at district level, sub division level and municipal ward level.

Exibit-A: Serou has the longest bridge in Manipur. Do you know any of the Engineers who built it?
Photo Source: E-Pao gallery.