What Made India Joke About Engineering?

In India, the jokes on engineering are more cultural than academic, writes Ashutosh Mimrot.

There is barely any famous Indian standup comedian who does not have 15 mins dedicated to engineers. And even after so much content being made, an engineering joke is still considered low-hanging fruit in the open-mic circles.

(Photo: The Quint)

In India, the scope of engineering isn’t restricted to that of an academic discipline or just a profession. Here the tag of an engineer has always been expected to play a significant role in fulfilling the social, economical, and political needs in the country. And so has been deemed valuable not just for the individual but also for the community.

The result of this has been a prominent cultural identity that the discipline has been able to acquire. However, due to the diverse and dynamic cultural landscape of the country, this identity of “an engineer” recognised by the dominant culture had undergone several revisions over time.

And the recently formed persona of it, which is working as a reservoir for comedic content is most unique, and also beyond the capacity of any other academic discipline to duplicate.

Nation Building & The Middle Class Dream

After independence, for the broken and stranded agrarian economy of India, Nehru envisioned scientific and technological emphasis to be the path towards becoming a developed and prosperous nation.

To further India’s development through industrialisation, institutions were established to foster engineering education. And as an announced aspiration, the responsibility of being the ‘nation builders’ was tagged to the engineers of the country.

Cut to seventy-five years later, Indian engineers are running the world by holding key positions in the companies that make our day-to-day life possible in the digital world.

While discussing the problem of ‘brain drain’, we came to be producing the largest number of engineering graduates in the world each year. The tag of nation builders had soon shifted to become a lucrative profession and later a default higher studies option for the children of middle and upper-middle-class families.

Responding to the economic liberalisation and the IT boom, in just two decades the number of engineering colleges shot up nine times from 355 colleges in 1995 to 3,364 colleges in 2015.

During this period enrolment in engineering increased 13 times, with around 4 million students enrolled in different streams and academic years at a time.

This series of events culminated to form a prominent target audience who were served the most relatable, funny, and quality content as soon as the internet allowed content creation to break free from the limited sources of media production and channels of distribution.

After love stories of Raj-Simran, and Sans-Bahu loving audiences, the internet identified a thick audience base that was most active on the internet and possessed ample cultural capital for content extraction.

In the last decade, engineering got mined for thousands of jokes. The jokes went way beyond stereotypical templates as engineering lifestyle became the dominant theme underlining hundreds of viral comedy sketches on YouTube, and the web series count sharing the same theme is also in double digits now.

There is barely any famous Indian standup comedian who does not have 15 minutes dedicated to engineers. And even after so much content being made, an engineering joke is still considered a low-hanging fruit in the open-mic circles.

Beyond Academia: Engineering as a Culture

The phenomenon is very unique to India as jokes on engineering are rarely found in the material of foreign comedians.

Also, an engineering joke elsewhere in the world might mean something that strictly involves some academic context, laughing on which would require an understanding of the underlying engineering concept. But in India, the jokes on engineering are more cultural than academic.

It is not to say that academic-engineering-jokes are none existent in the country. But the point that needs recognition is that the content that takes reference from engineering is working for the whole young age Indian demographic, and not just for the close engineering group.

It is exceptional that comedic nuances that stem from an academic subculture have broken the boundaries of niche relatability to become appealing and enjoyable for the audience, which by number qualifies to be called mass.

In a country that is so serious and repressive about academia, to create an atmosphere that allowed such lighthearted discourse to emerge around engineering, certain cultural and technological events had to coincide.

The preexisting superior perception about Engineering in Indian society, the positive effects of economic liberalisation; which resulted in the emergence of a huge middle class that could afford Engineering education, and the fast cheap-internet penetration; were some of the meta factors. Similar to these are also some factors that contradict the engineering leitmotif in the internet content space.

Once 'Nation Builders', Now Building an Internet Culture

India has been producing one and a half million engineers every year for almost a decade now. But even though the engineering population appears to be huge, when compared to other degrees like arts and commerce the numbers fall short to impress.

As per 2018-2019, 38 percent of the higher education enrollment went to arts, 15% to commerce, and 16% to BSC, while engineering enrollment stands at a mere 11 percent.

The stats look surprising to many because if you go by the internet culture, it seems that the engineering audience is so huge that every other content (meme, reel, sketch, or series) has to be about them.

So why the niche 11 percent engineering students were catered constantly despite there being a significantly larger audience base available in the form of arts and commerce students?

The hijacking of the engineering education ecosystem by the private sector with 86 percent of the total engineering enrollment going to private colleges in 2018-19 (93 percent in 2012-13) has made it hard for students with weak economical backgrounds to be part of the engineering club.

In 2017-18, the average expenditure per annum on an engineering course is Rs 71,000 against Rs 11,000 and Rs 18,000 for arts and commerce respectively. That makes 80 percent of the total engineering students come from the top 20 percent well-off population.

And before Jio, when the internet was slow and expensive, and watching video content was a privilege not available to all, the populous engineering student subculture became the audience that helped the web content space make ground in India and allowed first movers like TVF and AIB to make it big in the entertainment segment.

The engineering student subculture made a significant chunk of the active internet user base in India before Jio. The tribe was the niche that was readily available to the content creators in the infant stage of internet penetration in India.

The tech-savvy, handy smartphone users in their hormonally driven exploring age with time and internet data at their disposal, made the best consumer of video content. And this already segmented audience was catered and capitalised on by creators for years to come.

Comedy and Engineering in India: An Unbreakable Bond

Even though so much engineering content was being created, the reason that the comedic nuance in such content did not dry off, is the richness in the campus culture of engineering colleges throughout the country.

The similarity in curriculum, the internal social metrics, and the structured way in which engineering education infrastructure was established by the government in the form of IITs, NITs, and regional colleges in earlier days after independence, allowed for an internal campus culture to flourish over years.

And as Henri Bergson observed in his essay ‘Laughter’, that “our laughter is always a laughter of a group”. According to him, even in those cases when we are effectively laughing alone, or perhaps at ourselves, we always presuppose an imagined audience or community. And so to see the depiction of experiences exclusively shared by such a large community become a source of enjoyment and ecstasy.

The state of engineering in India at the present provides the best ingredients required to spark humour. The assumed seriousness required to pursue an engineering course and the clumsy education infrastructure present a contrast between expectations with engineering versus its reality on the ground.

The four years of college that transform a child into an adult become the most cherished memories of one’s life, inducing emotionality. And the recognition of the engineering character underlines relatability.

These ingredients were exploited at their best by zooming in at every aspect of the engineering life, from preparation for the entrance test to hostel life, placements, post-engineering life, mess food, gender equation in engineering colleges, and whatnot.

The students who boosted the numbers of the engineering content by regularly consuming it were the protagonists of the decades-old story of engineering in India.

Living in the modern world where especially during student life, your academic achievements become the proxy for your whole identity. They were enjoying a tag that had multitudes of associations on the cultural dashboard. They strongly identified with their expanded engineering identity.

This bonafide identity and circumstances made it easier for joke writers to create and break stereotypes around them, and refer to them with minimum required words. Many of their character traits were recognisable across generations. And it was found that many times humour could be sparked just by stating the realities of the engineering lifestyle.

In a country that has become hypersensitive about every distinct identity like religion, gender, or class, engineering provides an open playing field for comedians to exploit an identity that is personal, populous, complex, and carries a significant social grounding.

Engineering was just the flag bearer for the plethora of content that is being made catering to the student community. A quarter of our life that gets consumed being a student is composed of complex emotions, memories, and stories. Despite all the shortfalls in our education system, academia becoming a source for relatable stories and jokes projects a fun future ahead.

(Ashutosh Mimrot is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and currently working as a marketing analyst for a cafe chain. He blogs and does standup comedy to feed his heart.)

(This is a personal blog. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)