Happy Vishwakarma Puja!

Today, September 17 is Vishwakarma Puja. I was happy to learn that there is actually a Hindu God of Engineers. Vishwakarma is his name and he is supposed to have designed temples, palaces, missiles for ancient warfare, and the Universe.

One really neat thing here is the sense of the sacred that is everywhere. Today engineers and craftsmen stop and worship their tools. At our office a priest came into one of our labs and some offerings were made and prayers given:


Although not a Hindu myself, I think it's pretty neat that people stop and pay attention to what makes their livelihoods possible. Especially in my profession of engineering there is a lot of pride we take what we make.

Of course we never use our bare hands, we use tools and they came from somewhere. The next generation of computer chips are designed using computers that have in them the previous generation of computer chips running sophisticated software. The tools that are used to do what we do are the really astounding part of the whole deal. And those tools were in turn designed and built using other tools. And so on.

Once you take into account all the effort put into generations tools and infrastructure, one engineers' contribution to anything we build is but a small fraction of the overall effort.

And when considering our Maker who gave all those tens of thousands of people upon whose shoulders modern engineers stand their hands, minds, and inspiration, we can easily say that we do almost nothing. Just tiny little tweaks to move the whole thing forward.

So although taking a day for engineers to worship their tools might seem a bit funny to us, we should take that anytime over us engineers taking all the credit for our creations to ourselves!