Campus life at premier technical colleges always combined furious technical work with spirited argument—discussions about food, discipline, and politics long coexisted with late evening labs and problem sets. That combination of dedication to technical mastery alongside free, often contentious, intellectual discussion contributed to the building of many Indian technical colleges’ global reputations. So, attempts to turn back humanities studies at such places and maintain them restrictively as “technical" and lab-centred preparation miss a key fact: the humanities are more than aesthetic afterthoughts. They are integral in creating technologists and engineers who design products, services, and policies that work in people’s lives.

The world’s leading tech schools get this: MIT even has a fully-fledged School of Humanities, and Singapore’s tech-design universities weave arts and social sciences into engineering degrees. India’s National Education Policy 2020 likewise champions multidisciplinary programmes to break academic silos. The best institutions treat philosophy, history, and literature not as padding but as prompts that shift the question from “How do we build this?" to the more important “Should we........

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