Engineering is Beautiful

people think art is the only real form of beauty. and maybe that's true to some extent, a drawing someone makes can never be recreated by someone else down to the exact detail. but i think the things engineers do are just as beautiful. there's so much stuff we use or see every single day and never actually look at. and once you do, it's beautiful in its own way.

the other day i was coming back home from office, gurgaon to noida, switching from the yellow line to the magenta line, and just standing there waiting i started noticing how insane the metro actually is as a piece of engineering. this thing was designed decades ago and it's still quietly changing how millions of people live their lives every day.

think about it, running almost 18 hours a day, non stop. the longest break it gets is maybe 10-15 seconds at a station, and even during that the ac's running, the electronics are on. compare that to a car, which would probably overheat in a few hours, forget running it non stop for 18, everyday, for decades.

and the amount of people it handles is way beyond anything the engineers who built it could've imagined at the time. sometimes there's not even enough space to breathe, people get irritated, get into arguments over how packed it is. but the metro doesn't care about any of that. it doesn't slow down, doesn't stop functioning, doesn't complain that it's overloaded. it just keeps going (okay yes it does stop sometimes, i know, just let me have this).

that got me thinking about all the tiny design decisions the engineers must've made. why the wheels are metal and not something else, probably to cut down on downtime and faliures. how does anything even last for decades like that? it honestly feels impossible. even software engineers, who you'd think plan ahead, are constantly switching stacks, breaking things into microservices, changing tech every couple years just to keep up. but the metro is just... one seamless design. plastic seats, metal everywhere. even the handles on the top rail are metal, not some cloth or nylon strap like you'd find on a bus. almost everything in there is built to survive.

and have you ever noticed the top of the train where it touches those overhead wires that are basically just live electricity? how does it keep drawing power at like 120 km/h without the contact rubbing everything down or damaging the wire? there's barely any loose screws or bolts anywhere either, nothing rattling or falling apart over time. and yet if just one train on the route breaks down, the entire line gets affected.

i don't have answers for most of the design or architectural choices they made while building this thing. but every day i ride it, i appreciate it a little more, how it makes crossing that stupid kalindi bridge so much easier lol. i really don't think the metro gets appreciated enough for what it actually is.

also shoutout to "how it's made", that discovery channel show, for turning me into someone who actually wants to know how things work.