Aotearoa in 20: A robotics engineer turned organic farmer
Tuesday, 8 September 2020
From engineer, to software developer, to project manager, to immigration advisor to organic farmer, the Sikh religion has driven Malkiat Singh’s lifelong love of learning. He shares his story for Aotearoa in 20, a Stuff special project.
The word Sikh literally means to learn. I would summarise my life as being destined to learn. It’s my duty, as well as my fortune to be able to learn new skills and to be able to help people with those skills. If we can appreciate each human being in our life and learn from their positive experiences and their mistakes, that is the summary of a Sikh.
It’s not what you have that makes you special - it’s what you can do with it that makes a difference.
Growing up in Chandigarh, in India’s Punjab province, I always wanted to be a professional basketballer (I had been selected for the Indian under-16 squad, but got injured during the training camp) or a doctor.
I was often injured, so spent a lot of time on bedrest. My father didn’t want us to have a television, so I had a lot of alone time, and a lot of time to develop a lifelong interest in learning. I wouldn’t describe myself as one, but I like the word polymath (‘someone of wide interest’).
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When I was 16, my father arranged for me to take a government-organised mental aptitude test. After two days of testing, they gave you a full analysis of your personality. It was shockingly accurate. And it recommended that instead of medicine, I study at a specialist scientific institute.
In 1963, the Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru had set up a training institute under the Indian Council for Scientific and Industrial Research aimed at improving India’s skilled workforce. It teaches nanotechnology, robotics and mechatronics and every year, at least 3000 students aged 16 to 20 from across the country take the entrance exam.
There’s a mini-industry grown up around that exam: lots of training centres say they will prepare you for the test, which covers mental aptitude, English skills and physical problem solving. Seventy-five students a year are selected. If you get in, you’re considered either lucky or really smart: I think I was lucky. I wasn’t exceptional, but I like to make the most of whatever ability I have.
The first two years were very strict: the campus had armed security and you couldn’t leave during the day without permission. After two years the top 15 students went into mechatronics and industrial automation. Again, I was lucky to make the cut.
It all became very relaxed: we had to teach ourselves, decide our own topics of study and collaborate on a project. I learned to become entrepreneurial, self-directed and to study widely. My group built a robot - an autonomous robotic vehicle from scrap parts, at a total cost of about $100, with the motor taken from an old car window. I was the team leader: I wasn’t the cleverest, there were some geniuses, but I was the most sociable. That robot has helped me get a lot of jobs in New Zealand.
Graduates from the institute were in high demand. Most received multiple job offers from big corporations afterwards. I could have earned three times as much in New Delhi, but I went to an electronics company in Chandigarh, because I wanted to stay close to family. The company kept seconding me to their factory in Delhi anyway, so I quit.
A relative told our family how it was now possible to study abroad, so I looked into mechatronics degrees. Austria, Australia and New Zealand offered bachelor’s degrees - even though my qualification was four years’ extensive diploma and in the Indian market regarded above a bachelors, it was not considered the same overseas. Of the three, New Zealand was the easiest to get a study visa.
I arrived at the Manukau Institute of Technology in 2006 and I found they were teaching similar things to the institute. Their robot was much more expensive, but it couldn’t do things our robot could.
I looked at the syllabus and realised I knew most of it, and I saw the head of department and said ‘I think you should give me the whole degree now for free’. He agreed if each lecturer agreed, I could structure my own degree course choosing papers on topics I hadn’t covered.
I ended up with an engineering technology degree, although nothing like what a regular computing student would do.
For my first six months in New Zealand, I just couldn’t find work. I’d arrived quite charged-up: welding, metalwork, electronics, any job, I’ll do it. I’d walk 13km to an industrial area and hand around my CV and get the comment ‘oh Indians have great CVs, but no real skills’.
I didn’t see it as racism - just that some bad Indians may have created this impression, and we have to fix it.
Maybe some of the people who rejected me had some feelings of racism, but I never experienced it. The only racism I’ve faced has been in some nightclubs where they wouldn’t let me in because I was wearing a turban: ’Oh, no hat, mate.’ Other than that, I would say only drunk people are racist.
Because I smile and I wear a turban, I think it creates interest. If people want to touch my turban, I say ‘OK, fine’, because if you don’t understand something it creates fear, and I want people to realise I am just like them.
If it wasn’t for the strict disciplinary training I’d had, I could’ve struggled here. I got to a point where I had literally no money. Other students said I could work with them at a supermarket which was paying $6 an hour, well below the minimum wage. I had to do it, but I made sure not to compromise my studies, worked hard, got good grades, and because my marks were above 90 per cent, I got work as a peer tutor and in the campus library instead. I also ended up working at a petrol station.
My first job after graduation was for an Auckland software developer. My degree was in Java coding, and they worked in a language called C++ but I convinced them I would learn.
That culture of self-learning from the institute has really helped me.
I then applied for my residency and after talking to agents and people who’d used agents I realised you could do it yourself - I studied the manuals and it is all quite straightforward. I know this contradicts the industry I am working in now!
After three-and-a-half years, I had a chat to the managing director and told him I was leaving - I’d had recruiters offer me higher salaries.
I ended up working as a software engineer in Christchurch. The recruiter toured me around the city and I thought it was a beautiful place. I liked the company. Then came the earthquakes.
The shock of the earthquakes had influenced me - I realised how far I was from family and how life could be taken away from you at any time. I ended up quitting my job and going back to India for six months. I’m glad I did: it was the last time I spent with my mum, who died in 2015.
I’d also been pursuing a parallel career: in 2009 I had formed a company which is now called Carmento (a merger of the words care and mentoring).
If you haven’t visited India, it’s quite difficult to comprehend how huge the difference is between those with privilege and those without. It’s not that way in New Zealand, and my natural sense was very aligned with the New Zealand sense: if you’ve done something, it doesn’t make you special. Circumstance shapes people - life is part coincidence and part hard work. If someone is born to a family without privilege and is working as a labourer, that person’s potential will never be realised because they cannot get out of that cycle. Fortune helps some grow, and others not. So I liked the idea I could help people realise their potential.
Carmento only enrolled students into courses that would actually help them build a future. We would set their expectations and tell them what skills they needed before leaving India. For many, we would tell them the reality, lost them to other agents, and they would go and do exactly what I had told them not to. But we didn’t want to contribute to the cycle of exploitation of migrant students, we wanted to give them firm foundations to make a successful life in New Zealand. I’m in the immigration business because I want to help others to develop and keep learning new skills.
When I returned to New Zealand, I studied graduate diplomas in project management and production management at Ara Institute of Canterbury. As part of the course, I had to do an unpaid internship - I did mine at a company called Tait Communications, and ended up staying six months. I call it unpaid, but it was paid in so many ways, I learned so much. I ended up getting a job at Tait - they wanted a project manager with three years experience, but I talked them into hiring me instead.
I automated their project management office so all the projects were visible and you could see the impact on other projects when you assigned new tasks to staff. At the same time, I was teaching myself website development on the side.
A lazy engineer will make a great automation specialist - he will think ‘I don’t want to do that job, so how do I automate it’? I’m thinking that right now about how I automate the watering of our vegetable patch here at home.
I always had a dream that one day I would have a lifestyle block. Last October, I moved to a rural property in Kingseat, near Pukekohe, with my wife Rajvinder and our two-year-old son Gurfateh. We also have our extended family here: my father and mother-in-law arrived here for a visit the day before lockdown, so they are still here. She’s missing her friends in India, but we think it’s better they stay here.
My father is also here - we want him to stay permanently and he likes it here. I’ve convinced him to study English at MIT. In 2006, he sponsored me to study in New Zealand, so now I am doing the reverse.
We have four cows and two water buffalo - they’re the boss, if there’s something they want, they won’t let the cows come close. We’re keeping them as pets, but also to use the manure as fertiliser.
Our organic farming started during lockdown. I wasn’t planning to do it for another five, ten years down the road, but we were stuck at home, I had more time so I wasn’t commuting. We have a field sewn with mustard greens, a real super-food, from which you can make Sarsan da Saag, a staple Punjabi dish. We also grow radishes, lettuce, lemons, kale, spinach, beetroot and turnips.
As Kingseat Organics, we’ve already started selling the produce. I also want to create an eco-system where animals and plants co-exist: I want to use the animal’s manure for a biogas system to create energy and use the CO2 waste to feed plants.
I’ve always got a lot of projects on the go – I’m also developing a careers website. For me, shame is a big inspiration factor. Some are inspired by money, some by appreciation - for me, if I make a declaration to my wife that I am going to do something, I’ve got to do it!
As told to Steve Kilgallon for ‘Aotearoa in 20’, a Stuff project.