Throughout the years, there have been countless attempts by educators and parents to glamorize the academic pursuits of science and technology. Whether it was financial incentives, or catchy tunes on PBS children’s programs, for many, the battle usually ends in bitter defeat. What they should be doing is speaking to kids in a language that they understand — rap and hip-hop.

At least that’s Rajeev Bajaj’s theory, and the 39-year-old engineer from Fremont, Calif. is putting his ideas into motion. From the San Jose Mercury News:

Bajaj recently spent $15,000 of his own money forming an independent record label and hiring musicians to perform four rap and hip-hop songs he wrote in praise of the engineering profession. He hopes his debut album, “Geek Rhythms,” will convince America that engineers indeed are cool.

Sure, that sounds about right. A rap album entitled “Geek Rhythms” from a chemical engineer in his late thirties can’t possibly fail to make that point.

Hopefully, a friend or family member will sit him down and introduce him to the term “irony.” After all, his lyrics are brimming with it:

I pack more heat in a computer chip than any man
there is more than most can handle
the trick is to protect the circuit and conduct the heat
without causing to short circuit

You pack more heat in a computer chip than any man? That’s quite a claim, and will surely do nothing to end all the senseless gang violence erupting between Intel and AMD engineers on the tree-lined streets of Mountain View. Still, his underlying motive is shared by others:

“Trying to put a different face on engineering is very important,” said Leann Yoder, executive director of the Junior Engineering Technical Society.

“I just wish it wasn’t this face”

Ultimately, Bajaj has plenty of personal incentive to see his delusion become a reality:

Being brainy was nothing to be embarrassed about when Bajaj was growing up in India. He said it wasn’t until he immigrated to the United States in the ’90s to earn his master’s and doctorate degrees in chemical engineering that he “found out that engineers are geeks and social misfits.”

He didn’t really care. His wife and two young daughters adored him. Priyanka, now age 7, drew him pictures of all the things she wanted to build: space buses and shrink-ray guns like the one in the movie “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.” That’s when it hit him.

“I started to deal with the fact that my kids were going to go to school here,” said Bajaj, chief executive of SemiQuest, a Fremont start-up that’s designing a new way to polish silicon wafers.

“I want their ambition or their desire to not get filtered by the high school experience of what the biases are. I would like them to feel cool about whatever they’re doing.”

Little does he realize that when his daughters enter high school, they’ll feel cool by telling their friends that rapping Bajaj is really just a crazy uncle from India. They can make father proud by saying that he suffers from mercury poisoning. How else will they be able to explain these lyrics:

I am an Engineer
Respect my mind
I made D.C from A.C been trying since B.C

I am an Engineer
Respect my mind
I made the refrigerator to make your ice freeze better

I am an Engineer
Respect my mind
I made the airplane, car and motorcycle

I am an Engineer
Respect my mind
So bow down when u see me down town

I’ll defintely bow down, but only to avoid eye contact. It’s just that, see, it would be awkward for us to run into each other downtown, and share insincere pleasantries. Especially after I called you delusional. I’m sure you understand.

Following a spade of mainstream press reports, Bajaj’s album climbed from 231,392 to 5,716 on Amazon.com’s sales charts. And all joking aside, it’s a noble effort, with good intentions, and it would be great to see it succeed. In fact, I know a few folks that I’m going to buy this for. It would be the most passive-aggresive way to get them to stop talking to me.

San Jose Mercury News: Geeksta rap (free registration required)
Day to Day/NPR: Geeksta rap brings education to music