Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Bijli yahan bhi jaati hai.

Believe it or not, but it happened twice in past 12 hours. Power outage in Phoenix.
 
Suddenly, all your electronics gudgets will be ringing alarms or blinking on being reset. Life becomes hell and you helpless. You can't wake up coz your GE radio-cum-watch is hung, even microwave's watch is blacked out, yeah but without AC the heat outside due to rising Sun will not allow you to sleep any longer. Even if you woke up, neither you have cold water in shower nor your fridge and electric stoves are working... that time you appreciate the low-power consumption keyword of "Centrino" from Intel and neighbouring hotel's free wireless connection.
Its an irony that, you are connected to the world thru most latest technology inspite being in miserable condition caused by the habit of living in technological world !!!

Sunday, July 18, 2004

How long to wait...

After a long time, atlast my hands clicked "create a new post", and to add to earlier listed reasons of weblogging, this time the motivation is very different. Sat to write my thoughts, or say to capture my ideas to get myself reminded of it in future. Unlike many people, I do not write a diary, instead my thoughts flow thru e-mails, sms, talk, or penning on the last a few pages of nearest found notebook, but the problem with that is its hard to retrieve and that doesn't serve as reminder. Yeah, I have tried outlook "task" mechanism too but that works only in office.... ok, whatever after this background and justification of my log I shall come to the point.
 
As told by the title of this blog, sometimes I struggle with myself to get the answers to this question, that how long can we or should we wait to start doing something meaningful for this society? When I say society, its scope varies widely which starts right from the people around me and upto the thought of this whole world as society. Very recently for past couple of months I have extended my current scope to global society. :-) Well, but this idea is not that wide scoped, instead it has a boundary of a village or a town in India, specially not around Bangalore.
 
Yeah, so I was thinking of establishing some kind of school level science lab for my village. More specifically, my idea is not to make a school style lab instead to bring up a workshop which has basic scientific principles demonstrated in practical and meaningful ways. It will also have basic machine tools and ofcourse a x86 computer dabba. The ultimate purpose of something like this is to bring-in the awareness of science and nurturing engineering thinking in people right from the beginning and in the way which will be useful to them. Yes, it would be open to all and will have all the motivational fundas those are needed to pull the people inside the structure. There won't be any fee, or may the minimal fee which is generally needed to inculcate discipline. I have no great expectations from this, other than just making people aware of the things what they generally don't see, or get scared to when see in a city. Its like just giving information and once they have information eventually (though with very slow pace) they will start developing interest in it. But, I am not looking forward for some great breakthru or something like this, I just want to create some fumes and lets see how everybody reacts. By now we all have realized the fact that access to infomation is the key to growth and interest, otherwise how each of you started this blog thing, or why anthropologists try to lobby against MTV and other channels like that? When information is available, it takes up some cells in your brain and as the brain does a brute-force search at times, these cells happen to get refreshed and influence the results of queries, and then slowly becomes significant enough to influence your interests and decisions. Pardon me for my own crude explanation of "how brain works", atleast do not tell it to Manik. ;-)
Ok, so now its time to think about the logistics. Well, the first thing I do whenever this kind of idea hits me is to pick the phone and talk to my father and trouble him to go to our village and then talk to people there and then come out with a appealing proposal with cost and feasibility, BUT... this time its not possible, coz I am in different time zone and he should be asleep by now. So, I have sent a mail to me to serve as reminder for taking this thing forward after coming back to Bangalore (ah, one more week).
 
Its strange that I get so much of impulse of doing something like this and most probably once I am back to Bangalore, I would be far too busy in other "more important" tasks and all these stays in blog or task lists. There I have to convince my girlfriend to marry me, have to stay in office for long hours (though without much productivity), worry about food and accomodation (as if I do not have those already) and do all the other things those "sound" more important to me. Then I'll think that, let me get settled in life properly then I'll do all this... and the life goes on without reaching to a "settled" frame of mind forever and the wait never ends....
 
Will there be any moment in our life which will bring up the priority of this thought above other ever-lasting worries of life? How great we need to be to start doing something for the people who live hundred times below our so called greatness?
 
I salute people like, Dr. Devi Shetty, Dr. V J Kurian and Anna Hazare.