Few thoughts

I have hibernated enough. Resuming now, after realising that blogging is not a bad habit after all. For those of us who have mostly been working in the IT industry, we might hardly find time to do anything else. Amidst all this, there are people who continue to pursue their passions as their main goal and are able to treat their job as just an occupation. Hats off to them.

But anyway, I feel we may not find many people who say that they have enough time on their hands. When I got some time off work, I found I had plenty of time, with absolutely nothing to do. I dont remember the last time I found myself so free to do anything. No, not even the summer vacations during schooling, not even the break after the college, this was something different. I was thinking, what are the other professions I can choose, what can I do other than staring at the computer in a cubicle for the rest of my life. You could be working on an advanced technology, could be involved in an Apple notebook design or could be designing a silicon like 'Atom' that would go into handhelds and netbooks, but a question comes at the end of it all, a strange one indeed. I was generally observing the daily happenings in and around my house, people doing different kinds of jobs -rushing back to their homes at around 5pm, generally observing 'lives' and things around. It seemed as if I was doing something strange at 5pm that I never did for the past 5 years! What have I done all these years inside the air-conditioned office infront of my laptop was the question. It seemed as if the whole of the time that has gone past is gone so fast. Why are we so addicted to the computer, one day without broadband and we are handicapped. Look at our dependencies..And we are talking of some billions of interconnected devices by 2015, each individual owning a PC- atleast for basic browsing purpose like a netbook (I am not doing an advertising for Intel's Atom here!), each student having a mini PC etc. Schools might not see a library anymore, there may be no more written exams, no visitors to book shops, just imagine where the world might be heading with the so-called technology.

Slightly digressing... now, there are thousands of villages in India. There are villages in which there are many old people who have been abandoned by their children, have no basic amenities, no way to earn and they cry at the sight of someone giving them a 10 Rupee note. Yes, this has happened and I am not exaggerating. There are people even in the so-called well developed cities like Bangalore who think that sending their girls to college will spoil them and stop their education at the school-level. They get them some work and get them married, making them slaves for the rest of their lives. And it is very difficult to change the minds of these people. There are people involved in building constructions who take their kids along to play in the heaps of mud and stones, who would never see school or learn to write or read. There are places where there is only one school without any proper facilities. Are there no rural development authorities or can nothing be done about it? Talk about NGOs- of course they do a good job, but there are remote places where they don't approach. These are basic problems and they will remain so, forever in this great land of ours.

And on the other hand, we will continue to enhance our technical knowledge, develop more concise, smaller, thinner, power-saving processors and laptops and handhelds with higher performance, continue partying, visiting countries, making more and more money and become technologically well advanced. We will continue to spend millions of dollars on sending someone for space walk, while these people in our villages will continue to be in the dark not able to digest the value of a 10 rupee note. It sounds ridiculous. How do we bridge this gap? Who will strive towards it? Who wants to strive towards improving this? How selfish we really are. We are sitting within our own small minds, thinking of how to better ourselves either technically or personally, but how do we attain overall growth? Why shouldn't we think big? When it comes to thinking big- we think- 'Ok, I will write GMAT and do an MBA from Harvard or do an MS from MIT and work for Apple in Cupertino!' Really big! Too big infact! Just some schooling and professional advancement? Is this all we can come to? Where is the real growth? Of course, we cannot go build a nation or change the lives of billions, but I feel we can definitely do something more than what we are doing. It requires a heart, some effort and if we are able to touch the hearts and lives of even a few people, it would give us immense pleasure and growth than designing a Macbook!