Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Technology Menace

“Ford technology allows car to park itself” this is the headlines on The Gulf News business section I read few minutes ago. Congratulations Ford!!! For your another feat, for another important step towards making we humans further dumber by not making us use our brain for simple task like parking a car.

Driving is already made so easy with automatic transmission. You don’t have to stretch your brain to learn simple hand and feet coordination to drive old stick shift car. It is so dumb and old fashioned!! Isn’t it?

A kid doesn’t have to learn and understand, how to calculate as simple as the square root of 5+4. A simple inexpensive calculator makes it so easy, with just few clicks. For the annual biology project submission, your child need not strain his brain in the library, everything is so easily available in the Google. Just put the right key words and press Enter and there you have elaborate readymade content. Why to waste time in the library when you can plan another game on the play station in that time.

We stopped writing letters anymore. Emails, sms and mobile phones are so easy. Our fingers strain and pain when we hold the pen to write a simple one page letter, these days.

I might sound like an old, technology averse person. I don’t mind if you call me so, because I still believe, working hard ways makes us more strong fundamentally. I would still prefer to use my fingers to calculate the simple numbers, rather than use a calculator. I would prefer to use stick shift car and use my own senses to parallel park my car. I would love to go to a library and sit there in a silent corner, enjoying the typical smell of hundreds and thousands of books, and come across various other interesting intelligent subject matter, while searching for what I need. I would love to sit and write letters to my family and friends, not because I don’t know how to send emails, but to give a personal touch of my bonding with them.

My love for technology is limited to make me work smarter, rather than making me dumber person. Technology supports me, not governs me.

Monday, December 1, 2008

When will we give them a befitting reply?

She called me and said:"Hemanshu, my sister is dead. She is killed in Sarojini Nagar bomb blast". Till then any blast or any carnage was just another story of the newspaper to me. Then she came to meet me on her way back to USA and narrated her heartbreaking story. The dreams her sister had. The struggle she went through to establish herself as a fashion designer. The struggle she had undergone to ensure her younger sisters are well educated and married suitably. But before she could realise her own dreams, she was killed. I saw her pictures. The beautiful girl in the prime of her youth was a bare, charred, stiff dead body. Almost after 2 years even today it gives me goose bumps.



200 people are dead in Mumbai terrorist firing. Think of the pain which each family would undergo. The loss of a family member and on top of it beaurocratic procedures to claim the dead body. But who cares? It is only those who suffer can understand the agony.



The common man can die in dearth of security, but Mayawati, the chief minister of UP needs an army of 400 security men. A soldier might die because he is ill equipped because there is no money to buy equipment but there is money to buy SUVs for the MLAs and MPs with criminal history. You cannot expect much from them, because they are either too illiterate to understand nuisances of the world or come from such criminal background where they themselves have been killing people.



Every 6 months there is a killing spree in India. No matter how much ever they refute, everyone knows who is responsible for it. What are we waiting for? How much blood spill do we want before acting? How many famlies we want to be bereaved? Why not there is an end to it?

Its now time for action. No matter whether it is armed or unarmed solution. I as an Indian Citizen want an end to this killing spree.