Most of the physically challenged people i have seen are visually impaired. But they are comfortable walking across that big bus station. The word comfortable becomes void once they walk over some shop or person. When they stumble, most people nearby just give them way and become busy in their own terms. Sometimes few lend a hand to take them to the platform the Challenged person needs to go. Most of the time i saw who helped the Challenged had a fraction of second to hesitate first. But immediately they wear “don’t care about others view” mask and start helping. The “view of society fear” is getting encoded in our neurons as we grow old and stop us from things which we are supposed to do out of instinct.

There were few occasions which gave me opportunity to help the Challenged. When ever i use to take their hand and lead them to their destination. They felt most comfortable walking. The time they take to cross the distance with a person’s help is very much lesser comparing to what if they would have walked themselves. After leaving them in their destination my heart always felt like having achieved something.

The last person who gave me the chance to help him, came from a remote area in Bangalore. And he worked there in a textile company. I saw him while i was drinking milk in a nearby shop. I thought he would be regular person who knew the platforms & had the instinct to walk across. But he stumbled very often. So, i followed him and inquired “which platform he wants to go?”. He told he is walking towards the Intercity bus stand & he wants to catch a bus to Dharwad. The main problem we had is, the choice of language for conversation. We managed speaking in Kannada & english along the walk. He told, his name is Manjunath & he is going for a marriage in his native,Dharwad. I told him i knew Dharwad through Sudha Narayanamurthy‘s books. When we reached intercity bus stand & the corresponding platform of Dharwad buses there awaited two most striking lessons of my life. First lesson hit me, when i inquired the conductor of the nearby bus (which was bit superior in service), the conductor informed that, they won’t take this kind! of people. Then we decided to wait for some more time. The second lesson hit me, when Mr.Manjunath wanted to go to public toilet nearby. I took him till inside. I felt bad when he was swinging his hand in the air looking for sections to pass urine. It was one of the bad scenes to be carried throughout my life. Then a normal bus came and he boarded the bus. He was happy that he saved lot of time navigating. I was very happy & sad.

Happy because helped saving someone’s precious time. Sad because the state of facilities & help available for the challenged people in the society.

Why shouldn’t the challenged people also recognized equally? Why the improvements in the technology are not focusing the problems of the Challenged? Why cost effective or government aided technological innovation is not a reality? Something has to be done towards it.

There are many researches going on in the field of Robotics. Mainly on easy navigation of the robots using some top class algorithms. Then why not its possible to help a person who already has navigation ability but missing a piece to complete the whole. Hope someone comes with the missing piece very soon. The missing piece can be seen as an alternate till they get donated eyes.

In the meanwhile a kind request to the readers: If possible, please help the visually impaired to cross or reach places. Let’s be the missing piece till it becomes a reality.

The above story is an outcome of my thoughts about: the technological advancements making many small things irrelevant in our life. How people feel when they see zapper in restaurants or ice cream shops or  in bakery? Most of them won’t even notice what that machine does to the flies/moths/any flying insect.

The machine is an clever invention. But to exploit the natural behaviour of insects. In his article Richard Dawkins explains it nicely with an example of moth & candle.

These things makes me believe that the more we are getting advanced in technology, the more we are less concerned about the lives of the living beings around us.

The pens of famous writers and poets gets significant notice as the tool which weaved the creativity.

Its simply a lifeless thing. But its a physical evident of our most stressful efforts (exams). It helps us remind our strengths and weaknesses.

Here is the pen which shared important moments with me.

Pen with life

I believe many people have a pen like this, carrying the memories of their time.

Summer of 1991 would have been a memorable ever summer for my grandmother. Because that summer only, I wrote my first letter in my life. I sent that letter to my grandmother. Immediately! after three days I got a reply back from her. I got excited very much. I don’t know what made me so excited. It’s like doing something, which the also elders were doing on those days. And have done something of my own. That happiness is still fresh in my mind.

After that summer the person in me who wants do something “new” had woken up. After that event I started noticing the letters coming to my home. When a post man came it’s an exciting moment. The ultimate happiness came during the festival time. During festival the post man brought home different and colourful greeting cards. Streets were filled with small stalls / shops selling greeting cards, decorative items.  Even though my family was financially not stable at that time my parents use to send greeting cards to most of the relatives. Based on the intimacy of the relationship, the size of the greeting card would change. Another fun is collecting the greeting cards which are coming to my home on those festival days. I use to cut the beautiful images from those cards and stick them on my drawer and backside of my notebooks, inside my geometry box, on my cycle etc.,. Each festival left a footprint! on my belongings reminding me of the happiness of those days.

My grandmother is one of the important persons who made me aware of this postal communication, as she was the head post master of the village where she lived. I used to get excited whenever she sends me a letter telling she is coming to the festival with sweets.

It used to be a wonderful atmosphere when those seasonal merchants selling greeting cards on the roadsides. It added colour to the festive mood.

The winter of 1996 was another milestone in my life. That’s the time we got our first telephone connection at home. It was an amazing improvement in our communication. Communicating a message / greeting had shrunken from days to minutes!!! For more than a year we used to wonder about it, but without ignoring the postal service. Because in my home we didn’t have STD facility and more over cost of making a STD call is not an affordable one. It varied 4-10Rs per minute based on the distance.

As years moved on, the cost of making STD calls started declining slowly. It eased us to make STD calls and exchange greetings. Around 2001 most of the festival wishes we exchanged were through telephone only. When some greeting cards came home then we use to think of like “Oh! Yeah we could have sent a greeting card”, but that feeling is left behind backed by the conveniences of exchanging the wishes over phone in minutes of time.

The years moved slowly and the world, especially India, has been embraced by the technology fever. There was a big boom in Internet. I should not forget the contribution it has done towards communication. The internet became the primary medium of information exchange through the growing free email services. The internet made it possible for the smooth transition of festive mood from the real world to the virtual world. Greeting web sites were flooded on festive seasons. But I don’t know how many have noticed, including me at that time, the decline of roadside seasonal greeting cards sellers. The frequency of letters reduced from 4-6 per week (during 90s) to 2-3 per week. Out of which most of them were marriage invitations, or demise cards.

Then the behemoth of all communication mediums had arrived. The MOBILE PHONE. The mobile phone has made a great revolution in the communication. Even though it was costly at the time of its adoption periods, it started growing exponentially as the price of the handset and the mobile service started declining. Everyone had seen mobile phone as a promising medium of communication. By the end of year 2007 the mobile phone penetration reached till the lower middle class. Thanks to the custom packages provided by the mobile operators (in India) due to the competition. Text messaging became fastest and favourite medium, for most of the young people, to exchange festival greetings. I was so pleased with the easiness in using SMS to convey greetings. Wow!!!

By experiencing all these, I felt that technology is always good. It makes life faster, easier and efficient (looks like a tagline of some consumer goods )

But, something was itching in my mind for a long time. I noticed one thing, very odd though, the number of calls made to relatives became very less. I almost stopped calling most of my relatives, even though they are seconds away through mobile.

The frequency of letters reduced from 2-3 per week to 3-4 per month, out of which 2 are bank statements!!!

Following are the ratiocinates came to my mind:

1. When the technology grows, the life becomes faster.

2. When the life becomes faster, there is less time to stop and think about others (especially relatives)

3. Even though the technology has shrunken the distance between relations, an invisible wall is keep widening between them.

Oh! technology, bring us the love, the mood and the affection we had for festivals & relations across the wall.

Centillion was a famous company of 1970s which provided service of searching of information. If any person wanted to search for any information all he needed to do was write it in a sheet of paper and put in a box which was kept in the post office. The employees (known as crawlers) would take the sheets to the company’s nearest office and bring back the answer sheet which contained advertisement of company which provided a service closest to that of the query.

Centillion collected their revenues through these kinds of advertisements printed behind that result sheets. Centillion’s employees became the highest paid in the world. This went on smoothly for 6 years with Centillion receiving a high response. Many advertisers flooded Centillion’s offices and started giving their advertisements because of Centillion’s penetration in the society. Centillion grew very fast. Its revenue outperformed all other competitors’ revenues. Centillion almost became a monopoly in its business. People started using “Centillion it” to search for any ‘it’(information). So, Centillion decided to expand its operations and services.

First thing it did was to setup an Research Lab. Centillion’s every move was closely watched by the educated people of the society. At the start of 1979 there came a rumour about Centillion providing free postal service. The so called educated society exclaimed with joy “Oh My God (OMG) Free Postal Service!!!!!” Eventually it became true in that following month. Centillion opened postal offices (named “CPost”) all over the country. Initially Centillion’s employees (Crawlers) were given free ID card and were allowed to send free letters. Centillion mandated referrel of its employees as a hold to control the sudden surge. This free postal service became huge hit. It out shadowed all other postal services that existed in that period.

Unlike other players, CPost put text advertisements on the cover so as not to bother customers with too many images. Actually the advertisers were also happy because of the low cost incurred for text advertisements. CPost users once again exclaimed with joy: “What a simplicity!”. Then after two years Centillion started giving free ID cards to everyone. People were happy to the pinnacle. They didn’t mind the text advertisements came on the cover of the letter.

As years passed, Centillion proved the customers “simply the best” operation. Every where people buzzed the word “Centillion”. But one fine day CPost users felt that the advertisements they got on the cover of the letter were more relevant to the content in the letter (which is inside the cover). Initially no body minded it, but slowly CPost users raised voice against this issue. But they couldn’t do anything because CPost was the only mode of communication that they could use. Then they convinced themselves that this is not intentional and the correlation of the ads with the letter’s content is coincidental. The belief continued till the dawn of internet era. Then came the supreme players who were much worse than Centillion: stealing the privacy of customers extended using email. The saga still continues today…..

Will there be any surity for customer’s privacy in this digital world?

I like animation movies because they are close to my childhood dreams. It’s all about doing something extraordinary. Flying cars, speaking rats, striking bolts, clean rivers, world of ants, land of beautiful flowers etc.,.  

I think this inner drive of doing something extraordinary drives the people at Pixar to achieve this level of excellence. More of it is doing something extraordinary in a collaborative way. 

The history of India & its states came to know through various physical sources (Hard copy) like writings on stones, writings on leaves, writings on clothes, cave drawings and old books. These hard copies made history transcend to the future. Kudos to those efforts made by our ancestors.

Now lets see a story. The year is 2183 A.D. Aliens from planet J120X are coming to earth to collect some evidence of the existence of life. They are getting amazed by seeing earth with so many skyscrapers. But when they switch on their Lifectron (A device to tell the existence of life) it shows red light blinking!!!. Then the aliens are calling for some more backup analysts to analyze the places (the existence of life). They are starting investigation from a place where a tall lady statue with a lamp in the hand!!!. Many aliens are sent to various countries with Lifectron. But an alien (J323243432112) in the outer atmosphere of the earth sees only red lights blinking all over the world. One common thing the aliens came across in all the countries is a semi glassed box with 103 jumpy buttons nearby!!!!. Oh my god (aliens’ god J000X) says one alien. “How amazing is it to see earth without even single life. When i came last time it was with full of brightness and many lives with one hand attached to their head with a small device. How come suddenly no life in here??” exclaimed one Jolien (alien). Then Head of the aliens calls Jolice (police of planet of J120X) to check for some Physical evidence of life like stories, pictures. But in all skyscrapers they are finding only small cards with 16 digits of some funny jumbled letters printed. The next widely seen things are soft clothes with complex image printed on them or nothing on them. These soft clothes are almost 11 feet in length. How come there is no physical evidence of life??? The aliens wanted to know the “E”ffect.

The year is 2015. The prime minister of India is Mr.Alu(sorry) Mr.Lalu Prasad Yadav. He suggests the people of nation to use online services to store their information. Because almost all of the online service providers removed the barrier of storage like “6083.64321MB still counting”. Since India became 100% in unethical literacy in computers, People of India stops writing in diaries. And all the news papers become online. People in Oddappatti in Dharmapuri in TamilNadu are reading online news paper in the kiosk setup nearby a tea stall. All government documents are made online. In order to become environment friendly all the nations are agreeing to stop using paper. Almost every text in the world becomes online. Sri Ranga departmental store sent the bill of one Dettol soap to the customer’s email. So, this trend spreads all over the world. No nation is ready to spend money in hard copies everything becomes soft copy. This goes on and on…..

The year is 2082. A crooked minded scientist in PicoLabs, Alapuma National Research Laboratory for Non-destructive weapons,  finds a gas to vaporize all the living beings!!!. He keeps this as a secret. But world’s most intelligence service DIA sorry CIA figures it out. And captures this gas container from the scientist. And tests it in the deserts of Afghanistan. Prior calculation on even Osama Bin Bin Bin Laden (Grand grand grand son of Osama Bin laden) is there he will die. But their more intelligence hides their eye that it is gas. Once they release it in the air the toxic mixes in the air. And all the life in the earth vaporizes within a span of 2 days.

So, in overall computerization has a great advantage. But something as narrated in the above story might happen in future. Why don’t we write on something that will last long but readable without any support???