"It is an amazing thing to be told that the effort needed to extract oil from several feet below the ground, ship it to a refinery, turn it into plastic, shape it appropriately, transport it to a departmental store, buy it and then bring it home for use ...
... is considered to be less effort than what it takes to just wash the spoon when you are done with it and use it again."We are busy and are getting used to such dangerous things. Having a costly life-style is not only careless, but in fact dangerous. It may be okay for rich western countries to follow such life-style, but when a country of over 1 billion population starts adopting to 'use and throw', we are finished ! (I remember the nice words Gandhi had to say sarcastically against the spitting habit of we Indians - "The only thing we need to do to make the British quit our country is to spit together !"
When future generations study about our 'civilization' many centuries later - if human beings exist till then, of course -, then I wonder what will be their judgement ? Anthropology students, I am sure, will discuss something like this :
And, by the way, what is our modern age called ? We had stone age, iron age and what not ! Computer age ? Electronics age ? Science age ? Came across a nice cartoon which compared the different ages and presented an important common factor - which is clearly 'striking' ! Click on the following picture to see it in a new window :
There was a very good discussion on using computers in our village centres. We experimented having computers in three such centres for the last one year or so. Whether it is good and should we go ahead with introducing computers to other centres as well. Though everyone said that computers are important for modern age and future, there were some interesting comments."Many of us don't know how to operate. One or two people only use it. We don't know if what they are doing is work related or if they are just playing"I told them this is not only their problem; but very big IT companies in the world are also 'facing' the same problem. Whether their employees working or are they just chatting with their friends or blogging or social networking through facebook ! (In India, reading the ball-by-ball commentary of cricket matches ?) They don't have a clue and they even try to block blogger, facebook and googlechat in their office network.
Another more important comment was this :
"Things were earlier a bit easy. If we want any data, we will open the register and read it ourselves. Now, we need to wait for this person and ask her to give us the print-out"This is a real challenge. How do we make computer literacy more democratic ? How to encourage all our village activists access computers and use it just like they use calculators ? This is important; otherwise, it will create a 'class' within our team here.
The evolution of our species over the different ages is nicely given in this picture. At the cost of offending the monkeys, let me say that we are coming round a full cycle and are tending towards our early ancestors once again. Except that our tools and techniques have become a bit modern, but the instincts remain the same or even, more pronounced.
We Indians took to the mobile phone technology in the country quite well and the number of mobile consumers is increasing in the country every day. I was thinking, soon we are going to have the mobile number as the Citizenship number in India, instead of the social security number in western countries ! I am sure we will be able to embrace the computer technology as well - if it is utilitarian and useful for the common man - not just as recipients of information but as active users.
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