Wednesday, November 4, 2009

The danger of a single story

To start off, this post is a culmination of a large number of things that i have seen or heard, but before that a few things one should know to understand why the idea behind this post is what it is. I am a Google addict and in no way can i imagine a life B.G.(Before Google). Now what that means is that there is hardly a service provided by google that i do not use. And if google goes down. So would most of my contacts, most of what i love, my blog, my conversations with people i admired, the chats that i still read in solitude and in short a part of me would be lost.

Now again the events that led to this post, one was a talk that i heard here(on TED by Chimamanda Adichie), second was a presentation i attended by a Yahoo guy(who was telling us what all they are doing), third was my wish to write a post on living a week without google(I am still working on that), and finally the realisation during and after the Yahoo presentation that there was so much good that's happening, and i was cut off from it, even though i was under the illusion that i am connected to the whole world.

Like most people around me, yahoo was my first email service, but then came google, and with it gradually the plethora of services that it offered to keep us engaged within the google domain. I am not saying that it was a conspiracy to cut us off, and i am not even sure that it applies to anyone else or is it just me that's tied in the bind. But i am unaware of life as it could be outside of google, maybe my future efforts to write a post will make me more enlightened, but as of now i am a frog in the well, albeit a big one(that almost feels like an ocean).

But then why should i limit the thought to things google and !google. As the talk at TED that i mentioned above very rightly shows that the same applies to the real world. The talk of real world reminds me now, there is another talk by Arundhati Roy that follows similar thoughts.

Of course i am not saying anything new here, but its just a reminder to myself that there are always better things in the world. No matter how good and comfortable u are at present. One must constantly strive to get out of the cocoon, challenge the comfort zones and make way for things that could bring about changes for the better.

2 comments:

makhau said...

nice read. i like that B.G. funda... :)

Anshul said...

Sirjee..gd to read your free flowing thoughts exclusively..!!