Quantity we have, now we need Quality...

I was recently witness to an incident that made me wonder what does it mean to be alive but not be able to live the way one wanted to. I was sitting in a hospital with a friend of mine waiting for the doctor when a boy was brought in, probably in his teens, for what appeared to be clearly a suicide attempt. The conversation around the boy indicated that he had taken some pesticide or rat poison lying around the house. What was of particular interest is the fact that it took the doctor hardly fifteen minutes to diagnose the patient and send him off. Whatever was needed was available at hand and at no point in the whole event was anyone morbidly tensed as to the fate of the boy. Everyone there knew and believed that the boy will be saved. It is this very feeling that made me wonder what was it that could be missing in the whole sequence of events. At this point of time through whatever means there are amenities available all over the country which may not have been possible in the not very distant past. But what was missed in the whole episode are the reasons which could have triggered the boy, I am almost sure that there will be nothing done to address the reasons for the same.

On a very similar vein, recently a batchmate of mine passing out this year from college was worried about kids said to be just barely above the permissible age of child labour(15 yrs.) working in our hostel canteens. We did not want them to be just thrown out of the work because we did not know where they were going to end up next. A short interview with the child revealed that he worked there along with his father for a meagre sum of money, asked if he wanted to study he said no he did not want to(I cant blame him for it, i don't remember kids actually thinking that education is necessary, the realization comes only later).

As i remember Alvin Toffler the renowned futurist in his books had predicted an age when services and goods will be produced in such quantities that they will be available to the common man. Its in the same age that we are living right now. We did not actually cross the eras of telegraphs and telephones and jumped directly into this age with mobile phones. In the process i feel we lost the ability to innovate and improve upon and bring the changes as an improvement in our lives, rather than as a service. Yes its an era of global cooperation and sharing, but as i recently heard, its the local solution to global problems that is going to save the world. No matter how much we become like one another, its managing our differences and understanding them that's going to make us succeed.

Now merely increasing the quantity would not have the required effect on our lives that we desire, or at least i desire. The need for maintaining high standards of quality in every field of our endeavour, is what is going to bring forward the next revolution in our life.

What am I?

No its not a philosophical question that i have set out to answer, i am just trying to figure out what am i going to do for the rest of my life. I was on a vacation for the last one week, and that gave me some time to think over things away from the daily grind, and the worst thing is i still haven't come up with something concrete. I thought i want to be a guy who built something new, something that would change the way people live, something that would make the world a better place, I was always happier when i found out something new that i didn't know before, and u figured that's what i am going to be doing. But as of late, i think i am becoming more of a system admin, the kind of guy everyone looks up to as doing a great job but no one aspires to be.

I am not getting any new ideas, am not writing anything great, no code, no thoughts, nothing... I am just turning out blank day in and day out. Do people have dry spells too, i hope they do, because unless there is something like that, i would have a really difficult time coming out of something that doesn't exist.