Thursday, March 26, 2009

Latent Talent

The other day I had a chat with one of my friends and realized how technology actually helps in reversing the progression we had made.

We are an infinitely large bunch of fellow humans who are endowed with certain special talents to keep us ‘up’. As they say, each one of us is unique like the other??? As a child we are often made to attend many classes, karates, swimmings, crickets, dancings, and god knows what all. To ‘sharpen’ the talents that we have in each other. This reminds me of a humor. A woman in her teens is asked about her hobbies , on which she mentions - classical dance. The person questioning her asks whether she has trained in it, on which she replies so because she learned it in a ‘class’. (Class-ical dance, perhaps???).

But the point being, with the technological advent, we have left behind us the ‘classical’ talents that we have imbibed or were forced to imbibe?

Some non-classical talents also got imbibed for which we had natural flair for.

Like for example the art of sketching…it is like of those skills which have to be nurtured  with time. As time progresses, the more one sketches, the more he/she masters the art. But with the ‘demands’ of  technology, todays artists dwell more on what is called as digital art i.e mixing various technological mediums with the hand drawn sketches. There is nothing wrong in doing this, but the debate about giving ‘full human’ justice to the product is the key. Painters who toiled for several hours, days together to make one painting are set aside by these ‘digital painters’ who with their powerful imagination come up with their product much before a hand can do it.

Same goes with the art of writing letters. The age of emailing and sms-ing has taken a set back with the traps these technological relievers give. The dnt for don’t, the g8 for great, the f9 for fine, the modern lingo is fast replacing the customary English language. It is considered hep by the junta. The saving or eating up of certain letters in the words or replacing them in a certain frame is another matter of debate. The point being, how much should be expose ourselves to the technology to ride us or how to strike a balance between technological advancements and human skills, so that we cannot mention to anyone that…oh yeah, I have a ‘latent talent’?

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

NoNo???

The nano revolution that started yesterday made me start a blog. My first reaction when the car was announced was Nai-No’.

The nano generation as the world calls it, is going to be ‘in’ thing in the future. But does this ‘nano’-technology applied everywhere going to be fruitful to the cities?

Ofcourse, one must appreciate the concept and the efforts that went on to make a world class car with the price as it bets, but the question of its effects (adverse or favorable) on the interface that it is going to ply is of tremendous potential.

If one looks at the Nano and its repercussions on the Indian cities, one does worry as to where and how are the Indian roads going to take the additional ‘pressure’.

We are anyways ‘raping the cities’ in the pretext of ‘development’

It is going to be like the mobile revolution which has eluded us of many manificient things which not many of us have realized. Where do we here the chirping of the birds, where are those birds which used to fly and give a manificent feature in the colourful palette of the sky? We are looking nature a-part in the pretext of development.

The issue of these ‘comfort’ seekers is not restricted to the roads itself, we will need additional parking spaces, where the hell is the authority adding such spaces. Every family will eventually ‘give birth’ to this additional member in the family which needs so called parking space. 

With the kind of monsters that run on the streets, the records show a record of almost 350 nos of two wheelers being registered in the Indian city of Pune and the number of two wheelers almost double every 7 years. Considering this astonishing number of ‘comforts’ plying on the road, the nano should be a strict NONO.