Month: March 2023

We all know that old adage about how beauty is only skin deep. I had a first hand experience recently.

After the surgery performed on a family relative, the hospital handed over a DVD to me, saying it contained the video of the operation. This was a first, for me at least. After hunting for a way to load up a DVD (who uses these anymore!?), I thought to see what it is that was recorded.

“Guts and glory”, they say. Guts there was, glory maybe only for the doc who succeeded in his work. And for the person being operated upon of course, that they made it out safe and sound. But the innards of a human being… that stuff does not look pretty!

The Creator in his infinite mercy has made our outsides look so cool compared to the slushy mushy almost yucky insides. But the outside, is far too temporary. White hair, bald spots, reduced energy, wrinkles, crows feet, saggy skin, warts and all – these escape no one, not royalty, not celebrities, not the most beautiful and handsome people in the world. And yet, we run after exactly these things. We must ask ourselves why.

Transporting a computer to India in the 1960s was no easy feat. Apart from using a bullock cart, and also breaking a wall, the team had to get the machine through road blocks that collected customs taxes for road maintenance, for which the money had to come through additional AID grants.

The computer room wasn’t finished, and monsoon season had left an inch of water on the floor where the computer was to go. To add to the difficulties, the power in India ran at 50 cycles, while the computer needed 60 cycles.

Through numerous telegrams between IBM and Kanpur, they were eventually able to convert the power and adjust the voltage, and after three long weeks, the machine was up and running.

We today have the power of 1000s of those super computers, just in the palm of our hands. According to Barclays’ analysts, if human productivity was 100 units in 1765 (when the steam engine was invented), it increased to 1500 in the 1960s, and has doubled to over 3000 in just 5 decades thereafter. We are so productive but has that led to increase happiness as well? We should each introspect, and make peace with whatever we already have.

What are we without tech today? I couldn’t even be writing this blog. The word blog itself wouldn’t exist.

How far have we come? Ridiculously far, by all accounts.

Even a country like India – today known as an IT superpower – just a few decades ago was nowhere on the tech-map.

Even the premier Indian institutes of today, like the IITs, did not have computers. The story of IIT Kanpur getting it’s first (super)computer is thought provoking.

It was back in the 60s, or August 1963 to be precise. Transporting the IBM 1620 computer to IIT Kanpur was no easy feat. At that time, the bad roads of Kanpur made it difficult to transport such heavy and fragile electronic equipment. The team was worried that the vibrations from the truck could damage the electronic circuits, so they decided to transport it by bullock carts with inflated tires!

But the difficulties didn’t end there. When the computer arrived at the IIT Kanpur computer center, they found that the door was too small to take it in. The team had to break down a wall to install the computer!

Concluded tomorrow!

Technology is just wonderful. It’s made us solve problems that we previously couldn’t even fathom overcoming.

So tech is cool this way.

But some tech is also scary. It’s making us closer and closer to goldfish. No, not the color of the iPhone case, but our attention span.

Apparently our attention span is now lesser than that of a goldfish, some 8 seconds or less. If you’ve read this far, then congratulations, you do not belong in an aquarium!

But as if phones aren’t distracting enough, people now look to their smartwatches first! Mid-conversation yesterday, a friend looked at his watch, realized he got a message, so then took out his phone to read it in full.

It’s not like I was hurt, because he didn’t interrupt me while I was speaking… He interrupted himself because he was the one who was talking in the first place!

Apparently Google Glass was going to be a cool thing, where’d you’d get all notifications and inputs in your glasses itself. And then they decided to shelve the project. Good they did that perhaps. We may then go from attention span of a goldfish, to what? An amoeba?

Much fanfare has been made and much more has been written about Yuval Harari’s book called Sapiens. This post isn’t about that book at all. I wish it could be, but I haven’t read it.

This post is simply about the word itself. Sapiens.

I’ve always read “homo-sapiens” in so many places and never thought about it much. What does it mean? Oh it means human beings. That’s what we learned in school, and that’s what I remember. End of story.

Until I accidentally highlighted the word on my Kindle last night. The Kindle has a nifty feature where a highlighted word is immediately and automatically defined using the in-built dictionary.

And it threw up the meaning of the word sapien. “Wise”, it said. Wow. Wise. We have named ourselves wise. We are wise, at times. But mostly we are angry, cranky, greedy, jealous, scared, anxious… the list is endless.

We should live up to our biological name better.