Sunday, September 27, 2015

Thought Process Outsourcing

Hurrah! Google just turned 17, just one year away from its legal drinking age (maximum parts of the world). The sober teen Google has somehow got into our heads and eroded the human capabilities of thinking, just wondering what the adult Google would account to.

The advent of internet, with highly efficient search engines has shown an easy path to the humans for finding answers to their questions. This is good from one way that we get to save a lot time, and have access to more information than what our ancestors had. On the other hand, there is an adverse effect of limiting our exploratory skills.

One of the dangers of this habit happens to be 'falling for opinions', rather than banking on facts. It is painful to see people sharing weird stuff on social media that carry no logic. All that they see is the number of likes and shares, to quantify the legitimacy and just hit the share button blindly. After all, this is the new way of saying 'hi' to the followers.


A classic case of such an instance was when a lot of people shared the picture of Morgan Freeman to mourn for Nelson Mandela's death. Similarly, the RIP status for Rowan Atkinson (famously Mr. Bean) who is still alive and healthy. Are we falling for opinions and manipulations? Rather making use of our key strength called thinking?

And, do not forget that we all believed a set of photos of Shanghai to be actually clicked in Gujarat, just because lot of people shared it and thinking they possibly visited there. We are just getting lazy and reluctant to explore more about things that we choose to believe in, leaving lot of opportunities for the pranksters and fraudsters. Yes, even today I won a lottery from the UK and a German lady wanted to donate all her wealth to me, as she got to know from internet that I am a good guy. In a couple of weeks I am expecting 4 more such lotteries and ladies who would make me as wealthy as Donald Trump! (Coming soon: Vote for Srini).

The more we fall for pranks and false facts, we become more vulnerable and exposed to the greed of corporations and politicians. Simple example of e-commerce sites playing around with pieces of goods, to create a mirage of huge discounts pretty much sums up this whole scenario. And, we are not far away from the babas and the god men making use of search engines and social media as channels of chatting with the gods.


Google is doing a brilliant job in helping us improve our lives. Let's not just think of taking advantage of it, rather think of ‘thinking for ourselves’ too. The day we stop thinking is the day when our soul starts creating a gap from our mind. Thought Process Outsourcing is never the answer, still Thought Process Differentiation could be one of the possible answers. 

Saturday, August 15, 2015

Freedom, yes you are tricked

While the nation of a billion free souls is celebrating the wonderful feel of freedom, it is worthwhile to give a thought on the concept of freedom. Charles Darwin should be a happy man now, realizing that he just had to stop his theory at a point where greed of humans was still not a game changing factor. Trust me, this variable would have made the theory a never ending painful story which made no sense, still with a great set of audience. After all, we are more interested in drama than facts.

Coming back to this concept of freedom, it has a great correlation with God. We have heard stories about them but unfortunately don't get to see or feel them. And, of course they both were invented by humans just to bring a high budget feel to the story, like that one exotic foreign location song in most of the Indian movies. It adds no value to the story, but diverts the attention of the viewers.


Are we really free? Our grand fathers who lived during the time between the British rule and the advent of credit cards have better chances of claiming to have tasted freedom. We have willfully complicated our lives so much, that the word freedom has become a factor of doubt and we keep taking and posting about it to check if it is still applicable.

We are for sure politically free from those crazy colonizers and are happy about it, not realizing that eventually every organism under the sun is free. While the rest of the organisms on earth function by one thumb rule "survival of the fittest", we the humans have complicated the equation with a plethora of variables. Survival of the richest, smartest, cutest, hottest etc., and before reaching this comparison stage, we are forced to go through class test, quarterly test, annual test and much more.

Kudos to mankind for it efforts in commoditizing freedom diligently through establishing supremacy within the same kind, based on factors such as race, color, wealth and the latest addition "number of followers".  Every piece of supremacy established, gets dissolved over a period of time with a tag of freedom to it. So there are a lot more freedoms to come and let's wait and see if we are lucky enough to experience one for ourselves.

So, freedom! Yes, we are tricked :D