I suddenly felt very happy reading Intel's claim that only 5 p.c of the world's 1.3 bn school kids had access to PC or the net. I felt sorry for the 5 pc - a weird feeling since I am working with computers. I would really love to see statistics on how many adult lives have been affected by computers. Maybe overexposure to computers made me feel like this, or maybe I always did feel this way. Or maybe this is brought on by the fact that after a very long time I finished a book straight out - reading from 1 am to 7 am in the night, not caring about sleep. Its a weird feeling, nevertheless one that I felt I missed for quite sometime. When I was young, I was one of those children who didnt have access to the PC or the net and I used to read a lot of story books, play a lot outside, have fun with friends and people. For these 5 pc of the children, I fear they would be missing the books, the people and rather get used to ordering pizza on the net and the notion that everything would be available instantly - not always a good thing!! Sometimes imagination and creativity may be curtailed by readily available google search on the web. Creativity fills voids in your understanding and is often an useful tool for driving innovation. Less information is a good thing and the journey of slower search and the delay in acquiring knowledge is a process in itself. Which is better - we would never find out, since we would adapt to the current situation; but being a generation that knew books existed and imagination of a land far far away was not gathered from a google image search, we are going to miss the drive to imagine more as time goes by.

I changed my blog name - felt that the earlier name didnt quite reflect my current thoughts... I created a blog years ago when blogging started out - I was scared to let people in on my thoughts then on account of privacy concerns - that feeling slowly evolved into questioning whether it mattered at all to let people in on your thoughts. But recently I am finding that some of my friends are going through similar questions and it feels nice to chat about those questions. I question a lot, and dont look for an exact answer (I dont believe in "absolutes"). I am like the sage who drank sake - blurt out stuff, question stuff I blurt out, question other people's statements, which leads to a question that I have been trying to answer for a long time - "does it matter at all?". This is an overarching question - in the sense that we believe we do stuff for a reason, but at different points in our life we do different things for different reasons. Given that there is no consistency in our thoughts and actions throughout life, what distinguishes person A (lets assume hypothetically that he is rich, successful) and person B (lets assume he is poor and contented). Both of them went through life pursuing what they presumably wanted, but then at the end of it all, what mattered to them? The money, the happiness, the success? I might look like I am deriving a convergence theorem here - that the sum of the series and the answer to the most important question of all is 42 - but hey - perhaps you could tell me what the answer is!!

If at the end of reading all this, you have a feeling of listening to a person who discourses after taking in quite a quantity of intoxicating liquids, you might have a good idea about the 'sake' :)