Living through a webcam

Source: http://www.everythingusb.com/gsou-anti-peep-usb-webcam-18902.html

Any student who travels abroad for his/her education would resonate this feeling of living through a webcam. If you consider how culture and traditions have been modified to fit into the contemporary nature of our present lifestyle, it seems rather not that great of a change to move away from your home town into a foreign land and pursue your dreams. This however does not come without a price. We miss out on all those weddings, engagements, newly born baby, birthday parties etc. Is it that, we don't like these people whose functions you couldn't attend? of course not. Is it that we don't like these customs and traditions. Why have we adopted living far away in a distant land seems to be a question that a lot of students/non-resident have in mind.

We have all been harnessing our little vasco dagama inside of us. We have been the non-conformists by doing things as and when we like  and whenever we feel like it. The beneficial thing of living away from your birth place, you appreciate your home town a lot more. More importantly we realize why we left our home town, we just felt like it. When you really think how did it all start, when did you start pursuing your career to live abroad. It usually starts with people who were looking for something in the place where they lived and couldnt find it, or wanted to go elsewhere and see if the standards were the same. In either cases, people were not content and thats the beginning. Having said that, they don't forget all the true values of their home town, be it customs, religion, traditions and rituals. They carry it along with them to their new found land. They also add their own touch to each of these customs and traditions and make it their own. So we are fully aware of what we want and thats why we pursue. This is possibly why most of us felt a huge loss when we heard the news that Steve Jobs has left this world. Very few leaders in the world stands to represent all the misfits and weirdos.

It is because of innovators like him and so many others who had worked to make the horizon come closer. Now things have changed so much so that even doctors, therapists have resorted to their practices by consulting with their patients through skype. Skype has become such an integral part of our lives that we use it for professional and personal reasons. Right from having daily conversations with your folks in far away home land, meetings with collaborators and colleagues, skype has been omnipresent to the extent people has used it for online engagements, showing the newly born to the grand parents. Although the price of such moments is priceless, i began to think can we adopt living through a webcam? is it really popular? does it have the emotional appeal?

Lets say you are about to go on a vacation, you look up the place, check out the local tourist attractions, places to dine, activities to do. Obviously you can get all of these details with fully rendered images from google but that doesnt in anyway mean we had a vacation till we experience it. Or better yet, you might have so many friends in the social media, we share important events in our lives, wish each other for our birthdays, but till we meet our friends in person and share our wishes with our relatives, we will always feel distant. Life can be written as a story starting from our birth, school life, college, job, marriage, kids, growing them up ...grand kids,.. etc. Unless we experience it and live it through our own lenses and feel it through our receptors, it will not have the soul that life could offer.

By this, i dont intend to belittle the contribution of technology in our lives. Everything in moderation is applicable even in this field and when technology is put to use in appropriate areas and for daily events makes our communication with our loved ones in the far distant lands easy and not so distant. As a matter of fact, this is what i sincerely recommend.

Skype - available in any android, ios, pc and mac  (free video calling)

Whatsapp - available in any android, ios, blackberry smart phones and can be used wherever you have wifi (free dynamic messaging service)

The success of these applications can be traced to its common nature since they both are free and has the cross-platform support that most other applications dont have. This can be very well used in other areas in our society. Imagine when there is no language barrier and each of us can understand each other, no cultural differences, etc. By this i dont mean that there should only one universal language and one universal culture. The clarity among people to make languages and cultures to be cross-platform compatible is probably going to make a huge difference in making us feel a lot united. This would infact contribute to global peace as each culture would understand that the other culture which they thought was very different from theirs is actually very similar and peoples beliefs could be co-related. In this techno savvy generation wherein people have been thought to be hooked on to devices, we realize that the technology like facebook, twitter cater to our social needs and technology has enabled us that. Technology has understand human beings better as a matter of fact to create cross-platform interfaces to provide people with the online freedom which is almost a prerogative in every humans DNA. No wonder when Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddhafi was killed, it was not only libyans who was relieved but every other global citizen was happy for libya for its taste of freedom.

Whether it is for improvements in technology, community, society or any other field; 

"Freedom" is the key ingredient in the recipe for LIFE.

Joie de vivre

This blog article contains 926 words, 4163 characters and spaced at 1 line per page. See how i can make it immediately boring for the reader. Why does this happen, why do we make things unappealing; get confused in life and have discussions about i dont know where i lost all those years. The travel i could have made, places i wanted to visit, people i wanted to meet, if only i could have had the time!

First, stories from where i got an inspiration to write about this. I am reading a book "The best things in life" – Thomas Hurka. In the book they discuss about how each of us crave for pleasure from everything that we do and seek happiness. This is sort of like our purpose in life. A section of it talked about how drugs, cigarettes can give you pleasure but the problem is, in the initial stages just a little of it could give you pleasure but later stages you just need to consume more to get that feeling of pleasure. On the other hand in matters concerning passion and not an addiction, lets say you want to be a writer of course in the beginning stages, you may not be that great at it but as you keep pursuing on it the pleasure only keeps increasing and you feel greater and happier about your passion.

Later i happened to watch a TED video by Joan Halifax on how compassion, caring and other qualities which are primarily what makes us human, is sort of not realized till there is some sort of struggle faced by someone close to them (http://www.ted.com/talks/joan_halifax.html). Be it a family member or friend, till a person that you have well known suffers from it, most of us have an attitude to not grieve or mourn. Please dont mistake me, i am not referring to the entirety of the human race but for the most part when we are watching news and see that somalia has starvation issues, earthquake in japan, people killed in wars, riots etc; we take the news and can only think about the details of the news rather not about the emotional pain and suffering that people are going through. It felt as long it doesnt happen in my backyard, don't bother. Why is this a problem, you might ask; when you develop a society with future generations thinking along the same line then imagine how each one of us will feel distant from each other in the world.

Although social networking sites like facebook, twitter, google plus have made distances feel closer and closer; i want us to think about how all of us value our real relationships, the ones that matter the most. I have some uncles and aunts who were so good at keeping the family together at an age in the 80s and 90s where there was no Internet, forget about social networking sites. They used to meet us whenever they get a chance and regularly call us and talk to us about our studies and health and so on. Back then i used to feel, this is all some routine but then now they are no more i feel that i miss people like that. They simply used to call and find out if i was well.

Now this ongoing discussions about Americas debt, unemployment, GDP led me further to think about other key issues which is sort of the theme of this blog; What Matters?. I did not know about the king of bhutan, Jigme Singye Wangchuck who when he took office in 1972 at the age of 17  thought that the important measure of a country is not just by measuring GDP but by measuring GNH (Gross National Happiness). He identified some of the problems with whats taken into account with regards to calculating GDP and found that the most important things like involvement in the society, happiness, basically accounting for how people feel with their lives.

Photo Courtesy : Wikipedia

A businessman Chip Conley, a hotel chain owner who thought about what actually counts, implemented this (http://www.ted.com/talks/chip_conley_measuring_what_makes_life_worthwhile.html). He studied about Abraham Maslows hierarchy of needs which clearly talks about how human motivation is shaped. Its in the form of a pyramid with the fundamental being physiological and the top most being self-actualization. Upon interpreting this basics nature of human beings, chip conley devised his own pyramid for business by channeling Maslow into what he calls transformational pyramids including metrics to count employee sense of meaning and belonging in the company and the customer’s sense of connection. He started asking employees and customer’s questions pertinent to his business and due to which the employee felt a better connecting with the company and the customer loyalty increased. How can we make leaders measure the intangible things in life?

Can we measure how much we love somebody, what it feels when we lose a person who is close to us, how much happiness we feel when we work for something and get it. So when asked to the bhutanese about how do you create this form of happiness? they replied bhutan is a place which provides a habitat for happiness by asking people questions about how they feel about how their days are spent. Basically they believe in the principle proclaimed by Rabbi Hyman, Happiness is not having what you want but wanting what you have.

Photo Coutesy: http://andreebelle.wordpress.com/2010/05/03/gross-national-happiness/

So lets all create a habitat of happiness in whatever we do, wherever we work and how much ever we earn. Lets count what matters.

Applied Chemistry

Will we ever make the world we live in a peaceful, friendly and carefree environment ? ; many a times we start to wonder with so many global issues let it be poverty, illiteracy, global warming, hatred & war. As a chemist and researcher, adversities aren't new, in fact the quest for a solution by using the proven scientific concepts is almost a prerogative in our field. This led me to think if chemistry can in anyway help in any of these big challenges that we are facing in this current world.


Hybridize with the people around you:

Most of the problems around us start because, most of us dont have meaningful conversations with one another. By this i dont mean we are not receptive, we just preconceive ideas well before listening to the person around us. So lets hybridize and form those stable and strong SP3 hybrid orbitals since we will have head to head interactions and forming a shared electron covalent linkage, wherein we appreciate each ones uniqueness and react towards solutions for global welfare. Chemistry has in deed helps us with relationships. If you feel you give too much and your partner just keeps receiving things from you then you are probably in an ionic relationship. The aforementioned things does not mean just monetary things but much more important aspect of relationship like sharing conversations, spending time with one another etc. On the contrary when there is a mutual respect for one another in a relationship we end up with sharing our values, happiness, memories and a covalent type of relationship. There is a certain element of co-valency needed in every relationship.

The Hunds Rule of Budget to reach an octet:

When I see GOP proposal of the budget crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, i start to think about politicians need to learn about Aufbau principle. Government is from the bottom up, the lowest energy orbitals gets filled first after which the next level gets occupied. People who are struggling to get by in this economic meltdown, now there issues need to be of prime focus. So if it is jobs, education, then lets prioritize those over the rest. In their budget, they also avoid to be symmetrical in their thought process. Now if they are suggesting that bush tax cuts for the wealthiest of americans need to be available since they contribute to small business and thereby create jobs, then lets keep 44.8% as the calculation for octet. To be more precise, lets keep 44.8-25 = 19.2% to be our octet number for you to be qualified for the bush tax cuts, else since you dont satisfy fairness as proposed in Hunds rule, you pay up since you dint contribute to the growth of the country.

Dextro or Levo:

Just because i expected some sort of logic in the budget proposed by dextro-wing party doesn't mean i am levorotatary. What i find strange is the handedness between them is not so clear. Their political point of views, be it in abortion, gay rights, immigration.,etc are not so different from each other to form a clear chiral (sane) center. They form only an emulsion if you ask me, saying that they are two immiscible phases and yet on most views conform to the same ideas . This is particularly true interms of the countries involvement in war and other non war movements where, they would want to give arms to rebels who may not even know how to use it. The countries involvement in wars shows the emulsion nature of these parties that are ruling this country which if it wants to be #1 in the world needs to spread peace and non-violence.

Inhibition of fat:

Another issue has been the global problem of obesity, coronary heart disease (CHD), basically the physical well-being of our human race. Drugs like Lipitor which is commonly use for coronary heart disease & diet pills like Orlistat teaches us a valuable lesson of inhibition. I am not prescribing these to be the solutions but the way the drugs act on your body teaches us how we need to act on ourselves. It works based on inhibition of some enzymes in the case of CHD to be converted to cholesterol and in the case of diet pills, fats not being absorbed as they dont get converted to fatty acids. Although there are side effects with these forms of inhibition pills, why do we torture our body and not inhibit ourselves from having not so healthy foods. Is it just because we are just not so well informed? could it be healthy food has become more expensive so we eat junk food? economy is bad, when there is no job why would i think about good food? education prices are so high, i cant wait to get out of school? it doesn't matter what job i get as long as it pays me well?

Inhibit yourself from such negative thoughts and know that world is what we make of it. Collectively, if we all want some sanity and logic in our world even in the world of politics, spread the word and there might be some amazing reactions just like in the world of chemistry.

Right Choices!! Cost More???

The options we have in this society are limitless. Right from food, clothing, automobiles, cell phones you name a product and there are just so many options custom made to fit the customer. This is however if you don't consider the price tag associated with each of those options available.

Let's consider the food industry, an average meal in the states is usually burgers and fries. It's a meat driven culture and how heavy the subsidies are to produce a $ 1 burger and still derive profit. On the otherhand how is this having a profound effect not just on the obesity levels but also on global warming by the transportation of there frozen meat industry. If you look at how much it costs to eat the right food, be it organic and eating fresh vegetables; it seems like you have to be rich to stay healthy.

Consider the automotive industry, there is huge SUV culture running as an integral part of the american society and I for one has always been fascinated by it. But then you think about the consequences of that society which is built on certain principles. I find nothing wrong with owning many vehicles if you could afford it but the greater majority of the society would be benefited if there was a public transit system that worked.

I am not complaining that the mass transit does not operate on time but the cost to buy a metro card is nearly being the same with no difference among income classes is going to build a society who is going to believe that in order to experience a good life, we need to make more money.

Now this is going to make people buy things on credit, have more stuff even if you could not afford it otherwise. Take up career options which are monetary driven and no wonder the society would then be comprised of invidual who are always running without knowing what they are runnning for.

So, for the better of human civilization and be an example to the rest of the world, People need to realise a deeper stigma in the mindset of people. We have an urge to want more and only when we realise and make sense of our needs, we as citizens will make the right options, elect the right leaders and rebuild the society in which there is no need to discuss about the very basic needs of human being met.

Global warming, Energy inadequacy, Obesity should be tackled by us not stimulated by us.

I recommend you to watch documentaried Maxed Out; Fuel; Food Inc

Be the Change and Make the change.