Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Rich with Information

No work yet so many things to do, sound oxymoron but again that’s the way it is. By work I meant activities I do for my office. From 10 to 5 I have lent my time to office choirs but it doesn’t tell me not to do other things when there are no official works to be done. I had made up my mind that I will pass time reading things in the net. The first thing I did after starting my computer was checked my google reader. Gauss!! There were so many things unread. There was hundreds of information marked unread. I knew I could avoid many of them for example sports in which I have not much avid interest. Spain won euro so what? If it hadn’t won Germany would have won. Ok I agree I am boring. I have always been like this. There were business news, science news, celebrity stuffs, entertainment, programming news, computer and internet based things, politics waiting to be opened just like the monkeys look at the people who offer them biscuits in their walks. Just like kindergarten kids looking at their teacher for some response they looked through my computer. Trillions of information get added every day and just filtering them for oneself is a formidable task. Mugabe won the election while the international communities are planning for sanctions, Bill Gates finally left Microsoft, Google has built application for web owners to make their web sites search engine friendly, some old tree increases life expectancy, the number of illegal immigrants are dropping in Europe and United States, Israel and Palestine again at loggerheads, oil prices reached a level high at $142 per barrel, Indian government is loosing confidence, a 84 years old Tibetan Refugee murdered in Pokhara among so many others. In economist.com alone I had more than 300 articles unread. Obviously I don’t read all those articles just check out their headline and dig into those that I find interesting or that seems to be a must read. In CNN money there are 1000+ new entries waiting to be read. To avoid myself being overwhelmed with myriad of information and their sources I finally deleted my subscription from entertainment field except for jokes. Unfortunately they won’t get my attention and still in many days they won’t even reach 100. Now there are blogs. These blogs are basically journals of people spread in the world. They exist in the virtual community. If I had to walk pass them physically in the market I might not even look at their face because I don’t know how they look but I know how they feel, what turns them on and what turns them off, what did they do last weekend, when did they went to bed last night. There are no significant brain in these blogs still its so interesting to get into others life without breaching anything without violating any norms.
Information had always been there, events have always took place, great things have happened, crimes have been committed, war has be waged these are no new things but all of a sudden with the advent of technology we want to know everything, get informed in the most trivial of things and events. We might not notice that our room is in mesh but we want to know if the litters in Everest are cleared or not. We might not know who got elected as mayor in our city but we bite our nails to know the result of US primaries. Information has all of a sudden become so crucial, it empowers us in own way. With information one can analyze the current trend in the stock market and make investments accordingly. One can see the real state booming by leaps and bounds and we clear our bank accounts to buy a plot of land. We can see the electronic Scotties have already penetrated the market of a neighboring country and we postpone our plan to get a petrol powered bike when the price of fuel is soaring higher and higher. The access to information never had been so easy and cheap, in fact they do not even cost a penny. When we were kids our home works and assignments included reading the textbooks and answering their questions, today’s kids are given case and they have to work on a project. Last weekend my fourteen years old cousin asked for my help on a project which required her to gather the names and address of the travel agents in the country, how many customers they serve every year and represent the facts graphically. When we were kids the project as such would have taken more than week. It would have been rigorous and one had to visit government offices or areas like Thamel to gather that information but in half an hour my cousin’s project was ready.
Information is an invaluable treasure when one can use it, it is not any precious than a comb for a bald if one cannot use it. It need not always yield monetary benefits, it might just help one attain satisfaction feel fulfilled and updated. When I told people in the developing countries specially India and China are feeding themselves more which could be one of the reason behind food shortage long before George Bush ignited controversy by saying the same thing, my colleagues appreciated my insight. But I had told what I had read and that was no insight of mine. On fuel crisis as well I had given the globally accepted reasons which had not been published in our news papers and again I had received the glance of ‘wow’. When I started using google reader, igoogle etc. I became a leader in technology adoption. Information might have helped me earn praises; many people actually use the information to make profit, to earn bucks. Information empowers us with weapons more powerful than the real physical weapons. They provide us facts and data to prove our point, they provide us insights to predict the course of our business, they help us take precautions and preventions. Information is the real power of 21st century.

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