Seemanta’s Blog

Serial bomb blasts have rocked my home town, Guwahati and I can’t help but feel terrible at this sudden loss of innocent lives. Worse still, I can’t do anything about the inaction of our sleeping goverment.

I spoke to my family and thankfully they are all fine and safe. But I wonder how many more lives will it take for the government to sit up, listen and wake up.

How many more people should die meaningless deaths, before we realize that what is going on is wrong ?

seemanta Current Affairs, Non-tech, Thought provoking terrorism

If you ask me what is one of the most precious human quality that I would hate to lose, then my answer would be just one word: ‘Curiosity’.

I have always had a deep seated belief that it was curiosity which has led us to evolve as we have, over the millennia.

Was it not curiosity that led Copernicus to spend hours in his research to realize that the earth is not the center of this universe? Was it not curiosity that led Galileo to delve deep into nature and was it not curiosity that led Newton to postulate his famous laws ? Was it not curiosity that led Columbus to sail across the Atlantic ?

And believe me, it is curiosity that will lead humans to venture out to space one day, leaving behind earth, in search of the unknown.

But alas, these days, such curious people are hard to come by. This is very tragic and in fact shows the progression of mankind from a knowledge seeking species to a wealth and power gathering species.

I think, I am fortunate to still have that curiosity alive in me. This has fuelled my numerous quests for knowing all that I can. Needless to say, I am not able to understand everything, but as long as this curiosity is alive within me, I shall continue to learn new things and continue to look at this world with childlike wonder.

Hence, the title of this article. Poor curiosity was framed. It was ignorance which killed the cat.

Which is why curiosity is the best cure for ignorance.

~Seemanta

admin Non-tech, Personal, Thought provoking philosophical

I came across this very famous ad by Apple Inc., which I found to be very thought provoking.  Here is the embedded YouTube video for it.

A very moving ad indeed and from the day this ad was released to today, Apple continues to be the industry leading innovator! I must add,  an inspiring company and an inspiring ad !

~Seemanta

P.S. Here is an wikipedia article on the same.

seemanta Non-tech, Thought provoking Ad, Apple, Techology

I recently came across this excerpt from the ‘Pale blue dot’ book by Carl Sagan. I do not want to provide my own comments on this, but would leave upto you to deal with the thought that it provokes.

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

– Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Original link where I came across this: http://www.planetary.org/explore/topics/voyager/pale_blue_dot.html

admin Personal, Thought provoking astronomy, carl sagan, popular astronomy