School of thought

When I look back at the 'education' I've got, I realize how worthless most of it (not all) has been. Arguably, the system is geared towards giving a pretty broad foundation on which individuals are supposed to build their sophisticated lives on. Education could thus be summarized as the spray-and-pray approach at the bottom and you-better-find-your-groove expectation as you get older.



If the aim of early schooling is to provide an awareness of the limitless options available and to enable a student to choose one when he is ready to - that is a worthy cause! But what if this ends up creating a generation of 'exam writers' ? Unhappy and corrupt citizens? People who can crack question papers problems but not real-life problems? I would not be very wrong if I say that this is what we have ended up with in India. There is a looming talent deficit that this emerging economy has to deal with. More worryingly, a good percentage of 'graduates' that this country churns out, are marked as unemployable! Recently, my colleague Mansi lent me her book 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' to read. The book is a collection of anecdotes of the Nobel Prize winning, Richard Feynman. First published in 1985! What is interesting in that book is his critique on the education system that existed in Brazil. Excerpt (click this link on Rob Shearer's site to read more):

The lecture hall was full. I started out by defining science as an understanding of the behavior of nature. Then I asked, “What is a good reason for teaching science? Of course, no country can consider itself civilized unless… yak, yak, yak.” They were all sitting there nodding, because I know that’s the way they think.
Then I say, “That, of course, is absurd, because why should we feel we have to keep up with another country? We have to do it for a good reason, a sensible reason; not just because other countries do.” Then I talked about the utility of science, and its contribution to the improvement of the human condition, and all that – I really teased them a little bit.
Then I say, “The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!”
I can see them stir, thinking, “What? No science? This is absolutely crazy! We have all these classes.”
So I tell them that one of the first things to strike me when I came to Brazil was to see elementary school kids in bookstores, buying physics books. There are so many kids learning physics in Brazil, beginning much earlier than kids do in the United States, that it’s amazing you don’t find many physicists in Brazil – why is that? So many kids are working so hard, and nothing comes of it.If Feynman landed in India, I am sure he would have penned a similar chapter. Interestingly, Indians who continue their studies abroad seem to do well for themselves. The institutions abroad seem to be able to instill something in them that makes them thrive.

On the eve of India's Independence Day, let me attempt at putting together what I would really have wanted my school(s) to have taught me.


'The School of Thought' would only define the minimum education required, the maximum would be up to the students. The idea is NOT to enable them to recite the definition of addition, but the ability to actually add any two numbers up.


The following would be the ONLY mandatory subjects:


1. Language.
Two languages, English and the mother-tongue.
Alphabet. Words. Grammar. Phrases. Sentences. Prose. Poetry. Songs. Stories.
The pupil must be able to tell stories and read and understand stories.


2. Arithmetic.
Numbers. Counting. Concepts behind Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division. Tables. Mental Arithmetic. Estimation.
The pupil must be able to handle all the calculations required in daily life.


3. People.
Self. Others. Family. Friends. Acquaintances. Colleagues. Life Partners. The Opposite Sex.
Listening. Thinking. Meditating. Caring. Negotiating. Integrity. Context. Diversity. Perception.
The pupil must be able to understanding what he/ she needs and expressing it. Grasping different contexts, people, body language. Speaking tactfully. Understanding what others want.


4. Money.
Saving. Borrowing. Lending. Taxes. Giving. Make a living. Enjoying work- doing what you love doing. Starting a small enterprise. Planning for a big one. Value of having/ not having. How does money work?
The pupil must understand the need and value of money, the nature and effects of its uneven distribution. Understanding what money can't buy.


5. Searching.
How to search for information? Optimal formation of keywords. Synthesizing information. Scanning through large data sets to get what you need.
The pupil must understand that transforming data into information creates value. Must be able to do that and use the information to get literally anything.


6. Happiness.
Staying alive. Staying safe. Games. Sports. Health. Team play. Arts. Music. Enjoying nature. Religion.
Maximizing life and joy.


7. Thinking.
Logic. Reasoning. Things beyond logic? Questioning. Controlling thoughts. Wrong? Right? Role of the community in forging individual thoughts.
The pupil must be able to spend time thinking and be able to capture the gist of their thoughts, understand which aspects have been influenced- consider the nature of each influence.


8. Exposure and experience.
Reading at least a book a week. Keeping notes. Movies. Imagining and accepting the possibilities of worlds and contexts beyond what is obvious and proximate. Exploring Nature. Places. Traveling. Understanding issues that different people face. Empathy.


In my opinion, the 8 subjects above are the building blocks. If a student masters the skills above, there is no subject that will be beyond his/ her reach. Physics, Chemistry, Botany will be things that they would naturally and out of their curiosity; be able to explore- or not! This country; any country for that matter, needs thousands of smart workers, farmers, artists, authors, administrators and politicians not just engineers and doctors. Its time this school of thought is given a 'School of Thought'. If we get this ONE thing right, we do not need to worry about anything else. Corruption, lack of infrastructure, inequality and a thousand other wrongs can be set right only through the light of knowledge.


Nothing captures this better than Gurudev's timeless words:

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

- Rabindranath Tagore.

Friends

It hit me hard today that I have not been a good friend. I haven't even wished anyone a happy friendships day (though quite a few people have wished me!). Heck, except for a few people that I interact with on a daily basis and maybe two others, I haven't called or visited ANY 'friend' for a long time!

Has work made me so callous? Family? Facebook? Orkut? Selfishness? Is this the norm for this age?- Why? I am trying to remember at which point in my life, I actually flipped over. I do faintly recall a time when friends happened to fill most of my world.

Its not that I am without friends. I know and interact with a lot more people than now that I ever did before. The truth is - there is a difference between a Facebook 'friend', a business acquaintance and a 'friend' as the word was supposed to mean in the good 'ol days when we had no online avatars. The truth is - my sense of worldly dependence has shifted to work and money. Remember the adage: A friend in need is a.... ? I do also realize that there will always be things money cannot buy, work cannot satisfy and strengths cannot influence.

I do know of a few people who still take the effort and time to keep in touch and maintain strong chords of friendship - God bless them and their friends!

As for me, I will try being a bit better.
And if you, O reader, seem to be in the same quagmire - maybe its time for you too!
Happy friendship day!

Being Varghese

'War geese' sounds as close to quack-quack as 'war horse' does to a brave compliment. That quackish word dear friends, is one of the many colorful ways in which the butt-end of my name gets pronounced. Achtung!: This is an egopost. Please exit now if allergic.

And I'm not alone :). Varghese/ Verghese/ Vergis/ Vargis including its close siblings Varkey/ Verkey/ and Geevarghese are very popular christian names in malluland.


Free Mallu-gyan: We Keralites have an interesting mutation in our genes that makes us migrate to the gulf ('gelf') and the US of A ('stayits'). Those who get the lazier strands (like me) end up somewhere in between (the distance from malluland being inversely proportional to the laziness of that particular gene). So, mathematically, those with the laziest variety of that gene remain in Gods own Country ('goads own cundree') where the national passion is to wake up every election term and switch the ruling govt. from the Left to Right or vice-versa and then go back to zzz.. 

Well, the point I was trying to make is that thanks to that gene, Vargheses could be found scattered across the planet. See?
Two authors have recently tried to protagonize Varghese. Sidin Vadukut through Dork and Mathew Vincent Menachery through Arrack in the Afternoon. I've read both of 'em curious to know how they twisted their Vargheses. Both are funny and don't claim to be literary masterpieces or anything. One thing they both did manage to portray was a mysterious attraction that their protagonist Vargheses had to the spirits in the bottle.


More Free Mallu-gyan:  Rotund mallus vie for the 'highest consumption of alcohol in india' spot and usually win against the state of Punjab with all those burly warriors!
(Dude: On the rocks?
Strange-Mallu: Yes, Coke please.
Dude: 'You're a mallu and you don't drink!!! Stupefying, petrifying, terrifying!')

As any normal netizen would; I typed in varghese and hit the search button. Earlier it used to tell me 'did you mean vargas' or something like that which gave it an Italian twist, but nowadays it points to a blog post by another Varghese who ("Not Italian" he says and definitely nothing to do with the Borghese family. Sigh!) places V's origins closer to 'geese', quack-quack - Turkey to be precise. It seems folks there have/ have had Geewargis as their names. Hmm... but that sounds american to me: "gee! war-geese!". Anyways; if you dig further down the roots, you'll apparently find a George down there! Excavate a bit more? you'd find Greek! - γεωργος = 'Georgos' which means earth-worker (aka- farmer). Dig any further and I suspect you'll reach the molten core.


Enlightenment! So George, Geese, Turkey, Varghese, Geewargis, Greeks, farmers and the molten core are all connected! That noted and having killed your otherwise productive time, this is Varghese signing off. Light headed.


PS: Unlike what the search engine would like you to believe, 'Mallu' NOT = sleaze. 'Mallu' = native of a land where Malayalam is the language spoken... atleast that's what it used to be when Apple was just a fruit and gay was happy!

West is West

"OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet..." - Rudyard Kipling.


Well, they just did on celluloid! Sunday evening, I watched the movie West is West, the sequel to East is East and I quite liked it!

Strangely, while East is East was set in the west, West is West is set in the east: a village in Pakistan. Rudyard Kipling's classic -Kim also makes a entree in the movie. What I liked was its non-judgemental portrayal of difficult relationships, coming of age, accepting and finding acceptance. The wry wit intrinsically woven into the characters and the plot was also charming. Om Puri as Jehangir 'George' and the rest of the cast play their parts pretty well. While there was something that felt slightly fairy tale-ish... I wouldn't dream complaining. Well, whats a movie without some twists, eh!


If I were in the business of giving stars, I'd give West is West 4 out of 5.


Interesting Links: 
1. The Ballad of East and West, Rudyard Kipling
2. Free e-Book, Kim, on Project Gutenberg

UID as my Mobile Number. An Open Letter to UIDAI

An Open Letter.

To,
Mr. Nandan Nilekani,
Chairman,
UIDAI

Dear sir,

Let me jump straight to an outlandish idea and then delve into the whys and hows behind it:

Why not have the UID number as the defacto mobile number of an individual?

- So if my UID is 999123456789, I can simply print it on my visiting card and folks can call me on it.
- This is truly a mobile number for life. So as a customer, I will have a mobile number that will never change.
- Gives me a very valid reason to get a UID number asap.

UID = My Mobile Number for Life.

Why?

Aadhaar is slowly but steadily progressing in its mission to provide a unique identification mechanism for this country. This dashboard for instance shows 8 million cumulative enrollments in the last 8 months which I think is pretty impressive.

As the UIDAI website notes, the Aadhaar model clearly aims at attaching two attributes to every individual in this country-

a. a unique numeric identity and
b. an authentication mechanism.

This has very very profound implications on the way things are done by most of us. Aadhaar has already laid out its plans to work with its banking partners towards extending their reach by becoming the sole and minimum criterion for getting a basic savings account, which is a great fillip to the Financial Inclusion agenda.

The one thing I have learnt to value a lot above most other virtues in my past 3 years at Eko has been the value of simplicity. At Eko, we simplified the financial identity of a customer by providing it the customer's mobile number as a transactional alias and ensured that all transactions were done as simple number dialing -today we can claim that the choices have worked for Eko, where we have processed over Rs. 15,000,000,000 in cumulative volumes- way more than what all the other 'mobile banking' initiatives in India put together would have handled in the same period.

So,

Why not make things simpler for a few billion people, now that you've anyway embarked on this ambitious journey?

Why not provide a mobile access number to everyone, rich or poor? This could be a good utilization of the Universal Service Obligation funds with the Dept. of Telecom which I guess is well worth over Rs. 25000 crore!

How?

In India, TRAI had mandated the following mobile numbering scheme in 2003:
XXX-YY-NNNNN
where,
XXX= Mobile Operator
YY= Mobile Switching Center
NNNNN= Subscriber Identity

However, in January this year, 2011, Mobile Number Portability was launched. MNP essentially made the mobile operator and switch lookup as described above- redundant. Since launch, nearly 10 million customers have opted to change their operator while keeping their mobile number!! This clearly shows the need for an operator neutral numbering scheme. I think the 12 digit UID number neatly fits the bill.

How do we do this? Maybe, in a similar way MNP was rolled out; I guess the Telecordia solution for MNP already has some provision to achieve this. Another approach could involve UIDAI/ its nominated partner, maintaining a national master mobile switch (just as NPCI maintains a national financial transaction switch). Lets call it NMMS.

During Aadhaar enrollment, the customer is anyways asked to provide a mobile number, UIDAI would, from that point on, maintain the UID-Mobile Number mapping and the telecom operators be mandated to push any mobile number changes to UIDAI. This database could be used to seed the NMMS.

Aadhaar also does mass enrollment drives at places where not everyone might have (or be able to afford) a mobile number. At the end of such an enrollment drive, UIDAI could provide the entire block/ list of such customers enrolled to the highest pre-bid telecom operator which operates in that region. The telcom operator gets thousands of customers in one shot, which lowers their cost of acquisition and enables such 'no-frills' customers while UIDAI gets more customers in since it is now also seen as a mobile number provision drive  (Lets face it, the grandest successful 'inclusion' project so far in India has been the telecom inclusion project driven by the telecom operators in India with over 600 million customers already enrolled. The need to communicate is perhaps the biggest implicit driver!)

Dear sir, I'm sure you'd agree that its time to move the focus from thinking about 'allotment' of UIDs to mass utilization of the same. The more use cases there are and the more compelling these are, the more will be the adoption of the UID. Mandates and rules can only take an initiative so far; Only by addressing the innate needs of people can this initiative truly expand to its true potential.

I've been an ardent fan of your vision for this country and the ambitiousness of a project like UIDAI. I hope this crazy idea finds some resonance with your thoughts.

Regards,
Anupam

The Mobile Handsets Family Snap

I have been reading and thinking of how the mobile phones have changed our lifestyle. A typical morning starts thus: Office dress? Check. Car keys? Check and finally- Mobile Phone? Check... Reached the main gate; something seems amiss. Oops, forgot wallet! More intriguingly, its interesting to think of how the mobile phones themselves have changed. The way mobile phones have developed in the past three years has been unprecedented. 

In this post I'll attempt a silhouette of this handset super-family snap and try to outline their places in the family.

1. The Young, Bold and Beautiful (TYBB)

Apple created a usability paradigm that was not just incrementally better than what was otherwise available but was transformational. It created and set standards that others have yet to surpass and has created an eco-system that others are trying hard to replicate. A techie may still call the iPhone a duh! phone, but if the queues at Apple stores and the buzz when Steve makes his "This is the most amazing thing ever invented" speeches are anything to go by, thats a killer product.

Google went ahead created a mobile OS called Andriod, where it had no prior experience. Amazingly, it succeeded in creating a worthy competitor to Apple. Actually a lot of manufacturers realized that if they had to compete with The Quick and Dirty pack (read on to know more about them), they needed to adopt an OS that would provide them the competitive flexibility of being able to churn out more designs and faster- Andriod proved to be a good bet. HTC Mobile is a great company that has innovatively adopted Android. Even Samsung has made some bold moves with it.

2. So Yesterday, Yet Trying (SYYT)

Lets start with a pioneer of cellphone technology: Motorola. Motorola literally created this market, saw its culmination and complacence in the Razr series and has been struggling to find its grounding ever since. Its recent forays into the Android with Xoom seem promising- thats officially the tablet space; its certainly lost its ground in the cellphone category.

Nokia has been a corner stone in the mobile telephony revolution that has certainly changed India. Rewind a few years, in the mobile app development world, Nokias used to be the targets for the Gold builds. The first two builds that would come out from most studios would be an s40 and and an s60 build. All the other builds would normally be ported out of these. I'm not sure if the case remains. I guess most studios now focus only on the iPhone version, the Android build and perhaps one for the BlackBerry. I'm sure Nokia still gets a spot, but the point is - its no longer the spotlight. Thankfully, to its credit, India is still flush with the Nokia torch phone (the so called 'made in india' 1100, 1200 series), second hand N Series and third hand S40s and S60 that still make it a majority by existing numbers. Some of its new avatars also seem to show some promise. Again, far from its glory days.

Sony Ericsson, Siemens, Sagem - heard of them lately?

Windows Mobile. The reviews for Windows 7 interface have been rave, but lets face it- these guys have been around for a long time (remember the iPaq days?) and have not been able to make a worthy dent in this domain; very unlikely that they could.

The Symbian OS. Once considered a powerhouse OS designed for the mobile platform, it was a developer's nightmare platform. Sigh, even its parents don't love it anymore! Nokia recently announced that it plans to orphan Symbian and has already adopted Windows (a case of: you're sinking, I'm sinking, lets party and try not sink together?). 

BlackBerry from Research In Motion is one helluva 'ol timer that seems to have been able to stand on its own amidst waves upon waves of assault by dozens of old and new handsets. It seems to have succeeded in packaging itself youthfully afresh, despite its age. RIM bastion has been its rock solid messaging interface, instant push emails to instant messaging- RIM has simply got this spot on, not to mention its messaging friendly key layouts both soft and hard.

3. The Quick Guns. (TQG)

In 2007 (I think) a miracle happened. This miracle was a chipset made by a Taiwanese company called MediaTek. Its SoC (System on a Chip) dramatically reduced the component count, the time taken and the cost of building a cellphone. At the same time, it dramatically increased the number of people who had access to the reference design, increased reliability as a platform and suddenly unleashed a wave of handsets that have swept TYBBs and the SYYTs off their feet.

Another miracle that happened was Shenzhen. Shenzhen is an electronics manufacturing powerhouse. And the scale I've read, is mind boggling. Read this blog to get a feel of its size and this one (also has a video) to read its scale. In India 'China Phone' is a known acronym and customers come asking specifically for it. But Shenzhen has something much more interesting. It churns out three categories of devices: 

1. Original handsets. 

2. Handsets that look like original handsets aka fakes/ phonies 

3. Handsets that are are ingenious. 

Suddenly new models began to get churned out every week and even days! while earlier the So Yesterdays painstakingly churned new ones out every quarter or two.

I'm not sure, but am led to believe that a spate of companies in India owe their origins to MediaTek and Shenzhen. These pack is led here by the likes of Micromax, Carbonn, Lava, Lemon and a bevy of names that just seem to keep popping up. Slowly but steadily, this pack began to corner a significant share of the market which was till now being held by Nokias and their likes (SYYTs) by focusing first on the tier-2, 3 and rural markets. They also focussed on features like music, video, radio and multi-SIM. Despite the fact that on most devices usability sucked, the sheer variety and incredible cheapness seem to have gone their way.

Micromax is an interesting company which I believe is trying to mature from being cheap-shenzhenish-copy-plus-a-few-features phone seller to a new-feature-centric phones churner. One innovation from its stable has been the Micromax A60 'My first Android'- the cheapest and a pretty decent Andriod phone for the masses retailing first hand at about Rs. 6500 when I had last checked.

The road ahead?

For TYBB, they need to ensure that they always remain a few notches ahead of the rest of the pack. Youthful looks don't really last that long.

For SYYT, they are bound to be sandwiched from the top by TYBB and the bottom by TQG. They need to ensure that they find their sweet-spots. Real fast.

For TQG, the very fact that they can themselves be engulfed by another TQG clone launched today means that they need to move from being simple phone sellers to value sellers.

Update:

Check out the stats from Business Standard India (http://business-standard.com/india/news/reconnect/432525/) that support this story with some numbers!

Poxed and unpoxed

Apparently, a bunch of Varicella Zoster virus found it convenient to visit my body. Usually they visit kids, guess they'd have made a mistake with my DOB - KYC problems! Its been 12 days since their uninvited arrival and after having riddled me with lotsa red spots, they are about to hibernate in my nervous system in a benign state. It seems anyone who catches chicken pox is destined to live with a legacy of Zosters in their ganglia. The good part (sic) is, my body is now pretty immune to Zoster and co.

Its been quite an experience, doing mostly nothing and being isolated in a room. Had it not been for my BlackBerry, I should have been electronically dead as well. My folks said, since I didn't give my body a break, it simply decided to take one ;). And I got to watch, relatively guilt-free, the entire semi-final and final matches and saw India lifting the ICC World Cup :)

The saving grace has been the venerable Neem tree, 'Azadirachta indica'. As advised by quite a few people, esp my colleague Anand, I've literally been fighting the red spots with some green magic. For almost the entire first week, I'd smeared myself in Neem leaf+Haldi (turmeric) paste from head to toe. I looked pretty much like The Hulk gone terribly wrong in the makeup department. I slept on a bed of Neem leaves, bathed in water boiled with Neem leaves and also ate a few Neem leaves. All that makes it sound as if I was in some exotic organic spa resort- I've never been to one, but can vouch that the results have been pretty good.

So, while I am getting unpoxed, I've been thinking how vulnerable you and I really are (two days ago, a student in my dad's school passed away because of pox he got on a pilgrimage). Most virii, you can hit around, then some random virus hits and you're out, index finger is raised and you've got to walk back to the pavilion- even if you're the mighty Little Master. Inshahallah, the next match awaits :)
Well that is life. It screws you right when you think you have figured it out. - Five Point Someone

A Sachet Story - Epilogue

I had blogged about the ubiquitous Sachet a few months back in a post titled the Sachet Story.

The post also talked about how notoriously popular and unsightly, the discarded Gutka sachets had become on the streets of Delhi.

Well here's the epilogue,

Starting March 1st, no more Sachets to dress up gutka tobacco. Thats a really bold move by the Hon'ble Supreme Court of India considering the massive turnover and influence these companies have.

Times of India

Financial Express

While the move is great from an environmental impact perspective and certainly laudable, I guess it will only force 'innovation' (sic) in the Gutka delivery mechanism- Gutka dispensers maybe?

I have just recently witnessed, at close quarters, the devastating effect of substance abuse and how it degrades the people, families and relationships that it touches. Perhaps a firmer stand needs to be taken considering the simple fact that what our country loses in terms of its resources is way more than what it earns from these industries.

Unfortunately, it is so so easy to ignore costs that are not explicit- someday, it will hit us bad. Thank God, hope is free!

Merry Christmas

Heres wishing the whole wide world a Merry Christmas!

I forget, therefore I am

Let me confess in an understatement: I am not known for my ability to remember. I think I have what could be described as 'working memory' ('RAM' in geek-speak) and very less of the 'long term memory' (the hard-disk type). It is therefore fascinating for me to hear some of my friends rattle out the titles of the books (and even chapter captions!) they studied in 5th grade!

I have been trying to find out more about the way our brain stores information for a long time and have stumbled across many interesting insights. Disclaimers: I'm no neuro-scientist and no one claims to have completely unlocked the mysteries of the mind.

The first insight is that perfect memory is nearly impossible. Its something like this: Imagine our sense organs are digital transducers and that to each frame of sight, sound, smell and touch captured, the brain does some DSP and attaches contexts. These contexts act like keys that could be cross-linked to other such similar contexts. In the cyber-world, a simplistic equivalent would be intelligent tag-labels that could be attached to each piece of media on the web. And like the tag-clouds or page-ranking on the web, the brain keeps analyzing and attaching weights to these keys. I guess each person normally has the ability to assimilate only a certain maximum number of such keys in the top of the stack. Therefore, keys which have a lower relative weight might get pushed way down to a point that they become non-addressable. Thus, to recall information that has been stored in the brain that has its keys obscured in a huge bin of decrepit keys might be really difficult (though for arguments sake- not entirely impossible).

Techniques that claim to improve memory (eg: mnemonics) actually attempt to attach contexts with higher weight to chunks of information that might otherwise considered mundane- providing easier proxy addresses in a way.

There are exceptions though. Savants with Eidic Memory. There are certain differently talented people whose brains are mysteriously wired to have near perfect or photographic memories. The interesting part is that perfect memory is not as good as it seems (getting perfect scores in all tests sounds pretty cool though). Interesting read (long story) : Autism's First Child. The ability of human beings to forget is an inherent 'ability' and not a weakness. As human beings, we need to be able to forget, forgive and move on. If I had the ability to remember everything, I would probably be stuck in a rut and caught in an endless loop of ecstasy or despair- depending on the nature of some immediate trigger. That would be one extreme of being extremely 'experienced', where previous slightly negative experiences would posture our current actions through 'safe' and non-risky paths. It could kill the adventurer, the risk taker, the para-jumper and the entrepreneur in a person, it could kill the appetite for trying again after repeated failures. Imagine losing something very precious and not being able to forget about it! It would be like having a thousand phantom limbs.

That brings me to an inherent flaw in most computing solution designs. Most computers, networks, devices and robots are designed for perfect memory- more so because the cost of storage is decreasing drastically day by day and its easier to just keep adding up. So if I snap a photograph on my smartphone today and sync it up to my web album- that image is there to stay- forever. If that snap were a part of a bot's learning algorithm, it would be as retrievable a hundred years down as it is now. Google, for instance, will remember all my correspondences, my web interactions and profile for a very long time. I think there is an opportunity in trying to adopt into software systems, human-like methods for forgetting information.

Social web could also benefit a lot by trying to mimic human forgetting systems to tune their privacy settings. Google for instance today stores one's search memory for only N months- now thats a crude way to forget, it must be a lot smarter in what it needs to conveniently forget. A system designed to thus conveniently forget will meet both privacy concerns (to an extent) as well as being functional in a more 'human' way.

Thats the end of my rhetoric that brings me back to me. In conclusion, I do believe, that my ability to forget defines me, my thoughts and my deeds as much as it uniquely defines you! I guess the machines too would follow our forgetfulness in due course :)