Another excuse

I was in a stationary shop one day to make copies of my assignments and purchase some material for binding it. It's a tiny shop that has multitude of facilities.

It's a stationary shop, a Xerox shop, an STD booth and a binding shop all in one. Only that much I noticed in the little time I spent there. A single man was there in the shop to manage all these activities. The shop was buzzing with crowd. Always four or five persons are there, the number too much for a shop of that size.

I was one of the customers and I was standing in one corner, waiting for the man to finish taking the copies. It was then a little boy came to that shop. He has come to buy a pen. May be the first pen he is ever going to use.

He was scanning all the pens that are neatly arranged in the show case for sometime. His eyes fell on a little golden pen and asked the shopkeeper for that pen. The shopkeeper with out paying heed to the little boys call simply said that the pen is a costly one and turned his attention to service other customers.

'What a reckless man he was', I thought and looked at the little boy. His face half shrunk looked at the ten rupee note he was holding in his hand. That was indeed a big amount for him, enough to buy this whole world.

With this new found confidence, he turned to the shop keeper and asked him how much does that pen cost. But he has to repeat that question four times to grab the attention of the shopkeeper who said 'twenty rupees' and turned to mind his own business (of servicing his customers of whom this little boy is one).

I had for long thought of helping somebody in need. But every time I had enough excuses not to pay attention to others problems. I never give anything to a beggar and my reason for that is beggary in any form has to be discouraged. It's not healthy for the society and people must work to earn their bread. But here is a boy who needs help for some genuine reason. Perhaps I am in a position to help him. Giving ten rupees does not mean anything for me. But for the boy, he can buy the pen of his dream.

I heard the shopkeeper calling me and I looked up to face him. He said that my copies are ready and asked me to choose the sheet to use for binding.

He showed a verity of sheets of different qualities and soon I got busy comparing the sheets to select the best out of it. I was absorbed in it for a while when suddenly I remembered the little boy. But it was too late, the boy was gone. 'Had he stayed there for some more time, I would have helped him', I reflected. Or is that another excuse.

Rewind – The creation

Read recently the book by an eminent scientist – Stephan Hawking titled 'Black holes and baby universes'. Not that I understood much from this book, but it simply is a fine read. It is loaded with a lot of scientific information. I could only get an idea about few concepts discussed in this and I got my own idea about this. The key questions addressed in this book seemed to be

1. Was there a beginning of universe
   
2. Who created it and who controls it – God or Science
   
3. Will the world continue forever or will it come to an end. And how would this end be.
   

Not that the whole book of nearly 200 pages have discussed only the points mentioned; only these points can be taken by my mind. And only these points; not the details discussed about these points.

The creation

There must be a beginning for everything. Every life has a beginning. Every object that we see has a beginning. Every event - big or small - that we witness has a beginning. So apparently this world that we live in, and the universe of which our world is a part (and whatever else it comprises of), should have a beginning. And who and how has it been created. The easiest answer is that it is all the work of god. No further questions. Or the answer to all questions is just this one word. 'GOD'.

And for people who do not take any easy answers, its created in an event called 'BIG BANG'. At this point the entire universe is contained in one atom / cell / whatever which has the energy which our super computers would take years to compute. This Big Bang has created all the particles in the universe – particles as large as thousands to millions of miles in radius which is spread over in the universe. And hold on. They are rotating, revolving and moving away from each other. Now this is beyond my comprehension. What is moving away from what and to where. The moon that I saw as a child still seems to be at the same place, the sun comes and goes exactly from the same direction at the same time. Even the stars seem to be at the same place though I could not identify one from another.

The answer seems to be that we should look at the big picture – as though the view of moon, sun and other stars is a very narrow view. Our galaxy (means?) consists of billions of starts and is just one of the galaxies of billions of galaxies that form the universe. And the solar system is just one a few starts (roughly around 100) in our galaxy. So our earth is just one of the stars (did I say our earth as a star) among trillions (is there a bigger number) of stars out there and my city probably of size one trillionth of earth and my flat roughly about one trillionth of my city and myself merely occupying 5.5 cubic feet of nearly 25000 cubic feet which is the capacity of my house. And that puts me in the right perspective. You are too small to think big enough. The stars move together away from each other.

And this leaves a lot of questions – if the word is created by an event called big bang, then who created it. And for what has it been created. And if before the big bang, the universe has been as one atom / cell – Who created this atom. And who has put all this energy into this one atom. And for what reason has all this been done. Who gets benefitted from all this? Is there somebody who is losing out? Or is this all done to satisfy the sarcastic pleasure of someone? Think science would take a lot of time to answer these questions – probably millions of years. And who knows. It can conclude that 'God is the creator' and probably the destroyer as well as by the time these questions were answered the world might have ended.

  

Thoughts on IT

After working in the IT industry for more than 10 years (it’s close to 11 years now - hold on, let me check the exact no. of years that I had spent in IT - oh.. its 4189 days as of today, which is 11.47 years which 11 years and 5 months completed). Just thought of noting down what comes to my mind instantly for each letter of the alphabet... This is not to favor anything or anyone and it might strongly reflect my experience and my thought. Again this is just the reflection of what is on my mind at this instant and the list may vary if I do the same this at a different point in time.

Here goes the list...

A for Apple

B for Bell Laboratories

C for Computer

D for Dell

E for Ecommerce

F for Face book

G for Google

H for Hibernate

I for Internet

J for Java

K for Keyboard

L for Logic

M for Mouse

N for Network

O for Orkut

P for Pen drive

Q for Quality

R for Risk

S for Super Computer

T for Tablet

U for USB

V for Virtual

W for World Wide Web

X for Xerox

Y for Yahoo

Z for Zombie

Note:

It took 3 mins and 37 secs for me to complete this list and this time includes

1. Checking for new mails 2 times (no new mails have reached my inbox. If any mail has arrived, it would have taken much longer time or I would not have come back to this list at all.

2. Referring to word web for spelling for 3 words (I am typing this in edit plus editor and I checked for the name of the to tool to put it in this sentence)

3. And to complete this, I will have to copy paste the full content is ms word to do spell check :)

4. In ms word now, there were 7 spelling mistakes in the text with none in the list of words (thanks to my mastery over spelling and to word web where my mastery failed)

5. Oh… the spell check again says there is one more correction in spelling and 4 grammar mistakes to be corrected.

6. And one more spelling mistake in the above line… so goes the correction… It’s always (one more word showing in red by now on this line) mistakes and corrections in life continues… After all life is all about learning from mistakes and the main quality of IT professional is to keep learning. So we keep doing mistakes is just to enable us to learn better.

Now I am leaving it to you all to find the remaining mistakes (in this short write up).