Why am I Blogging?

The Internet has revolutionized the way we humans live and communicate. Digitization along with globalization has led to creation of new opportunities and has provided us access to information from across the international frontiers, yet it has also been responsible for giving rise to new threats and unprecedented risks, transforming our lives, literally, making it much more complex than what we had wished for.

With the advent of Web 2.0, the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as a platform for collaborating, maximizing collective intelligence and adding value for each participant by formalized and dynamic information sharing and creation, we have now at our disposal, new avenues for business, social-networking and entertainment. The allied technologies such as wikis, blogs, social-networking, open-source, peer to peer file-sharing, etc. have also gained significant importance in the life of every individual, directly or indirectly.

We now scrap our friend’s profiles on social networking sites instead of meeting personally or calling them up to wish them on their birthdays, share videos of our family events with people who having nothing to do with us, make friends online, instead of going out and indulging in group or social activities, pretending to be someone we are not, portraying ourselves as uber cool dudes and dudettes, in an endeavor to get noticed in the artificial world, leading a second life.

The ‘e’ buzz is growing by magnanimous proportions, from e-mail, e-cash, e-commerce, e-shopping, e-government, etc., we are actually moving towards leading e-lives. We have started sharing our life not just with friends, but with the global community, utilizing digital media, storing our thoughts and life incidents in high capacity storage servers, which are backed up regularly to keep our memories and social contacts "alive".

People grow old, meet other people, and make friends, form relationships, fall in love, and even break up, all online, in real time. We are getting accustomed to living in the virtual world, where anything is possible, and the cyber-world has almost taken over our lives, and such ideas as that behind The Matrix, no longer seem far fetched.

The time when the sweet smell of paper adorned with the blue-black ink of fountain pens could draw vivid pictures in our minds, the formation of each alphabet and word, painted in its own unique style, providing clues to our character, is long gone. Now is the time to type and express our thoughts on virtual media, using emoticons to portray our mood and state of mind. We are in the era of e-publishing.

So, here I am, blogging my thoughts and blog-marking incidents and events of my life, to be stored in the memory of some lifeless, emotionless machines in some remote corner of the world, hoping that I would be able re-live and reminisce these memories, share my experiences and gain insights from similar blog-marks of other individuals, and believing that these e-memories will live on, long after my body and mind have crashed.

But the era of blogging too is nearing extinction and we are rapidly adopting micro-blogging, publishing even the minuscule thoughts the micro-second they come into our mind, even when we are on the move, not willing to disconnect from the e-world.

Soon, we might wake up in a world where using the virtual networks, we would communicate with other individuals exchanging our thoughts, without even having to voice them or put them down in words, as e-content or otherwise as well. In such a human network, we would be connected to each other, just as our cell phones are now connected to other devices by the wireless networks across the globe.

Yet, I fear the day, when all the networks of the world would clog, all the servers would crash, the dooms day for the e-world, when we would cease to exist, all our memories, thoughts and knowledge erased, and we might not be able to survive it, as by then we would have forgotten what living in the real world was like!

But, it is not this day, not today, nor in the near future. So, till then, I will blog, micro-blog, nano-blog and much more..

I, me, myself

I was born and brought up in a conservative religious business family in a quiet valley at the foot of the Himalayas, close to the land of the holy Ganges. Growing up amidst such natural treasure, I developed strong bonds with nature and found ample opportunities to explore and further strengthen my ties with the environment by the trekking and camping trips and also by the frequent outings with my friends to such places.

I enjoy cooking, reading, roller-skating, watching television, gardening, trekking, playing synthesizer, etc. but the one activity that has got stuck to me for life is kite-flying, a passion for which I used to get scolded by my parents, almost every-day during childhood.

As a child, I managed to secure a decent rank at school, almost always figuring amongst the top students of the class, but was not very inclined towards studies as such. I somehow managed to achieve a high score in high school, especially in the sciences, and my parents motivated me to pursue engineering, adding me to the league of the thousands of aspirants seeking to secure a seat in a premier technical institute. I managed to crack the IIT JEE twice, but the rank was not good enough to get me in. I joined the College of Technology at Pantnagar, but as destiny may have it, a special exam was conducted after the seats in government funded engineering colleges were increased and I joined the Harcourt Butler Technological Institute (HBTI) at Kanpur.

Graduating from college, I became part of the so called IT revolution and joined the millions of individuals, who spend hours in front of the intelligent machines in the honeycomb shaped cubicles in large glossy buildings, doing nothing but churning out imperfect ideas in the name of technology, and advancements in society, making our own life a little more complex, everyday.

Having spent some time in the IT industry, I am now looking forward to exploring other avenues, in the hope that I will be happier, more successful and richer, in terms of the depth and quality of experience that I have now. I seek knowledge and want to use it for the benefit of the community, and yet get ample returns so as to be able to buy some of the things in life which provide momentary pleasure, for that is inherent in our nature as humans and is what differentiates us from the other inhabitants of planet earth.

I am an open book, the pages of which are being filled with text, color, and МűЅЇċ, that come with events in life, as and when they occur, with the occasional splotch #*##, a mark ? or two, yearning to maintain a balance in the journey of Life.

I am Siddhartha.