Finding Answers

My world has changed over the past few years. It has lot many more W's than ever before. Since I was a little child, people around me were petrified with my w's - who, why, when, where, what etc.. I never ran out of questions and people around me found it hard to answer them all. As I grew, civilization took it's toll on me and I started realising that so many questions were 'not invited'. Gradually the questions decreased. Something poked inside still. Explanations were still demanded. But the fact that I knew finding answers was a hard effort pulled me back.

Bunking the games time was my expertise in school. I knew all the tricks in the book to avoid the 6 km runs that we were sent for. One of the shield I had was the library. I used to take permission to go to the library and work on project works as frequently as I could. I was particularly fond of the corner in the library where there were 3 shelves full of encyclopaedias. These volumes after volumes of know it all fascinated me and kept me coming back to them. A little respite from the big bad world which does not provide sensible answers to questions delivered orally. Still in my home I have more than a 1000 pages of xerox copies that I took from these books for leisure reading. Mind you, 1000 copies @ Rs. 1/- per copy. That was a huge sum of money for a miser like me who used to come back with 40 bucks remaining out of the initial 50 from the annual school 'fancy fair'.

I passed school and went head on into engineering preparation. The engineering prep books had sufficient puzzles in them to keep the mind from wondering off to the unrelated Q's. It was after my engineering prep that I got into a habit that has refused to leave me ever since. This time whining, money sucking, specks power increasing, deeply involving habit was surfing the internet. And that is when all the w's that were hidden inside came rolling out almost in magnitude of three orders (www). Ah, I found a way to find it all out. It was "Yahoo" and "HowStuffWorks.Com" then. The former promised a whole lot of information from across the globe and the later promised me a chance to be known as a 'techie' or a 'geek' or a 'braino' whatever you prefer. Actually speaking, they were there to quench my thirst. I found ANSWERS!. More I found them more I got involved.

As I write this blog I went back to 'Google' - my favo search engine now - and captured a few numbers for my searches. here they are: Total Google searches: 10644 In August2008 total search: 866 Whooping! Aint it?

Internet has equipped me with the power of finding it all out by myself. I need not wait for someone to help. I need not meet an expert. I need not but expensive books (though I acknowledge they have their own unique place in the process of learning). I need not worry about sounding fooling. And the best thing is I need not WAIT. Every few hours I get a chance to be on-line. And every few hours I have a chance to quench my thirst. :)

Coming to the GYAN part, I was not sure why I should write this post but here is one good reason I thought is Good to Share. My life requires me to know a lot from various diverse fields. It requires a lot of decision making that not only affects my life but that of hundreds of others. So, there is the need to know a lot in short time and know it sufficiently - neither too less - nor too more. This is where these www's have brought in a revolution. I am not an expert at everything, but I can have expert view about many things. I may not know many things, but I know how to know many things :) In short, the www world allows me to stand on my feet and learn things quickly at my own convenience. thereby it allows me to take up newer changes and deliver results :)

My suggestion to you is that next time you have a problem before you for which you have very few clues, go on-line. Search and know and soon you will find yourself in a much better position. Minimise the 'asks someone' and maximise the 'find out by yourselves'. It will take some time to get used to writing search texts that give you good results but once you have a hands on it - you will have the learning of the whole world available to you.

Search - Learn - Deliver and when in doubt - Google!

Looking back these are few search strings I used: - sri prakash shukla (was thinking about the movie Sehar) - how to make good an icon (was planning icon set for SankalpIndia.net) - why does mushroom cloud form (was watching youtube videos about Nuclear tests) - winning a rat race (One of my friends has a rat race related status message) - how to offer a secure window (I don't know what was running in my mind to type this) - is it okie to send 10000 mails at once (the newsletters we sent failed to deliver) - where to buy a nano (newspapers were flooded with nano) This was just about last one week. I am sure now you know what I was talking about above ;-)