"Real Meaning of Helplessness.. " - A Story with a message (written by me for a competition)

Real Meaning of Helplessness….

She prepared a cup of tea for herself, took newspaper and sat in balcony to enjoy the view of distant snow capped mountains. She was alone as her parents had gone for a medical checkup and was happy because she was going to become sister of a newbie after few months.

She took one sip of tea and turned the pages of newspaper to look for stock market news as her father had told how the stock market crashed and he was in loss. Suddenly her eyes stopped on an article about female feticide. She felt contentment that her modern family was far away from the touch of such bad and pusillanimous actions. She had inherited honesty and panache from her parents, kept herself protected from fashion fever and lived simple. She always felt motivated by her father who believed winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. Her chain of thoughts broke when door bell rang. Parents had returned.

At night, she heard her mother crying and discussing something with father. When she understood, she felt as if earth had moved away from under her feet. Her mother had gone through abortion. Whole night she imagined that her father was standing with a knife and the knife was dripping with blood.

In the morning, she finally mustered the courage and went to mother. “Why did you do it”, she said softly, “what made you kill your own baby, mom?” Mother got shocked and replied, “I was helpless, dear”.

And she again drowned deep somewhere in thoughts searching for the real meaning of helplessness that makes people monsters. But she could only conclude that however modern we become, but that ‘special’ helplessness always follows; just as reflections of the past are always apparent in the present.

--Maninder S.

Open Source: Moving Towards Real Knowledge Sharing Economy

Open Source : Moving Towards Real Knowledge Sharing Economy
Composed By (Maninder Singh)
(With inspiration from Dr. Maninder Singh@TU, Dr. Seema Bawa@TU, Mr.Vishal Verma@Bivio Networks and Mr. Niyam Bhushan)

Before Reading this article, just think of the coffee or tea you have in the morning on the bed or may be tea time in the evening to get with your friends or family. How sweetly you prepare and serve tea to your loved ones... But just imagine from the wildest corner of your thinking; what if someone in this world claims a patent and copyright over the method of preparing tea and sues you for using his method without his permission???? Sounds illogical ?? But is it not exactly the same the properiotry giants doing with us? Can you legally 'share' a proprietary software setup CD (remember that piracy is illegal) with your loved ones? Can you ask for the source code of a very popular software tool so that you can experiment for your research interests? I am afraid, you are not !! The whole funda of 'sharing' (sharing the knowledge and sharing the goods... both) fails here ! And yet they talk about creating an economy where knowledge is shared !! Just give a thought to it now if you have never given it before.

This whole story revolves around two main keypoints: Usage of "Copyleft" software (which are not copyright) to save the national monitory treasure and Creation of software whose source code is available to all, with credits to the original author to enable the real Knowledge sharing among the people. It is not bad to purchase the software licenses but where does the rational thinking goes?? We being the residents of a developing country.. see the irony- We have money to purchase license of a properietry software (for which copyleft alternative is availabe); we are ready to spend thousands and lakhs on the software funding but we do not have money to lay down road to a distant village; the government thinks twice to fund the building of a school. Ceilings in many governement schools are still cracked and water oozes out in the rain and children are managing with such an uncomfortable "study environment". There are a number of other needs of money and we are spending it like anything in purchasing licenses when there are equivalent alternatives (even better) are availbale. And then they say, ours is a 'developing' economy !

Lets see the other aspect of the story now. For the development of a knowledge economy we need to share ideas, we need to merge the intelligence powers of different people across the globe to find new dimensions and explore those unreached heights of thoughts which will pave the way towards a new science era for the . But the big irony is that we ourselves are refusing to unleash that path and the new heights by creating/purchasing the proprietary software and ignoring the advantages of Open source software. Above all, dont you think this is inhumane and against the moral of humanity to keep the culture of "Not Sharing"?? Despite the fact that the research is only possible if source code is available and source code is available only in open source software, why are organizations still not aware that how important it is to nurture and permanently adopt the open source software. There are a plenty of new opportunities in the open source software era. I do not mean stop using other software at all but I mean we need to start using and creating open source software as well. Money can buy everything we know, but it can never purchase the human values back once they are gone (by 'not sharing') and it cannot buy the super power of intelligence formed from the merging of different people's intelligence which if put on research can do wonders !! And we can create a better world where the knowledge is really free and distributed without the legal boundaries !! Won't you love living in such a world?

The time to think about it is now! Lets move towards real knowledge sharing economy and every single person can do a lot about it. To know more about open source, visit this link: http://www.opensource.org

- Maninder
maninder.tiet@gmail.com