If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner.

It is the story of the past when machines were built to save effort and time of the mankind. Today, we have ample machines to give us all the free time and yet, we are making more machines by the day to save more effort. The result is that we have started to become slaves to our own inventions.

Take washing machines, for example. Can you imagine a life without them? Can you imagine that you can wash your clothes by your own hands? Well, it’s a scary thought, isn’t it? We cannot imagine our lives without the television, computers, mobile phones, mixer grinders, cars and motor bikes. There was a time when we could do all those things ourselves.

We have been driven by our uncontrollable desire to become tech-savvy; to develop more of them and if we continue at this pace, we will soon not know what to do without them. If the technology fails us and the Internet goes down everywhere, the entire country, all the financial systems, all trade and commerce, all hospitals, etc. will stop functioning. What will happen then? The movie, “Die Hard 4” shows such a scenario when the country is thrown into panic, when some hackers hack into the security systems of America and the entire country is threatened into oblivion.

We must, thus, use wisdom and prudence in developing technology and in such a way that its loss will not affect the human way of living.

Friendship is a pretty full-time occupation if you really are friendly with somebody.

Friendship comes in as many flavors and varieties as ice cream. Some kind of friendship requires hard work, similar to an occupation. Other kinds of friendship can be meaningful, enduring and emotionally enriching despite long periods of neglect, springing to life with only a brief touch. Relationships with parents and siblings are often an intense type of friendship that can last a lifetime, run hot or cold and often require a great deal of work to maintain. The same can be said of relationships with a spouse or partner. While they are emotionally demanding and time consuming, these intense types of relationships offer profound rewards that are not often achieved in less intense relationships. The aforementioned benefits include love, nurturing, trust and emotional, financial and social support.

In contrast to deep family relationships that often entail hard work, other types of friendship can flourish, go dormant, and easily spring to life again. Friends found in early life, such as childhood school buddies and roommates from young adulthood often form close relationships. These types of friendship do not require hard work, as one’s job might, because they are formed from natural affinity. If hard work were required, these types of friendship would fall apart early, allowing other more natural relationships to develop. However, these kinds of friendship many times are interrupted when education, family and career draw friends in different directions. Sometimes friends from early life lose contact for years, even decades. Friendship encompasses a wide range of emotional connections. Some develop easily with little work and suffer little from long periods of neglect. Others require continuous and hard, sometimes emotionally wrenching work to maintain, but may achieve an intense, rewarding type of friendship that is deep and durable throughout life.

Do you think people watch too much television?

According to my observation, people waste so much of their precious time watching non-informative and cheap entertainment on TV channels. This trend has also resulted in people becoming less interested in the habit of reading.

For example, one whole day is lost to a cricket enthusiast, when he/she sits watching sports matches on the TV. The availability of entertainment channels, which air movies after movies, can be another spoiler.

Millions of people spend their weekends and evening hours glued to the TV sets, and some even sleep with the channels on. People turn out to be recluses, and the trend may affect the natural growth of children. Today’s kids are addicted to cartoon programmes beamed on channels and do not find time for games and physical activity. Mothers spend their evening hours watching TV series, which are often far removed from reality.

A few decades down, there was a culture of libraries and people were declaring book reading as a hobby. Now, it would be a rarity to find voracious readers, who take pleasure in reading books for information and not for leisure alone. The diminishing library and book reading culture can adversely affect the thinking process of humankind and civilizations may cease to exist in the absence of creative thought. Though TV can urge thinking, the fact that one may be avowed by the scenic and picturesque façade, make it difficult for quality imagination and productivity.

TV has also done damage to the indigenous culture as people come to see live cultures and civilizations and become inclined to them. It is a fact that people who live remotely and do not have access to modern audio-visual technologies keep their cultural fabrics intact, while others dilute essentials of indigenousness to embrace duplicity.

I believe that as TV cannot be done away with, there should be a self-regulation on what to watch, when to watch and how much to watch.

Do you believe that change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better?

When talking about change, there are many questions that need to be answered. For instance, what is meant by a change, causes of it, necessity to bring it, possible consequences of it and so forth? In this essay, I will explore, briefly though, the answers to general questions related to the concept of change and inconvenience caused by it.

An object is bound to complete its life cycle that is from its birth to death. Plato, the great Greek philosopher, explains the change in his “Theory of the sub-division of the human soul”. He says that an object is conceived either through our mind or through our senses. The picture of an object that we imagine through our senses may be different or ‘transcendent’. Such a form is free from limitations of time and space whereas the perception through our mind is permanent. He further explains that a concept is a cumulative product of many objects and that they are “systematically inter-connected”. The act of an individual in a given situation with a set of an environment may be different from others dependent on the information that already exists in his conscious. It is not a matter of right or wrong but it is natural to react differently by two human beings at the same time in the same environment.

People with conservative approach like to stick with the traditional or contemporary concept and consider call for a change nothing different from being rebellious to the existing system. However, many who like to see the results with a newly adopted approach proclaim themselves to be progressive.

A fierce resistance, at least initially, is inevitable against the introduction of a new idea or an effort to introduce a change in the existing system. Traditionalists oppose the idea not because they dislike it but due to the fear of its new form that may arise. A new idea or a change occurs when the intentions are good for the system, objectives are clear, and there is an ability to exercise it practically. It is also important that instead of repelling the frictional forces, the idea should have the capability to absorb the impact of it. The attitude to bring everybody on board keeps the inconvenience to its minimum.