As always, when I’m a little high I get on this whole debate of “what / who is the driving force behind all the changes in our lifestyle ?”.
And as always, I tend to take the open-source route. People find it annoying. People find it “just trying to be different”. But seriously, try to think of it – the things we enjoy / spend most of our time on, are things / products / software built on open-source technologies. I won’t even go into the details of facebook’s source code, but will definitely quote a genuinely appropriate example from facebook only.
It’s no big deal (everybody know this), that facebook was built on PHP (open-source)! But what is amazing, is that the facebook chat (that is slowly replacing gtalk / yahoo IM) was initially built using Erlang (though maybe I won’t be 100% correct here, but Erlang definitely played a major role). And better still, the whole facebook messaging system (which is slated to be a combo of IMs, text-messaging and emails) is built totally on open-source technologies !!
Now, would you think I really give a shit about some “Barkha Dutt” or “Vir Sanghavi” who don’t have a single line of character, and still enjoy the idolism / fan following of billions of people ??!!
The point is, we don’t really need anymore Barkha Dutts or Vir Sanghavis…it’s high time we get some genuinely good people in limelight. It’s very easy to follow people in the limelight, so definitely number of followers / number of people you influence is not a criteria. What the criteria is right now, is that you have character (more than anything) and values that you follow
Everything apart, I would love to see Kiran Bedi and Sachin Tendulkar come in the mainstream media. It’s the country at stake, and I am a stakeholder. Period.
I know it’s a weird comparison – technology and mainstream media – but if Barkha Dutt has to resort to twitter to clarify his position on important matters, then it’s not difficult to guess who should lead the change !
