Abundance
During my middle school years (1988 – 1993), every summer vacation, my parents took my brother and me, to visit my grandparents’ who lived in a nice little town called Tirunelveli in South India. We took the train from Chennai and traveled almost 12 hours to reach Tirunelveli. These train travels are by far the best part of the trip because I loved to look outside and see farmlands, landscapes, mountains, the waving people, reading station names and the merchants selling local market items in every station. By the time I reached my grandparents’ house, I had lots of questions about different train engines, and even how the train pulls so many compartments. With my grandpa being a retired station master, he was always eager to tell stories of how railway stations, trains, and how other related things work.
During one of these travels, I noticed there were 4 lines of metal cables following along the tracks of the railway line. I was curious why they were laid like that and what they do. When I asked about that, my grandpa told me about the telegraph and how it works. I was very surprised at how the information traveled from one point to another and how there were people to transfer that information at every station, which were almost 75 kilometers apart because the information cannot be transmitted over long distances.
Around 1998-99, when I was in my 3rd year of college, I got a telegraph message saying that my grandma “expired” and I had to go to Tirunelveli to participate in the final ceremony. Although my college is just 200 kilometers away from my grandparents’ house, this message was sent in the morning and I got it late in the afternoon. Even though it was delayed, I still got to attend the final ceremony. Dial tone phones were available, but they were not accessible. Cell phones were not even known to the general public at that time.
20 years since then, with the introduction of internet and wireless technology, everybody is now carrying a device in their hands and getting instant messages. We can even see the other person typing. We have a personal assistant, travel guide, and route map to tell which direction to go all in our hands and available all the time. My kids talk to their grandparents every week through video chat as soon as we want to see each other. What a great empowerment technology has provided to all our lives.
Now the whole world is hyper-connected. You can search for anything and find the answers. Consumers are connected to the manufacturers very easily. Global trade is happening at a very high pace and large scale. There are so many ways available to publish your thoughts to the world community, instantly, by using the Internet through tweets, blogs, and social media platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and Snapchat. As things are happening, we can better understand the realities of the other side.
Billions of people, like never before, are connected through a single, great network called the “World Wide Web”, commonly known as “Internet”.
Realize the immense power that the internet can provide us with, and the infinite possibilities we all want.
What a great time in human history that we are gifted to live in!!!
Creativity and the power of the internet led to several successful businesses to flourish around us in a very short time span of 10 years, such as Google, Facebook, Uber and many more.
With the innovations happening in the cloud computing technologies, it made everything accessible to all to achieve anything at a very affordable cost and in a short time.
Still, there is a huge vacuum to be filled and it is up to each one of us to take our chance to fill it.
Are you up for the challenge to utilize the abundance and show your ART to this world?