Thoughts in HD

 Any person who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good

  (Though published now, this article had been written long before the controversial bifurcation of the State) Mohammed Aslam, holding his 10 day old daughter in his arms, sat on the steps of the hospital reminiscing what has been going on. He remembered his father telling him how his great grandfather had been killed by the Pathan tribals in October 1947. Angered by this, his grandfather joined the Indian Army to fight against the neighbours and was killed in the war of 1971. Following his father, and hoping for an end to the dangerous situation, Aslam’s father too joined the Army only to be martyred in December 1999. Shocked by his father’s death and radicalised by the clerics, Aslam’s brother joined the separatist militant movement. At the age of 30, he was killed in 2017 by the Indian forces. And Aslam sat here, with the lifeless body of his 10 day old daughter who he didn’t even get the fortune of naming, wondering when this saga would end. He wondered if any member of his fam...

  The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways earned ₹65 crore by providing access to the data stored in Vaahan and Sarathi databases. These databases contain data about the owner, make, model, etc of a vehicle. The data entry operators entering this data into the system would not have imagined the potential of the resource that he was generating. Some decades ago, companies would shred their papers or sell them to recyclers. The same papers would have fetched much more in recent times.  Humble beginnings More than a century ago, Jon Snow, an English doctor had mapped the residences of cholera patients to identify the polluted water pumps. His analysis of the data of the patients that he had attended to, helped find the source of the problem and hence eased solving the problems  The genius idea of a store manager to start a Customer Loyalty programme as a bait to lock his customers helped him generate information about their purchases, frequency of purchases, season of pu...

            Ashok’s mother was looking at his sketch of a clinic that he wanted to open in his village. As she flipped the pages of his blue diary, she read about his struggles, about the beautiful moments of his life, about his dreams and plans. She read about his desires to sacrifice the comforts of life and work as a doctor in his village. One page mentioned his plans to combine the knowledge of ancient Indian medical science and modern medicine to provide holistic healing to villagers in a sustainable and cost-effective way. As pages turned, the diary started getting wetter with her tears. Who will fulfil these plans now? Will these dreams always remain a dream? Will her son be satisfied with the work he has done so far? She was proud of her son, but would he be satisfied with what he could do? She remembered looking at him as she held her baby for the first time. She looked back at his efforts and work to help the sick. She was anxious when her yo...