First - please do not apologize for writing in your own language. It is
a handicap that it takes work for me to read it, but it is *my*
handicap... not yours. The last thing I need are people wandering around
stealing my problems. If that happens, I shall have nothing to solve and
will be lost forever in despair. Would you want responsibility for that? :)

This was an excellent read... and quite true. To unleash the power of
who we are, we must be who we are first... and respect each other for
these decisions. The role of ICT should not be to make everyone a
programmer (a scary thing indeed!), a network engineer, a multimedia
designer... We need the farmers, we need the artists, we need the
dancers - and we need the poets, the comics... we even need the
politicians, though we have yet to learn how to effectively use people
who would delve into politics.

I used to speak of India as a success with ICT, but in the last few
months I have stopped doing this. My reasoning - perhaps my own
editorial censorship of my writing - is because of one thing: The
problems that come with the technology. Every revolution carries the
seeds of it's own destruction, and ICTs are no different. My friends in
India tell me of signs of this, and with a troubled mind I listen. There
is cost, there is value - and our goal must ever be to get the most
value for cost. This is because both cost and value change with time and
circumstance. Adaptability in a society is slow.

When we change too rapidly, there is a danger of shifting the balance of
cost and value too rapidly, and then adjustment... in engineering, at
least in English, we call it 'dithering'. A 'dampening' circuit removes
the 'dithering'. In thinking of how to explain it through a translator,
I can only think of the analogy of a pendulum. The goal is for the
pendulum to be at rest, and the harder the pendulum swings, the longer
it takes to get to rest. If you can picture that on a pendulum which is
itself on a pendulum and on another pendulum, and so on, I think you can
understand what I am saying.

Richard Feynman once wrote of this, talking about the need for
scientists to be subject to public scrutiny; that science itself
required people to oppose it to assure that the path of Science remained
in line with the needs of society. Sadly, he did not become a Nobel
Laureate for that thought, instead getting one for something few people
would understand even today. But it is a good thought, and as we speak
of technology, we need to have people - or aspects within ourselves -
which guide us to do the right things. I would prefer to have both.

Incidentally, you're writing somehow reminded me of a short story by
Borges. 'The Aleph', I think it was. It was a similar concept, as I recall.

-- 
Taran Rampersad