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The Attitude to Search

Second Year of Engineering, boring lecture in motion, fed up. Some of us stand up to tell the teacher that we have no interest in enduring this ordeal. The lecturer tells us that in no event will she teach the on-going topics, which is recited out for us to register, ever again. We walk out and one of my friends says out aloud, "Google maar lenge", Hindi for "We will google it." And Google those topics we did. That is the attitude of search, one has to develop in order to survive this rough, competitive and demanding world. You have to embrace one fact of life: You cannot know everything, but the world will expect you to know it all. That is what demanding means. And you have to take it like that. So what do you do, to meet such demands? Do you try and know everything? Well, even if i could, i would not. Why, u ask me; well those are reasons devoid of logic so let us not go there. But, the point i am trying to make is simple: you cannot know it all. So what is it that you do best to cover up? You develop this unique ability to look for clues and search for the answers. Of course google has made it so much more simpler, but that is not the only source for solutions, and you need to find more accurate ones, with more effective results. As an IT professional, this is the single most important that i have learnt. There are too many technologies floating all over the place. And there are too many people master all of them. You cannot compete with them. Unless you have a trusted source which tell you the answers provided you know the right questions. This sounds a little like cheating in an exam. But this also sounds a lot like the old saying that has been repeated to us time and again: The answer lies in the question. Atleast at my workplace we are encouraged and sometimes forced to fend for yourselves when it comes to looking for answers. This very fact was also tested a little in our selection process. We were free to access any resource of knowledge available on the net. The fundamental idea was simple: get the results, one way or the other. While this post is philosophical in many ways and logical in few others, i took this day to state it so explicitly simply because i see that urge to search for answers either missing in many and dying in most. Develop this attitude to search for the unknown piece of knowledge, for it may be the only piece of true adventure that many will ever have.