« Back to blog

The IT Cottage Industry

My mom is a brilliant chef! The best there is! She has had about 30 years of cooking experience and she has been at since she was twelve. Similarly, my colleague's father is a master automobile engineer and has been working with vehicles for a great deal of time now. Many of my uncles are profound at their religion and mantras. This is a generation that we look at with great pity, since they did not have the power of information and computing at their disposal. Well, atleast that is what i hear when people talk about them. And it is hilarious to say the least. This is a generation which might not have had Wikipedia or Google at their disposal, but were equally and perhaps more knowledgeable and experienced in certain things in their days than what we are today. They did not have information at their disposal, but rather they hunted it out, and held it close and together even after all these years. That is information you cannot ignore, that is knowledge that we must not let go of. So as i sat about doing nothing fantastic at office, i realised the amount of value, monetary, this information had. You are talking about expertise gained over 30 years, in very specific areas ranging from South Indian cuisine, Motor bikes and Sanskrit mantras. Most of these things from our culture as human beings. Mind you, such knowledge has not surfaced for the first time. In the past due to poor means of information storage, rich volumes of information was lost as it was passed down as word of mouth from father to son and mother to daughter. I can not even imagine the magnitude of loss that has taken place already and shudder when i realize that we are on the brink of making a different set of errors, but with the same results; loss of knowledge all over again. What is most alarming is the fact that, this is happening when technologies concerning information storage and retrieval are at their beastly forms and only seem to be getting better. What a pity it would be if we allowed our over arrogant selves to ignore the rich knowledge slip away just because we can never bring ourselves to respect our elders because they could not learn how to use a computer. So speaking a little more about the value of that information, (and do not get me wrong here, i used and will continue to respect my parents even before this thought came to my mind) let me put it this way: in the olden days when India was stepping into Industrialization, there was  a calling to the villagers and rural segments to help out the process by running small scale industries from their homes. These industries would be based on arts and crafts learnt in one's family, perhaps as a tradition even. This was popularly dubbed as the Cottage Industry, an industry which existed in most households of the nation, especially in the rural fixtures. A fundamental purpose of such a growth was also to keep those arts and crafts alive by giving them a sound industrial backup and economy. A similar situation has come about with the information that i was speaking about in the preceding paragraphs. It is time that the Industry of Information Technology, called upon the previous generations and encourage them to record their information for their own monetary gains. Blogs, personally developed websites and, even notes and pages on Facebook perhaps. And using these methods and means would just be scratching the possibilities for a full blown information revolution. Never do i claim that such activities are not taking place. All i say is that there is a dire requirement to make those actions and effort a lot more deliberate. Encourage our elders to blog to start with. That I think will be a great start!