Serendipity and Learning

Mahatma Gandhi once said, Stone walls do not a prison make, nor do iron bars a cage. He was probably talking about human imagination that cannot be shackled. Thats why bad ideas like thought policing will never survive, even though there are societies where there are, quite literally, thought police! To Gandhis quote, I might add, A cape makes you superman, fly all you want. As you might have seen, children need just a small straw to clutch at and leap into the clouds of imagination. A few days back it was "Superman" . All they need is a cape to leap into the wonderous land of imagination. The cape gives them superpowers to leap over buildings, climb over mountains and do things that they never thought possible in their "human" avatar. These days, the little one sleeps with the said "cape" one so that she continues to be "superman" in her dreams as well. Whats your cape? Wheres your cape? Why are you not wearing it often and leaping off a ...

I recently purchased this book from Flipkart (where else). The title of the book is Ramayana, Divine Loophole. I got the link from Varnam , a blog I hugely respect. So, without thinking much, I ordered the book. The book is basically Ramayana, but the way Sanjay tells the epic with graphic, technicolour illustrations is quite nice. The structuring of the book is quite simple and it retells the story so familiar to all of us - but I just liked it. Who knows, you may too!!

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo . Via Brainpicker  

Our activities together involves a lot of imagination - sometimes it is storytelling, sometimes it is sports, sometimes both of us will be poring over a screen learning about seaplanes or “the worlds largest car” or “satellites” or something else. But the biggest joy we derive comes from creation. We have made paper airplanes off the net, made random things that show up in childrens shows (MAD used to be a favourite and we made quite a few things out of that) and made other even more random things – like cutting out a cardboard phone or a gun or creating a "scene" using cardboard. And more often than not the idea comes to the little one when he looks at the raw material. So, he holds up a soap box and then he will say “let us make something with this” or at other times, it is a shoebox “make me a guitar out of this” and sometimes we succeed and at other times we do not.  So much so that he now has a box in which he fills all this raw material with which ...

Recently, I had to chance to attend a session on "Strategy" by two people. Let us call them Professor and Trainer.  (No, the ending is not what you think it is) The Professor had a lively interactive discussion - as did the Trainer. The Professor spoke for the same time as the trainer - but the Trainer was more interactive, had exercises for us to complete and had reading material. The Professor spoke about experiences from his work and around the world including historical examples- the Trainer spoke about data points around the world. The Professor was not the most suave, articulate - the Trainer got all his accents right and could speak like a dream. So, whose talk do you think we enjoyed? If you thought that we enjoyed the Trainer, you got it wrong. The Professor beat the Trainer by a wide wide margin. And therein lies an important lesson for me. That is about understanding the audience. Sometimes, we focus on making trainings interactive, lively, fill it up...

During my chat with the students through the Science Exhibition, I casually enquired with them about the components that they had put together. The list of things included, LDRs, Solar Cell assemblies, Flexible LED panels, Programmable robots, Assembled Helicopters, Spy Cameras and the usual assortment of Batteries, Motors and Bulbs. Each time the answer was, SP road, short for Sardar Patrappa Road. It was nice hearing that from them. Most people here know this place. Sardar Patrappa Road or SP road as it is known is at one end of the road leading to Chickpet (an adventure in itself, but this much I can say – If you have not visited Chickpet, you have missed much in Bangalore). This is the place for electronic junkies. Bangalores answer to Funan Square, to put it mildly, but much more exciting, in my humble opinion. You want to assemble your own computer, check. You want newer electronic toys, check. You want to buy some gizmos or connectors to some gizmo you got or want replacem...

Over the weekend, I chanced upon a board at a school which was holding a science expo. The board said, “Open to all”. So, in a bid to give “exposure” to Science to the little one, we landed there. And walked around, talking to students – who were explaining things with a lot of gusto. The little one was, of course, impressed, seeing children do stuff and explain to him was a thrill in itself. Also, to see them demonstrate concepts such as robotics, electronics was something else. I can imagine the rush of adrenaline he must have had on seeing it. More on that in a moment. But first, a word on the exhibition itself. The Chemistry and Biology section were quite ordinary – not in terms of the exhibit itself – or on the enthusiasm of the students. What I mean here is that, as concepts go, the concepts that the chemistry and biology section were talking about are all atleast 50 years old. When I was in school (and that was not 50 years ago), we had pretty much the same exhibits then...

Quite simply, the best opening para I read in a long long time. " When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997, it was just a year before the universal search engine Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger, that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library and spends hours and hours working her way through the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to make a love potion. The idea that a wizard in training might have, instead, a magic pad where she could inscribe a name and in half a second have an avalanche of news stories, scholarly articles, books, and images (including images she shouldn’t be looking at) was a Quidditch broom too far. Now, having been stuck with the library shtick, she has to go on working the stacks in the Harry Potter movies, while the kids who have since come of age nudge their parents. “Why is she doing that?” they whisper. “Why doesn’t she just Google it?” That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and ...

Once upon a time at the beginning of my career, I was poring over some data. That data happened to be in MS Excel. And I tried to sort it, sum it all of it to no avail. I was facing a classic problem that we see. Whenever any new technology replaces an older one, we look for it to be incremental or the same. So, in this case, technology had replaced paper, but we were still using technology as paper. So, the spellings in the sheet were not organized, they were entered as text and there was no uniformity in the sheet at all. Hence most of the standard functions were useless, unless the sheet was cleaned up. After about a week, I finally was able to produce a sheet that blew the minds of the people who saw it. And it was nothing great. Just totals, subtotals and a reverse sort by value. Which was difficult to come by in a paper mode, but far far easier when we move technologies. Why did initial digital cameras have the sound of the shutter? Same reason. Why does the ipad ...

and they gave me an office person! said the little one. He was playing Scribblenauts Remix on the iPad. If you have an iPad please download Scribblenauts Remix and read the rest of the post. If not read it anyway. The game has a simple premise. You are given a situation to solve – pretty simple ones – like giving someone a haircut or painting a car. And how do you solve it? By asking for tools that help you resolve the issue at hand. How do you ask for tools? You spell it out and the game provides it. That’s it. Simple as the premise is, the little one (and his dad) has gone crazy over playing it and in the process both his spellings and his imagination have gone up. Take a scenario – where the character of the game has to reach something in the sky. You could ask for a hot-air balloon, a winged horse, a magic carpet or an aeroplane! If he is hungry, you can ask for a idli, a burger or anything. We once asked for a nuclear bomb and as you might imagine, it killed everyone in ...