Technology or Labour!!!

Hi
Just a few days back i had discussion with a friend of mine over who drives whom?Whether is it Technology driving the labor or is the labor driving of technology?To make it simple was iPod a result of technology or labor.Now this is a topic which has been raised since time of industrial revolution.People saw upon technology as the one which will take their jobs away and will cause unprecedented levels of unemployment.There can be many arguments in favor of each side.
The proponents of technology will always put the point that technology is the one which is driving the world towards evolution,making way for more technological revolution,making life of humans easier etc.On the business side they can raise multiple arguments like technology has driven business.It is the technology that drives companies towards success and the ones which continuously improve on technology are the most successful.There might be a dearth of arguments in favor of technology in this passage since i am putting the ones which my feeble mind can collate at this time.So there is scope of many more such arguments.
I might sound a proponent of labor driving market rather than technology driving market.So there is always going to be some level of inclination towards the first point in this blog.
Kicking off the discussion i will like to take up the business perspective.I strongly believe it is the labor who drives the market and market which drives technology.Though technology has blurred the boundaries and made the world flat but how was this possible? Was this a case where we just came up with some technology and then we place that technology and it finds its consumers ? Or is it that one highly intelligent person came up with a desire to make this postal department run for money?This dude found severe bottleneck in transmitting his information to his friends so he thought of something like a telephone by which he can send his messages to all his people instantly.But then this telephone was also badly impaired and he wanted to remove this telephone and thought something else and then something else and like this the things kept on growing.What i am reflecting on at this point is that there was a need a customer for the technology who created that technology.Though the technology found its customer since many people wanted the same technology only they were not clear what they wanted but once this thing came up they had this light of enlightenment which struck them and they found it is very important for them.
I can also infer at this point that in the above example that here the consumer was the labor.The same person who used it was its creator so this is a cycle.
Like a farmer who grows wheat sells it to the market and again buys flour from the market . The farmer is the consumer and the producer.Only there are a few middle man who are smarter than this farmer who take his thing from him add value (or may not add value ) to his product and sell it back to him.These are the capitalists/industrialists.
So at every moment it is the labor who drove the market and if the labor does not need it the technology fails.Citing couple of examples like the pager in India.This product never clicked in India.There are many reasons for this mobile phones made them obsolete , no service which could facilitate pagers to develop etc.But i also feel that the need for pager was never felt in the Indian market.When the pager was launched in India it was targeted to the niche class segment,but subsequent to its launch we had the mobiles too which entered the market.The people started flirting with the idea of having a mobile than a pager while in US still a pager has its market . Now mobiles could capture the market since it met the requirements of the people more comprehensively than a pager.Here one more point we can infer is that the labor is not directly involved in creation of the mobile but indirectly,since he is the one who works in other industries and it was he who helped in rise of the mobile market.So every moment labor should be satisfied for a industrialist to make money ; though this is what i feel.Second example is from Dell where in they developed a product "Olympic" which could make immense impact to market but sadly they had to scrap the product as Micheal Dell states in "Direct From Dell".This certainly gave a lesson that you never build a technology and the sell it but first see its requirement and then sell it.
Many a times this case is being put that iPod is a technology that has created a market of its own.I would disagree here since iPod targets one major requirement of people their need to listen to music on the move.And in that perspective we can see that the Sony Walkman was also a instant hit since it provided people with the option to listen as they move.And for the same reason we have these hundreds of mobile phones with inbuilt mp3 player , fm etc flooding in the market do find customer.I regard the reason for iPods success was its first mover advantage .
May be i might not be correct.But it is my perspective that it is always the user( read as labor) who drives the technology and not the vice versa.

Hi
Recently an article came in the economic times(28th Jan).The article was conveying to the reader that there is no difference between a stock market and a horse race.I think why horse race i think we can compare it to pure simple gambling also.A game of chance!!
I wonder what makes people make such resemblances , such comparisons. Why ?
Is it because they loose the money in the recent crash and money tons of money!!
But what is reason for that loss? Do we ever try to discover ? Did they ever try to find what was wrong in them that they lost ? No!! Since we have other important works to do than this!!Like asking the BSE people to shift a bull sculpture from one place to another as if being facing the entrance will make it run into the market and change our fortunes overnight.
I think we all remember the simple adages.1)The quicker the rise the faster the decline.2)No one keeps on moving on higher altitude..There is nothing like perpetual upturn or downturn..the gist of it being the golden words of Newton 3rd law"EVERY ACTION HAS AN EQUAL AND OPPOSITE REACTION"
The things i mentioned above are used so often in our d2d bantering that they are a cliche.Even a child of 1st class knows it by heart but what does it imply very few understand and follow.
Just trying to apply such parameters to the recent happenings in last 4 years.We rose like a mad bull and when every small barrier was broken we grew more sceptical , more suspicious of the market.Then there were people who would say that everything is good but they also warned that yes we will fall and fall big time.Only we kept on missing the point.
And then when we started to be a bit complacent and felt that things are fine no more corrections we will scale new highs , we had hundereds of theories on decoupling ,strong growth , recession which all made one point we are not vulnerable; we are stuck by a bolt of lightening and we lost all our airs.
Now the real game begins find the scape goat who must die since others have to live.It must be slaughtered since the government has to work.And to add to it our venerable politicians give comments that stop futures trading , stop this , stop that !!!
May be these laws might not be true in overall market but won't our commonsense help us stave off such miseries.
But this is what an ideal world should do but this world is far from ideal ; it is real driven real laws...Laws of greed , lust , power ...
There fore any learning of any sort is far from coming....So till then we will continue play the same game and make same mistakes only the players might change...That i hope does happen...
Till then make money by fooling the fools!!!!
But never blame anyone since when u got rich u too made someone poorer..
After all it is a horse race !!

Dilema of democracy: A wirter's agony

Democracy:- A very hallowed word and being an Indian I am supposed to be proud of it.But of what should be I proud of?Should I be proud of the fact that our democracy is not a voice of the masses ? Or should I take excessive pride in the fact the our democracy fails to safeguard the very pillars on which is was founded?
Here we have example of a writer like Taslima Nasreen who is placed in a house arrest in some place away from world.A place where we deny her rights that are awarded to every human who is born;the right to mingle in the society.Is she so dangerous a creature that she has to be kept out of public sight? And who decided over that?Is saying what is ones belief such a crime that we should incarcerate a person?(And then we expect Md Haneef to get a fair trial.Thanks Allah he was targeted in a foreign land and not in India.)
I believe we are no better than the Junta in Mayamar the generals who on some whims of their house arrested a champion of democracy.
Here we have a person who championed against the grave injustice existing in the world,only she could not sit closed eye to the plight of people.Every rational thought points to the fact that this is curbing the rights of an individual and the biggest paradoxity is that it is prevalent in "World's Biggest Democracy".This is a hypocrisy when we ask our neighbors to enact democracy while we march upon the basic rights of people.
But wait the laws are always for some individuals to benefit. Aren't they ? And the next paradoxic case is that we still follow them!!!!
I am perplexed what has Taslima done wrongly for which we have waged such an acrimonious attack against her.Are we not aquianted of that fact that women are still targeted in our society? Are not children put though such perils that they ought to loose their interest in the sanity of so called educated people?
We all accept all these "misdemeanors" in our closets.I say misdemeanors since they have become minor crimes for us.They do not shock our nerves we have learnt to ignore these and those who cannot ignore and raise their voices we have learnt to ostracize them.
See how simple life has become!!!!

Devoted to all those who come and go out of my life

Life and River
Today I understand the point Herman Hesse raises when he says we learn a lot from a river.A river is in constant turmoil. The upheavals, the quite moments, the raging waves and many more emotions all quite distinctly connected to life. But inside all these emotions the basic character of a river never changes; its basic tenet that of helping civilizations to grow and flourish. I think you got the point I am raising here. Life also brings all these emotions to fore every day. Some people choose to live with them while some stay away from them. There are so many similarities between these two that any conscious attempt of mine to elaborate will result in a chapter and I will loose the point behind this passage. I know this is not a passage since it spans across various lines but my limited knowledge of literature fails me in giving a meaning full definition to it.
Imagine you are sitting by the river side and seeing the river flow. Forget all that is happening in your life. Forget about the wind, birds, sun everything; just look at the river. I see the water , rocks , plants and many things flowing with the river. If the river is fast they just pass away while if the river is calm they stay there , they may stay there for centuries altogether but they are not permanent. And now if you could sit there by this riverside for ages without you yourself aging then you start to see that it was never persistent. It is always changing though blind to human eye. But since we have a restriction of aging and the duration of change is large we see these things constant and when we see these things constant we start associating them with emotions. I might sound clichéd, you may say that what new I am saying but then it is your decision to continue or just move out.
Now what I see in this river is everything I see people swimming in the river some sit with me for some time share some time with me and then leave while some just come for the sake of coming to make my sitting more complex. But if all these were to go and I could stay here on this river all alone talking to the river; which always was speaking something but I could not listen to it and I choose to listen to the creatures who came to make my life complex to divert my attention from the river; I understand the point that all will pass what remains is we with our rivers. And I was foolish to associate emotions with these people who had to fade away since that is there inborn tenet. They are the ones who trigger change by not being the same and the thing which is the same is this river. This is all just a game played by us set up very neatly by us. I might question how can this be set by us and played by us. So the answere to this lies in one more tenet which we have that is of action. All these emotions, reactions and associations to these sightings in the river are a result of our own actions. If all of us choose not to act then the riverside is a boring place to be but even one person choose to act then this chain of actions are triggered and we fall like the stock market.I base this on the simple law of action and reaction.
So I just ask this question who started this first action? Since for this action to happen also there must have been a motive. Someone would have thought and acted. So who is that person and upon deeper deliberation I found the culprit. It was none of the people sitting by the riverside but a bigger player. He in fact rolled the dice first and all just started playing like the Jumanji. When he rolled the dice the consequence was that we were all given a very remarkable feature of existence and for existence what was required was the nag to eat. This nagging desire of human made him to react. This very feeling made the man to take action and what I see is that rest is all history. And the game that God was playing with us is to come out of this plug and play game of action and reaction. Here I donot mean that we should stop eating/acting altogether; no; no way this is our feature but to see the life in broader perspective, the perspective which Buddha, Mahaveer, Jesus, Krishna and all the great saints of the world adopted.
The idea that nothing changed. When I say this I mean the basic tenet of the river has not changed it is still the same but only our association made it so complex and caused this despair and pain .