The rise of the machines

(These are just thoughts. I will be a dutiful worker #CustomaryRecruiterAlert :P)

Note: This is a dull boring post just to make a note of the stuff i read in the past few days.

Ever since my term-IV course on “Business sustainability and carbon markets” understanding the “rise of the machines” has been one of my key focus areas. I still remember after one of the course lectures on bio-mimicry i sent a mail to the course prof asking about how the whole idea of industrialisation seems ridiculous and anti-thetical to the idea of living in sync with the nature.

I remember that day i wrote this in my notebook:

As i have documented on my blog this journey took me to works of multiple people starting from Schumacher .. to Gandhi.. to Tagore .. to J C Kumarappa to many more. In the last week i had read a couple of books which also clarified a lot of the questions i had on this topic… these are Ivan Illich‘s “Tools for Conviviality” ( Interesting to know this book is behind the evolution of Personal Computer)and Claude Alvares‘s “Science, Development and Violence, The revolt against modernity”. Both of these are very well written books.

I am currently reading Lewis Mumford‘s “Technics and Civilisations” which is Volume-1 of his “The Myth of the machine” series.

I am also doing a parallel reading of this philosophical treatise by E.F.Schumacher titled “A Guide for the perplexed”. The only reason i bought this book is because i happened to read that .. Five days before he died Schumacher handed a copy of the finished manuscript of this book to his daughter with the words “this is what my life has been leading up to”. It is a very difficult read. Not because it is deep philosophy but there is something else which makes it very difficult to understand .. or may be it is deep philosophy.. i dunno! I think this is one of those books which i will appreciate only after i re-read after sometime (though i haven’t finished it yet!)

The “Leadership through literature” course ended and my team presented last on the book “Life Of Galileo” by “Bertolt Brecht” . I enjoyed reading the book. The book did fit in well with all the other stuff i was reading otherwise.Thanks to the course i also read “Beyond the last blue mountain” and Irawati Karve’s “Yuganta” for the first time. I did read some more in the first half of the course but these three are my take aways from the course.

If not for all this term-V was a bit boring academically speaking. The courses i took somehow weren’t exceptional … they didn’t really ignite that spark in me.. like a couple or more courses in Term-IV did. I however, enjoyed all my reading which should be evident in the upsurge in my blog posts in the past couple of months.

So, that is that.