Philosophy of life

In this page I would simply like to state my motivation and source of inspiration which keeps me going. We all know that life is not a bed of roses, that we need to fight our own small battles everyday on the professional as well as on the personal front to live a life like thousand others and yet so special in its own way. I would quote a well known poem by my all time favourite poet Rabindranath Tagore which succinctly expresses my philosophy of life:

“Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow
domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought
and action–
Into that heaven of freedom….. “

I believe in freedom of knowledge and am deeply convinced that it should be accessible to all.Contrary to some who believe that they “own” knowledge, it is difficult to ignore the fact that most of us are means of knowledge transmission . Since yore, human beings are indebted to their predecessors for the valuable knowledge. Its not really a favour to share it, instead I feel that it’s a part of our basic duty towards fellow humans. Apart from the handfuls, who with their talent contribute to the knowledge generation, the rest share it among themselves.

Of course the debate generated by the internet and its different free knowledge sources can go on. Surely practices such as cracking source codes of programs and softwares are abusive. Otherwise the intellectual property rights would not have been necessary. The method of knowledge acquisition involves issues of ethics, honesty and mutual respect. (A propos du respect, une petite parenthèse: comme on dit en français: le respect, ça se mérite!)

What makes the difference is the capacity of each individual to use the acquired knowledge and their ability to develop particular skills. Life is the greatest teacher: we learn our lessons and live on.

P.S:Those who are interested in knowing more about Knowledge transmission can try the article/abstract written by Paul Faulkner. It comes under the headline “Understanding knowledge transmission”.