Today, I did something that made me feel good. In that sense, I have been selfish for, I did it to make myself happy. I could also be counted as a bragger for gloating about it here. But the reason I am putting it here because I want more of us to realise the value we can add and make a conscious contribution.
There is a different kind of discrimination that people cutting across countries, religions, castes and creeds practise today and that is based on knowledge. As with other powers, there are people who have the power of knowledge and those who do not. People who have it sometimes abuse the power in oneupmanship over the have-nots. They may either make gains or withhold the knowledge which may otherwise have put everyone on an even keel. Some others may distort or misuse the knowledge to bring about harm. Wouldn't it be nice to stop this abuse if all of us had easy and equal access to all the knowledge and information around and the only way someone would fall back would probably be because of their laziness around not gaining that power? I look forward to such a world where knowledge flows freely without fear or insecurity.
There are so many people around trying to bring about that change. Like, for example, the man who is trying to set up computers in the remotest villages of Asian countries so that children can freely access the tonnes of information online and learn more than they ever possibly could from simplistic schoolbooks. I was initially skeptical about this idea assuming vandalism and porn access but surprising statistics reveal the former was in a miniscule (less than 10 I think) percentage of cases and there was no occurrence of the latter. Think about the impact this one man has the potential of creating-children from rural areas will be on an even footing with the urban kids when it comes to exposure (in a positive sense) and of course, knowledge. They (rural kids) will not lose out on opportunities just because they (rather their parents) chose to create their home outside noisy, polluted, overcrowded but busy, cosmopolitan, trendy cities.
Then there is also the man who is collecting , repairing and donating cycles to kids in remote villages in India so that they can commute to schools which may be miles away from home. In most cases, the people in towns and cities no longer had use for the cycles and they were simply lying around. This kind gentleman collected such cycles, got them repaired (change of tyres, seats,chain and painting probably) and donated them to children for whom the nearest school was probably atleast 10 kilometres away. Now, the children need not remain uneducated just because they had no means of commuting to school.
A salute to such people who are going out of their way to remove the discrimination based on the power of knowledge. I added my own miniscule drop to the sea of efforts today but there is room for doing so much more. Go on, help spread knowledge. Happy holidays!