The
dawn of a New Year is always an occasion for taking stock of at least
some of our major concerns : so let me take a critical look at
the uneven progress made by Articulations Online during the past six years.
I
launched this online column in September 2010 with the intention of
taking a comprehensive look at the world as it was evolving in the first
quarter of the 21st century, in scientific, technological,
socio-economic and cultural terms -- as
compared with the scenarios prevailing in the preceding three
quarter-centuries (during which I had grown up as a schoolboy and
college student, and evolved from a young civil servant and amateur
journalist into a senior citizen, superannuated man,
and semi-professional newspaperman, then U-turned to amateur journalism
again).
Articulations Online : take-off and travails
In September/October
2010, which I spent relaxing in my doctor-son Vimo's home in Northwest America -- precisely at the opposite end of the world away from my own
home in Southeast India -- I outlined my perception of a century
of scientific and technological progress in the following substantial
essays in this column, hoping to follow them up with some detailed
survey and analysis :-
I even marked the last text above as 'to be continued'. However, in the very next post I deferred further exploration of the formidable theme, with the following explanation :-
When
I started writing this online column last month with an awesome vision
of the Internet's apparently infinite dimensions, I knew I would find it
necessary to follow it up with some reflections on the impact of modern
science and technology on individuals and society. And I now realize
it will have to be a very long series of essays, because the theme is
extremely complex and bristles with so many intricate aspects. But
rather than risking mental fatigue by considering the same issue week
after week, let us spread out the core series a little, and take up some
other lighter topics in the intervals!
Well,
that's what I really hoped to do, relaxing in my son's hillside
house, with all the leisure in the world for meditation and
reflection ; and I did make a good start with the following posts in
Oct./Nov. 2010 :-
And although
I had taken up those topics merely at random, I felt tempted to explore
the related fields (space conquest, folk music, environmental
pollution) on a universal scale, in a historic/geographic/scientific
perspective. Actually, this was true of almost any context I could
think of ; and I soon discovered there were no such things as 'light
topics' at all if one's aim was to obtain and project a wide-angled view
of
things.
Moreover, back in my native habitat in South India, I began to get bogged down in the local music circles, writing my column Musicscan in THE HINDU, which called for frequent concert-going and intense concentration. And
It
wasn't long before I realized that in my five initial essays in 2010 I
had already projected a comprehensive preview of these turbulent trends,
and I really had nothing more to add to those reflections.
Meanwhile,
I was alarmed to find that hundreds of significant articles I had
written over a period of 50 years on a wide variety of topics were lying
buried in bulky folders, and needed to be arranged in some orderly
fashion if they were ever to be preserved as an interesting and useful
collection -- and Articulations Online suddenly looked
like the ideal medium for salvaging and circulating my past writing to a
potentially world-wide set of new readers, with appropriate notes and
annotations.
And
that's how, after a couple of barren years, I completely re-oriented Articulations Online in November 2012 -- by retrieving a significant article I had
written 35 years earlier in the Evening News in New Delhi : Spirit Of Adventure.
(to be continued)
