An idea a day keeps the doctor away

I think I am obsessed with the idea of creating new ideas. Since my undergrad days, when a mere look at a stepper motor interface made me think of the numerous possibilities there were to make something cool with it, I have been fantasizing about the next cool thing I could make with the basic building blocks I have at hand.

Only with time, my building blocks evolved and became a mix of technology pieces, business concepts and social issues. Thats a great concoction though! But with more information in my head, I guess my idle time goes into thinking about new things to make, new companies to start and a new world to live in...

Most of the times I get out of my day dreaming and move on with my life... but the idea sticks on as a 'Could have been the next revolution' Sometimes I have actually realized that someone made a killing out of it :)

here is a small list of a few of those ideas.. These are in no particular order DO NOT judge me on this!

1. Automatic pet fish feeding system
2. SaaS based Supply Chain Management system (Patented by IBM I think)
3. An earth based car positioning, and guiding system which I proposed to Reva the electric car company. (they shot it down)
4. An advertising system based on ring back tones on mobile phones ( too late on this one  )
5. A virtual of Chai ki Dukaan (Road side tea shop) where people get together and gossip, discuss new ideas or understand the world, Office politics, course curriculum, or their love life.. This is still a very potent idea, if the Chai ki Dukaan ambience is successfully implemented.
6. A local area customer - vendor handshake platform for services. So you can get a local plumber/carpenter/nanny without having to hunt for one.
7. A concept similar to batchmates.com but much before batchmates.com came about
8. Setting up a Sabji Mandi in US to promote healthy food
9. Opening recharge stations for electric cars in India.
10. Opening a p2p shop rating system, which is accessible through mobile phones.
11. And a fresh one.. A doctor rating system!! 

Well the list is longer... but you get the gist.. and yes you are free to implement any of these.. it's open source now :)

Yoga to fight greedy capitalism

I was watching 'Capitalism A Love Story' yesterday. Well, call it a totally senseless conclusion, but after watching it, I decided I need to start doing Yoga. And here are the dots connecting the movie to Yoga :)

The movie propounded that in a place like the US, people always spoke very vehemently and passionately about Capitalism, Free-markets... A place where enterprises were always easy to open, where competition was fair, and where everyone was prospering because of this healthy atmosphere for people to follow their dreams and live out their american lives...

and then the economic crisis happened.... something, which according to Micheal Moore, was calibrated and executed very well by people in the US govt, colluding with people from Wall St. The movie is made with enough emotional sequences to floor you before driving home the point that when someone else is making decisions and telling you to do something, or invest in something etc etc, he has his foremost capitalistic (read profit making) intensions in his mind.

So much so, that in some places children were unjustly kept in juvenile homes when they never needed to, at the behest of a judge colluding with a private juvenile home operator. Similarly, other examples were given to show ( or rather prove) that capitalism in its current form cannot be trusted, coz everything from money markets, food markets (meaning what is sold in your next door grocery store and what's not... have you thought about why there is just soooooo much more orange juice than any other?)

When you let someone else choose for you, through the means of consulting, agents etc, you let them decide for you. Maybe we are trained to do that. To let the specialist do his job, coz we know much less than him! and also that it is NOT our job to know as much as the specialist does....

Think about healthcare. Primarily in US. I have been to docs enough number of times here to see that most of the times, I get the answer, 'I don't know what this is!' so please get a test done, and then get an X Ray, etc etc... For my carpal tunnel syndrome tests (which they didn't even prove in the end) they got me to do an MRI, an EMG (which another doc then said that it was a useless test), 4 X rays. 2 blood tests for everything in the body and 5 visits to the doc. And in the end, I was at the same place as I was before. I even solved the problem myself by getting a new keyboard!

Now. I would have always let the doc do his job. But this, and other cases which stunk of money mindedness in the medical profession, made me rethink...

If you put capitalism and your complete submission of yourself to someone else, you are giving him the power to take you for a ride as he wants to. And in the process, possibly defer your speed of getting healthy again.. same applied to the housing loans with sharks out there to shave that extra bit of profit from you. etc etc.

So I thought, I must take charge of my own life much more than I do right now. Instead of 'take me there' approach of current service oriented industry, I want to move to a Do it Yourself. A familiar term, but not really implemented anywhere beyond building/fixing home/cars etc

And to begin with, let me start with reducing my dependence on external medicine.. and a possible way of that is to start doing Yoga...