By-Two Kaapi in an oilfield

Varun invited me to blog at Similitude - a new team blog where "people blog for the pure selfish joy of writing". Reminded me of those golden times when I read Atlas Shrugged. Here's a mirror of the first post that I made at the blog.



As I pen this first post for Similitude, my media player has Floyd playing some of their best music. One of their songs, coupled with one of Salvador Dali's drawings (above) titled 'Ants and wheat ear' inspired this post's title.

As I just sipped some coffee a few minutes back, it struck me:

• I hadn't updated my whereabouts on Twitter
• I had to take a look at the snaps that my brother uploaded on Flickr in the morning
• I hadn't posted on my Tumblr blog today
• My del.icio.us account needed pruning by adding bundles
• I had to put a clip of my Google Reader's shared items somewhere

Somewhere in the sands of time, we have fallen prey to ubiquitous bandwidth and internet. You can bump into me in the evening and ask me how you too agree that 'Picture Perfect' was a piece of crap after having read my Twitter status last night. And to top it all, maybe we hadn't met for a couple of years now - and here you are, talking about the movie I watched last night, just because you've been silently observing what I've been doing for these last two years.

And beat this. All of us are doing so. We are just like those ants over the wheat ear. All we want is a piece of that wheat. Blindly we go about pulling that wheat ear in whichever direction we want. (You do know that when ants are moving something big, not all ants are pulling/pushing it in the same direction, don't you?). At the end of the day, the wheat ear does move. Not where we wanted it to, but how the collective spirit of mankind wanted it to.

(Now I understand why TIME said the Person of the Year 2006 was 'You')

The question is:
Is technology/internet illustrating that collectivism is far more glorious than the spirit of individualism?