The monk who sold his Ferrari

An 'eye opener'




Let's say that you are teaching a class. Let's say that you are teaching Unix.
You have drawn a neat sketch of the inode-wise layout of the disk and you are
explaining the concept of the hierarchical filesystem and directories and
inodes and hard and soft links with the help of your neat diagram. Suddenly
you discover that one of the students is not getting the whole picture ...
because he can't see ... *because he is blind*.



At that moment I didn't really feel the impact because I was too engrossed in
the subject, too engrossed in teaching. But the whole thing really hit me
hard on the bus ride home. A thousand questions were raised, not many
answered.






First, about teaching - in such a situation, do you teach for the lowest
denominator or the higher one. Doing anything is going to unfair to the other
category. But in this case, the whole problem is magnified to a huge extent.
I obviously cannot rely so much on graphic description to explain things, but
in that case, how are the rest of the bunch going to get the hang of things?
In this case they become the lower denominator because they cannot imagine
the whole system, even though Unix is so simple that it is beautiful. This
blind fellow must have been so frustrated when he kept hearing things like
'here', 'this block', 'this file' when he can't possibly know 'where', 'which
block' and 'which file'. I have been in classes where I could not get the
hang of what the teacher was telling about. But that happening all the time
would be so tough. Hats off to him for being so persistent.






Second - this point is for the people who smirk at computer geeks telling them
to get a taste of the real world (yes I've heard this remark pretty often,
especially from girls). What *is* the real world? Is it what you see? That
argument just came crashing down. For this blind boy then, what is the
difference between the beauty of the design of the Unix system and the beauty
of a lush green landscape with huge, sprawling, colourful flowerbeds? Which
one is 'real'? If you say that touch, smell and sound define the real world,
go ask Stephen Hawking. He most certainly knows more about the real world
than most of the people on earth.

BEAUTY LIES IN THE *MIND* OF THE BEHOLDER.
So next time you laugh at a long haired, shabbily dressed geek sitting in
front of a glaring screen and typing an incomprehensible language of symbols,
think again. He can see whatever beauty you can and appreciate it too. But he
can also see the beauty, the existence of which you didn't even know, let
alone making an attempt to experience it. And don't mock at him when he keeps
talking of free (as in freedom, not price) software. Because you are mocking
at his right to experience beauty.






Third - I wonder how this person has come so far, learned so much without ever
looking at a single diagram, a single illustration. I mean I just cannot
imagine it. I admit that even I rarely need any illustration to see abstract
things. I even say that I can imagine 4 dimensional space-time. But to do
that I have always needed to take help of symbolic sketches which ignored one
dimesion or the other. At least to start with. I clearly remember relying on
a diagram drawn by Richard Stevens in his Unix programming book to get the
hang of the Unix filesystem. I may not need it now, I can imagine it in a way
that is independent of the diagram, but the point is that I always needed one
to get me started. It would be so difficult to learn without *any* visual
illustrations at all!






Finally, I feel the significance of a sentence that I remember he once said
when Narayan Murthi visited the Pune campus recently. (I knew from then that
such a person was working at Infy, but the I did not get the gravity of the
whole situation till today, till I fell down a warphole). This guy had
earlier designed and written a piece of software and was noticed when Infy
employees were involved in some charity work. Yet he had to give the Infy
entrance exam and he passed. His sentence was - "I'm proud to say that
Infosys has selected me because of my ability, not my disability".