Tuesday, January 25, 2011

The Essential Think Pad - Part I

There is this one pad in my house that I call 'The Think Pad'. If you spend time using your Think Pad the way I use mine, I promise that you'll soon reach a stage where you will have a bright idea almost every thinking session. May be even two or more a day, especially if you are fortunate enough to have a plumbing that is compromised.

I am amazed at the number and quality of ideas that I have had while using my Think Pad. In fact, the light bulb with the idea for this particular essay written all over it turned ON while I was using my Think Pad. As to why the use of The Think Pad leads to creative and critical thinking, I am not yet certain. May be it is the thinkers' pose that one has to assume while performing the business of thinking while in the Think Pad Room - elbows firmly planted on the knees and the head resting on the palms of both your hands with fingers curled up into your cheeks, or may be its just the ambiance of the Think Pad Room, the odors, and the occasional sounds that all the thinking that you do makes.

Yes, my Think Pad has a room of its own, and I am fairly certain that yours does too. The days when we used to do all the thinking in the open are long gone. Well, actually ... let me take that back. (Unfortunately?), there are a few many amongst us who still have to do all their thinking in the open. It isn't considered very lady-like/gentlemanly to do ones thinking in the open. Now that I really think about it, thinking in the wild, in the open that is, may not have been that bad an idea. The cool fresh breeze at dawn and the chirping of the birds heading out from their nests must have made thinking quite an experience. But then, during good ol days there were no Think Pads available. Not even to the royalty of the day I reckon! So all the thinking must have had to be done while ... ... while squatting. How would squatting impact the quality of thinking? Hmmm ... something else to think about when I am sitting on my Think Pad next.

Oh ... that was a good save. Just an improperly placed 'h' in sitting would have mixed it up with thinking. Now wouldn't it? Phew!

Having had some experience using my Think Pad for a while now Ithought I'll make a case for the larger utility of Think Pads, give out some advice and suggestions for The Think Pads' optimal and best possible use, and discuss some cool and very effective applications of The Think Pads.

Some of the immediate applications of The Think Pad have to be the ones that require a lot of thinking, for example:

1. The speaker of the house in a country's parliament should sit on a Think Pad, and so should its legislators. They will be able to think fast and smart, and the issues that need addressing will be addressed duly, not in the least because The Think Pads are hard to pick and hurl at each other. Legislators from both right as well as left can chose to sit on adjacent Think Pads, especially during the very special events such as The State of The Union. A legislator from the right should actually share their think pad with their counterpart from the left - this shall enhance the bipartisanship like never before.

2. The Presidents and Prime ministers should have Think Pads installed in their offices - just imagine, if President Obama had a Think Pad in Oval Office, he would have been able to solve so many problems for 'US' as well as for rest of the world. If he pays heed to this suggestion now, he wouldn't even need to run for a second term leave alone campaign for it again for all the thinking he was able to accomplish in his first. Had his predecessors used The Think Pads, he wouldn't need be in office right now, but then that would have denied us the historic moment of a non-white person becoming The President of our great nation, isn't it? By the way, the same goes for the current crop of governors and legislators too - they would have saved us so much botheration, only if they had been smart to use their Think Pads.

3. If we are really serious about solving some of the greatest problems that we face today (for a prioritized list of issues that mankind faces today, watch this video here ), the heads of international organizations should use Think Pads to sit on during the meetings, and so should the representatives of the member nations - lets start with the UN Security Council as a test case for testing the feasibility of using Think Pads, but, we must then immediately move to applying those findings to The UN Climate Summit and on to the annual feature at Davos that The World Economic Forum is.

4. The appointees to the erstwhile Supreme Court need to do a lot of thinking, so they certainly could use The Think Pads. Not only will the decisions be more thoughtful and more relevant to current times, they will feel better in their stomachs, hearts and minds after they've rendered a judgment upon thinking straight, thinking issue through without leaning towards one side (of the Think Pad that is) or the other.

5. The leaders of various religions - ancient or modern, idol worshipers or not, must take a cue and start using The Think Pads in their respective places of worship. And so should their devoted congregations. I promise you, the gods will come to tears in less time than it takes to say Amen and they will certainly have to pay attention to the plight of their followers on earth. The atheists will have to take heart from the fact that the likes of Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris probably did most of their thinking while sitting (phew) on their very own Think Pads. Here you can watch a very intellectually stimulating conversation between four of the most prominent proponents of atheism today - I wish they were sitting on Think Pads during this conversation. It would have been brilliant yet.

I was going to say that students who are preparing for their exams can benefit from using their Think Pad too. But, the more I think about it the less certain I am of that, probably because the mental and emotional demands of the exams of academic nature tend to effect our physiological systems such that the whole business of thinking, and that which leads us to it, is affected. So, during exam days a student's gastrointestinal system will likely be compromised in the exact opposite way to the one mentioned earlier in this essay.

Now, as true (or false?!) as matter and anti-matter are, there are places that will not be served well by the suggested use of The Think Pad. The bus stops, the train stations, the airports and all other public locations of such nature cannot afford to let people use Think Pads for thinking all the time. Primarily because people will start lining up to use The Think Pads as most transit hubs do not charge extra buck for such a service. Not only that, during times of restricted transit the situation at public transit systems is bound to worsen e.g. during the natural (volcanoes spewing ash, crippling snow/ice storms) or man-made (planes flying into buildings, airports being callous about operations management and logistics) problems - during such times when we want every individual to be at their thinking best so that the problems can be tackled well and with urgency, everyone will end up queuing outside the 'The Think Pad' Rooms at these locations because of the rush and the anxiety of the whole situation. Thus, it is advisable that the contractors and operators of such facilities (facilities that must allow free of charge use of Think Pads) and governments in-charge figure out ways of avoiding that from happening.

To be continued - Part II to follow, soon ... - Click to go to Part II.

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