I just finished watching the A&E Biography for Alexander Graham Bell. Though all of us know of Bell as the inventor of the telephone, his work for the cause of the hearing impaired, aviation, the hydrofoil, assisted respiration and even the pre-cursor to x-rays – a device to locate bullets in the human body are less known.

Similarly, a couple of months ago, while on my roadtrip through most of New England, I also listened to Time‘s compilation of The 100 Most Influential People of the 20th Century — and each one of them was truly amazing. From the leaders like Churchil, FDR, Hitler (even though he may be screwed in the head, he was a leader), Roosevelt, Kennedy, Mandela, Gandhi to Watson and Crick, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, Martin Luther King, Einstein, Alexander Flemming, Sigmund Freud, William Shockley, Tim Berners-Lee, Akio Morita, Sam Walton and even Bart Simpson! It boggles my mind to consider the greatness that has been achieved by these people. And while they reached the pinnacle of their contribution to humanity — they were all people. Each one with their own flaws. None perfect.

As I listened to Salman Rushdie’s piece on Gandhi, I realized that what we are taught in schools and in the media is the image of the person. he image the media wants us to see. But the real person behind that image may not be perfect. May not be the idealized human we expect them to be. Rushdie started his description of Gandhi by describing the multi-million dollar “Think Different” advertising campaign launched by Apple Computer in which they showed Gandhi and the words “Think Different”. And Rushdie asks the question as to when did this icon for peace become the medium to sell more computers and notebooks to consumers? Rushdie also pointed out that Gandhi too had character flaws — surprise surprise.

Besides learning about the amazing accomplishments of these amazing people, I think one of the things that made it that much more memorable for me was that these were all real people. They all had their weaknesses — which makes them like us — it doesn’t belittle their achievements, but instead tells us that despite our own flaws, we too can do things to leave our mark and make our own history.

It is truly an exhilarating experience for me to watch and listen to the successes of people who have gone over and above what most even dream of achieving in their lifetime. To all those who have done so in he past and to all those who are doing it today and to all those who will do it in the future — you are all amazing people.

Every once in a while I go from one extreme to the other in terms of craving interaction with other people. For the most part I enjoy interacting with other people. But there are days in which I’m highly ambivalent about being around people. Those are days on which I prefer to watch people but not necessarily interact with them. Today was definitely one of those days.

So my answer to this was to go to Starbucks, armed with my notebook full of MP3s, a DVD player, a bag full of DVD movies and audio books from the Carnegie Library and he ultimate weapon in creating your onw personal world… the Bose Noise Reduction headphones.

As I context-switched between a multitude of tasks ranging from writing this blog entry, to writing essays for graduate school applications, to watching Elizabeth on DVD or playing with CSS for my website the headphones made sure I was always in my own personal world and though my peripheral vision would catch people moving around and talking I could only see their lips move and not hear a sound outside of what I chose to pump through winamp or PowerDVD – just the way I like it.

A public solitude — all of my own. A public place with my own space. The ideal place for a pseudo-recluse.

Over the centuries and the millennia, humanity has come to think that it is superior that the other species of the animal kingdom. Humanity is civilized. Civilization has become the cornerstone of history as we know it. We’re not the barbarians that we once started out like. Not the animals. We’ve evolved. We’ve become intelligent. We’ve become superior.

I beg to differ. Humans are just as much animal-like as they were when they first started. Just the means and the methods have changed. And in some cases, animals are better than humans. Animals don’t systematically plan and organize the destruction of masses of their kind. Though they may kill their kind, it is generally for self defence or with reason and even then, they do not organize concentration camps and devise means of excruciating torture, where death becomes preferable to life itself.

Humans with their advancement of technology, engineering, intelligence and everything else have still missed the boat on the overall ability to really understand the meaning if the word civilized. History is witness to the immense cruelties inflicted on man, by man. Be it for the cause of money and greed, religion and belief (probably the most scary in terms of the scale of attrocities that have been committed in the name of religion…), lust, power, fame, fortune.

Even today, the same story contiues… in one form or the other. Some of the issues surrounding the major conflicts of contemporary times are completely incomprehensible to me and defy my ability to have sympathy for either side. As to me they’re both being irrational and there has to be a way and a compromise to be able to resolve their differences without being such mules.

The only explanation which works as a cop-out is one which removes all the basis for even attempting to understand humanity… we’re still animals… and nothings changed.