The Information Underpass

 

There is a woman farmer tucked away somewhere in a small village in Nagaland who is worried about the mental and moral health of birds in her area. “Aiyah!” she exclaimed feverishly at a farmers’ interaction, “Even the owls have started lying these days!”

Till a few years back, the traditional knowledge passed on to her through generations came to good use while farming. When the owl hooted, as goes the agriculture lore, it promised sunshine the next day, after a continuum of rainy days. Of course, it wasn’t the owl’s hoot itself that brought sunshine but the sense and sensibility, from probable experience, of the owl that allowed it to understand certain patterns of weather. Considering owls have been around in this biodiverse zone of the (now) North East of India for a while, they probably knew their weather conditions better than their human counterparts, and passed on the knowledge accordingly.

The owls must be slightly confused themselves at having lost their age old wisdom about weather conditions. Whether they do, or do not, know about the rising carbon emissions from the world beyond their forests, we do not know. How does the owl networking and education system work anyway?

Human networking and education, on the other hand, has progressed at a startling pace. The World Wide Web, the “Information Superhighway,” turned 25 years last week. Quarter of a century after its invention by British engineer Tim Berners-Lee, information is available a click and type away to nearly three billion people across the world. Just imagine! Those of us privileged enough to write and read this, can technically connect to nearly three billion people from walks of life we never knew existed, or even the moon and stars. We could get knowledge of the most mundane and useless subjects to the core of fixing our electric meter and gas stove.

But there are another four billion people, also across the world, who have never logged onto this Web. Forget computers, many of the children from this four billion, do not even get textbooks in the cowshed, teacherless schools they are subject to. Nagaland shines as an example in point. Teachers do not get paid, have to agitate every now and then for something as basic as a salary, and students have lost their voice even in demanding textbooks. Now imagine the life of these young students—forced to live under the shadow of an Information Underpass—few years down the line. It will probably be where we find this region, as do many children across the poorest zones of the world, at present—in a puddle of unjust conflict and lying owls which make sense no more, connected merely through dying links.