Amir Khan - Not only an entertains but also spreads social awareness

Amir Khan

Movies show us how to reach the hearts and minds of people. Commercial cinema has a huge following in India. People not only visit multiplexes to see movies , but they are able to see a particular favourite movie many times over in their DVDs , mobile phones, tablets etc. There is great impact of movies on the psyche of people around the world, probably more in India than anywhere else. 

In Bollywood if anyone has tapped into this wonderful influencing power of movies positively, that's Amir Khan. 

During his earlier years Amir came across as a wonderfully talented natural actor. When he became a film producer his humanitarian and thoughtful side came into prominence. The film Lagaan actually became a case study for students at various management institutes and also the Indian Army. 

His film Taare Zameen Par created awareness among the masses regarding dyslexia in kids and also generated hope and optimism in the minds of parents of kids affected by dyslexia - that the condition can be overcome. 

The awareness created by this movie actually helped in early detection of dyslexia among thousands of kids and many parents and teachers took corrective steps  to overcome this disorder in their children and students.

Earlier in India, in most cases a dyslexic child was simply passed off as dumb and were often made a laughing stock. In India even now beating up a student with a cane is still practiced by teachers. This dyslexic children are often mercilessly beaten up by their parents or teachers for being weak in studies. This results in lower self esteem  and loss of confidence among such children. 

This compounds the already bad situation of a dyslexic child. However dyslexia can be overcome, some of the greatest scientists like Nikola Tesla, Galileo , Pierre Curie and the great painter and polymath Leanardo Da Vinci were dyslexic. 

He didn't stop there he started a television programme called "Satyamev Jayate", that took up various social issues and also showed various positive initiatives taken by people. The show was simultaneously broadcast on various TV channels including the national service broadcaster Doordarshan.

It was watched by millions across the nation , it was discussed widely in social media. It was shown in regional channels as well in languages other than Hindi. The success of this programmes bear testimonial to the fact that even knowledge based programmes can be commercially successful and at the same time spread awareness among the people as well. 

Meanwhile he also did two more movies, which were both entertaining and had an excellent social message as well. Both of the movies were super hit in the box office. The movies were 3 idiots(released in 2009) and PK(released in 2014) respectively. 

The movies 3 idiots encouraged youngsters to follow their hearts and warned students against memorising stuff without understanding them in a rather hilarious fashion. 

In the movie a student named Chatur (nicknamed silencer) memorises a speech that is to be given in Hindi. Now chatur does not know Hindi , he gets his speech written by the collage librarian. 
Rancho(the character player by Amir Khan) mischievously changes some of the words like chamatkar(miracle) to balatkar(rape) and dhan(money) to stan(breast). 

Now when Chatur gives the speech in front of a packed audience the speech not only embarrasses the principal, but it generates a laughter riot among the people present there. By this prank Rancho tried to give a message to his friend that only memorising things won't work one needs to understand what one reads.

The film also shows little innovations done by Rancho from the stuff available near him like on the first day of his collage, when the seniors were ragging the juniors ,he immediately ran into his room.When one of the senior student threatened that he would pee outside his door if he didn't come out, what Rancho did was he connected one end of a wire to a steel spoon and the other end of the wire to a power supply and placed the spoon right under the door so when the student urinated , his pee fell on the spoon and that completed the circuit and he got an electric shock. 

It also shows how he helped a woman into delivering her baby , with the help of an inverter made by him he generated power when power supply was snaped and his on the feet thinking of adapting a vacuum cleaner into a suction device of a lower force that helped pull the baby out was another such instance.  

I have already written a blog about the movie PK , which is a wonderfully entertaining movie that warns against getting under the influence of fake spiritual gurus. 

Both the movies are produced and directed by the duo of Vidhu Vinod Chopra and Rajkumar Hirani, but both movies seem to have a tremendous Amir Khan influence in them. 

If we have more socially responsible actors like Amir Khan it would be good for the country and the society. 

Movies can make scientists

Around the world movies are extremely popular and has tremendous influence on the public psyche. Can this influence be tapped into in order to arouse people's interest in science, specially kids. There are space scientists and astronauts who have said that it is the TV series Star Trek that influenced them into taking the decision to become space scientists and astronauts.

There have been scientists who were inspired by a book to become scientists. There have been doctors and scientists who have been in their childhood influenced by their parents, teachers or others and that had tremendous influence into them becoming doctors and scientists. 

Thomas Alva Edison was not liked by teachers in school because he asked a lot of questions , his supportive and strong mother allowed him to leave school and his entire education was done at home. His parents encouraged him to experiment, allowed him to follow his heart and intuition and that's why he became such a great inventor and entrepreneur that we know. 

Dr APJ Abdul Kalam was deeply influenced and curious about the flight of birds, the collage in which he studied had two decommissioned war planes kept in order to explain the various aircraft subsystems. In his biography Dr Kalam says that he felt a strange attraction towards the planes and would sit besides them even after everyone had gone back to the hostel. This are the factors that influenced him into taking up aeronautical engineering at Madras Institute of Technology and later on went on to become the father of India's missile technology and at ISRO he headed the SLV project.

The examples of Edison and Dr Kalam are from the pre-television and movies era. But there is one thing that is very common whether it be past or present. What people chose to become in life is owing to some influences of childhood or some inspiration in youth. 

Take example of the country Israel , with a population of mere 8 million people it produces so many scientists, engineers and innovators. The youngsters there are influenced by their own countrymen who have done well in field of science and technology and they want to follow their example. 

So in India where movies are so popular and with satellite television beaming hundreds of movies a day, there should be movies made that encourage the spirit of scientific enquiry and experimentation. Such movies must be made that encourages innovation and finding innovative solutions to problems. 

The 2009 movie "Three Idiots" is an excellent example in this regard. There are youngsters who developed a drone similar to the one they saw in the movies and named it "All Izz Well".  Watching someone innovate encourages the spirit of innovation in other people. 

The innovation need not always be in terms of a physical product but there can innovation in terms of doing things, that increases productivity. 

Movies like "Three Idiots" ,"A beautiful Mind" ,"PK" and TV series like "Star Trek" should be made more and more so that bright young students are encouraged and inspired into taking up science as a career and maybe some of them will end up being great scientists and inventors of the future. 

Music and technology

Music has always been a great source of entertainment for people. Music relaxes and reinvigorates the mind. Music has also been used by psychologists to cure patients. Now 140 years ago people can only hear music only when some talented singers and musicians played it. It was all live performance for there was no way in which we can store the music at that time. 

Now music is nothing but rhythmic sound. Sound is a set of waves in air or in other words sound is disturbances in air that are propagated as waves. In 1877 Thomas Alva Edison made the first mechanical device that store and reproduce sound , this device was called the "Phonograph" which later came to be known as the "Gramophone".

Edison with his Phonograph

It was the first device of its kind in the history of humanity. Edison's phonograph could record sound on a tinfoil sheet phonograph cylinder and it could later play the sound as well. The phonograph comprised of a stylus the circuit around the stylus was arranged with magnets . So when the sound was recorded the corresponding sound waves was converted into physical movements of the stylus that would etch out the corresponding disturbances on the tinfoil sheet.

When the tinfoil sheet was used to play the sound the movement of the stylus would generate electrical pulses which would be amplified and corresponding sound were generated. Later on many scientists worked on this phonograph and kept improving it. The cylinder was ultimately replaced with flat vinyl disk. Very soon they became the major source of storing music and playing music for many decades till audio cassettes and tape recorders took over in the late 1970s.

The advent of audio cassettes reduced the use of vinyl Cd's and gramophone significantly. In case of audio tapes, there was a tape with magnetic material in the cassettes that contained the audio information in terms of analogue magnetic information. It can be written and rewritten multiple times.

The read head of the tape recorder worked on the principle of electromagnetic induction. When a particular portion of the tape passed under the read-write head it would generate electrical signals that would be amplified and the vibration of the speaker would generate corresponding sound waves in air and thus we heard music and sound. 

When recording sound using a tape recorder, the portion of the magnetic tape that passed through the read-write head would have its tiny magnets rearranged depending on the electrical signals. Tape recorders were a rage in the late 70s ,80s and early 90s. 

Audio Cassete

Tape Recorder and Player

Japanese electronics company named Sony brought the Walkman which made it possible for people to listen to recorded music on the go. The Walkman was a small tape recorder with earphones that the user placed in his ears to listen music. 

Sony Walkman

Now tape recorders used analogue recording technology and developments in computer science and technology were making digital electronics popular. So in the 90s there came speakers that can be connected to a computer to play music. The music was stored in the computer as digital information in the form of 0s and 1s , the sound card that was placed on the mother board would generate electrical signals corresponding to the digital information and the speaker would convert this electrical signals into vibrations that would produce sound in air.

Computer Speakers

                                     
          
The quality of sound(music) with digital technology turned out to be far superior than the analogue sound. However there was one drawback back then the encoding formats of digital music did not have algorithms that compressed it significantly so the music files were huge for those times. 

But in time new formats came in , the mp3 format was a revolution because this technology actually eliminated those sounds that were not heard by humans form the music files, thus making the music files smaller and at the same time the storage technology was improving by leaps and bounds, it was actually doubling every two years.

So storing music became cheaper and easier and with the advent of Internet one was simply able to download music from the Internet anytime, anywhere he or she wanted to. 

Then came those little Mp3 players that stored and played music. Apple Computers saw opportunity in this field and came out with their iconic product i-Pod that made it possible to download , store and play music anywhere and anytime. The quality of music in i-Pod was very rich and the marketing done by Steve Jobs in popularising this product made it a rage in the entire world. 

iPod

                                  

At the same time mobile phones were getting better and better and then you had mobile phones that can actually play music. Today there is not a single mobile phone sold in the world that does not have this feature of playing mp3 music. Mobile phones have become major source of not only communication but also entertainment and information. 

Mobile phone with earphone

                                       


Most of the songs downloaded form the Internet is downloaded in some mobile device. Today we have come to a point where anyone can connect his mobile phone to the Internet and the download music and play it anywhere he/she wants to and it doesn't cost any money at all. Most of the music downloads that are done world wide are done free of cost. 

So science and technology has played a big role in the way in which we used to hear music and sound. Today for  99.9% of music heard by a person would be recorded music. Live music is only heard in a music concert or if you have any singer in your family or in your neighbourhood.

Thanks to technology people have more access to quality music than they ever had in the history of mankind. It is knowledge of sound, materials , electronics etc and corresponding developments in technology that has made this possible. 

Innovation and Development

A spark of innovation can destroy systems built over thousands of  years. Innovation can change lives. When man figured out how fire can be used it was a game changer for him. He was now no longer afraid of dark because fire provided him light in the dark. He was healthier since he learnt to cook the food in that fire and eat it. Also frequent heating of the meat helped him to preserve the meat for longer periods of time. Fire became his weapon and his protector since wild animals were afraid of fire. The smoke that he got from partial burning for firewood helped him to keep harmful flies like mosquitoes away. He used fire to make stones hot and give them shape that would make them sharper and hence more lethal. 

     A simple innovation Fire which man started using either by observing nature ie Forest fires that happened when two trees rubbed vigorously across each other and copying the same (as we see it among American Indians and Australian aboriginals) or by chance stumbling on two flint stone pieces rubbing each against the other  generated a spark powerful enough to ignite dry grass or saw dust. 

Thus the first innovation of man FIRE made him the undisputed King of the Jungle a class above other animals. 

So we see that at the very basis of human evolution innovation has played a very important role. Without innovative thinking man won't have come up so far. Human innovation did not stop there but continued and accelerated.

   The next big innovation was wheel. The wheel enabled humans to build carts that made transportation easy and fast. This innovation was so big that even today most of physical inventions made by man is directly or indirectly someway somehow linked to the wheel. The tyres of your cycle, motorcycle, car are wheels . The same principle of wheel is responsible for the working of various machines . The hard disk or the DVD drive of your computer uses the same principle of wheel to rotate. The turbine is a wheel whose rotation generates electricity.  In short the innovation of wheel resulted in tremendous development in the fields of tools and machinery. The wheel played a major role in the material development of man. 

Similar has been the story of many other innovations that happened through the course of human history. Different innovations have had varying degrees of impact. Some changed the world some had very little effect but innovation is essential because humans are always cornered with challenges and humans have to overcome them through innovative thinking. 

Not just challenges but many a times simply following his curiosity man stumbles on various materials studies them their properties and once having grasped this knowledge, man smartly creates products and services that would change they way he lives. 

   It doesn't stop there once a product is first invented it goes through a series of subsequent improvements take for example the hard disk. The first hard disk was of the size of two refrigerators used to consume huge amounts of power and provided a storage of mere 3.75 Mb(megabytes). The cost per megabyte came to around $ 9200. However subsequent improvement in the design of hard drives have made it smaller and smaller. Today you have hard disk that are less than 1 inch in size consume a mere 2 watts of power and a standard 3.5 inch desktop hard disk can store up to 10 Terabytes of data(3 million times more than the first hard disk). The cost per megabyte of storage is little as $ 0.000035 or 3.5 cents per gigabyte. This has been made possible by constant improvements in the design of the hard disk. The basic principle is the same but researchers figured out how to put more data in a square inch of the drive. In the future hard disks will have even higher capacities. 

The development of a nation today depends on scientific and technological work that happens in that country. The modern day examples today are to name a few South Korea, Japan, Israel. Japan and Israel are particularly lacking in terms of natural resources but still they achieved great economic progress thanks to their technological achievements. The are other nations like Saudi Arabia, UAE , Qatar which are rich. But this countries are oil rich and the money make by selling oil is ultimately invested in building infrastructure. The infrastructure is built by companies of countries that are advanced in technology.  Without the technological advancement of western and far eastern countries the Middle East countries would have remained poor since the oil would have been of no use. In fact they couldn't have dug out the oil at all. 

The real wealth of a nation is in the minds of its people. Through good education the young minds need to be nurtured into becoming excellent people and excellent innovators of the future. 

INNOVATION - Think different

Innovation is nothing but doing something different with a product or service to make it better cheaper and more useful to people in many cases it may lead to the growth of complete new market new solutions come into existence because of that. Let me  explain this with an example. All of us have seen barbed wire fences across the world but from where this idea of barbed wire came into existence ,before barbed wires fencing a large area was extremely expensive and required a lot of labour since the fencing material was made of bricks and stones but in 1867 Lucien Smith of Ohio came up with the idea of twisting pieces of iron wires in such a way that they join up with adjacent wires and at their junction the ends of the wires stand up straight in such a way that someone who holds it carelessly may be injured, now this property of barbed wires was used in making fences of animal farms that prevented predatory animals and other trespassers from entering the farm and this was achieved at a fraction of the cost of a fence made of wood and bricks.

              So what does the above example show a man had a problem he wanted fencing to be done to protect his cattle at the same time he wanted it to be  one at a cost that is affordable without compromising on the effectiveness of the structure that would protect his cattle. He observed the resources available to him thought about using it to achieve the intended target and comes up with a solution that would satisfy his need.

        On the face of it a solution like barbed wire seems very simple but iron had been known to man for thousands of years even iron wires were available to man for a long time by why no one else thought what this man did. This simple innovation of barbed wire is still being used across the world as a major fencing solution its no rocket science it also shows that one does not need to be an engineer or a scientist to innovate examples are there from people around the world that even innovation can come from even the simplest of the people who have never read a letter of their language.

          In fact human civilization itself is based on innovation the utilization of fire for security and cooking was an innovation so was utilization of wheel for making vehicles and pottery. The various tools that man used for hunting like the bow and arrow ,man understood that highly pointed objects when thrown with a good amount of speed would penetrate the flesh of an animal deeper and faster also he understood the elastic properties of materials which was the string of the bow that was used to catapult the arrow with great speed.

            So this little faculty of the human mind that makes him think differently and try and find new solutions to problems with the available resources should be encouraged every person in the world can innovate. 

                                                                               Rakesh Mallick