This topic reminds me of the standard “What Are You Grateful For” kind of blog post or list-making event. The top five for something like a gratitude list is always God, health, children, employment, family. Not necessarily in that order but it is the same thing for most folks. It is the same with “Who Inspires You?” Of course, my Father inspires me, my Brother inspire me, and my friends inspire me. But even then it is hard to narrow down to one person.
So here goes my list.
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| Nikola Tesla |
NIKOLA TESLA
Does this name ring a bell?
Surprisingly few people these days are familiar with the life and times of one of humankind's most eccentric, and volumetrically-insane scientific super-geniuses. He is affectionately referred to as the "Father of Free Energy". Tesla was a world-renowned Serbian-American inventor, physicist, mechanical engineer and electrical engineer.
One time, while he was working on magnetic resonance, he discovered the resonant frequency of the Earth and caused an earthquake so powerful that it almost obliterated the 5th Avenue New York building that housed his Frankenstein Castle of a laboratory. Stuff was flying off the walls, the drywall was breaking apart, the cops were coming after him, and Tesla had to smash his device with a sledgehammer to keep it from demolishing an entire city block. Later, he boasted that he could have built a device powerful enough to split the Earth in two. Nobody dared him to prove it.
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| Nikola Tesla in his Lab |
He held 700 patents at the time of his death, made groundbreaking discoveries in the fields of physics, robotics, steam turbine engineering, and magnetism, and once melted one of his assistants' hands by overloading it with X-rays. And honestly, if there were one man on this planet who was ever capable of single-handedly destroying the entire planet through his insane scientific discoveries, it was Tesla.
He spoke eight languages, almost single-handedly developed technology that harnessed the power of electricity for household use, and invented things like electrical generators, remote control, spark plugs, fluorescent lights, and giant machines that shoot enormous, brain-frying lightning bolts all over the place like crazy. He had an unyielding, steel-trap photographic memory and an insane ability to visualize even the most complex pieces of machinery – the guy did advanced calculus and physics equations in his damn head, memorized entire books at a time, and successfully pulled off scientific experiments that modern-day technology STILL can't replicate. For instance, in 2007 a group of lesser geniuses at MIT got all pumped up out of their minds because they wirelessly transmitted energy a distance seven feet through the air. Nikola Tesla once lit 200 light bulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of the god-forsaken desert. To this day, nobody can really figure out how the hell he pulled that off, because two-thirds of the schematics only existed in the darkest recesses of Tesla's all-powerful brain [http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/mass-transit/a-critical-look-at-wireless-power/0 ].
My respect for him grows day-after-day as I learn new facts about him.
SEBASTIAN THRUN
ANDREW NG
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| Andrew NG |
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| Sebastian Thrun |
Education has been a problem in India and lack of it has been blamed for all sorts of evil for hundreds of years. Even Rabindranath Tagore wrote lengthy articles about how Indian education system needs to change. Funny thing is that from the colonial times, few things have changed. We have established IITs, IIMs, law schools and other institutions of excellence; students now routinely score 90% marks so that even students with 90+ percentage find it difficult to get into the colleges of their choice; but we do more of the same old stuff. Creating a few more schools or allowing hundreds of colleges and private universities to mushroom is not going to solve the crisis of education in India. And a crisis it is – we are in a country where people are spending their parent’s life savings and borrowed money on education – and even then not getting standard education, and struggling to find employment of their choice. In this country, millions of students are victim of an unrealistic, pointless, mindless rat race.
We have reservation in education today because education is not available universally. Education has to be rationed. This is not a long–term solution. If we want to emerge as a country build on a knowledge economy, driven by highly educated people – we need to make good education so universally available that reservation will lose its meaning.
There is no reservation in online education – because it scales. Today top universities worldwide are taking various courses online, and today you can easily attend a live class taught by a top professor of Harvard University online if you want, no matter which country is belong to. This is the future, this is the easy way to beat reservation and make it inconsequential.
Both Sebastian and Andrew have won a million hearts by providing us with the most fundamental necessity.
I myself have enrolled for many a courses and find it quite interesting.
https://www.udacity.com/
BTW, Sebastian is also working on Driveless Car (Google X Labs), which I have been following since DARPA Grand Challenge.
This list would be incomplete in I do not mention Google.
The number of products are enormous and it never seems to be ending.
It's only that I hear there is a new product today.
Maybe its Search, Mail, YouTube, Docs, Drive,Transliterate, Translate, Gtalk, News, Forms, Android, Play Store, Google Glass, Chrome, Google Scholar, Nexus 7 and the list goes on. every product is a marvel itself .
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| Aamir Khan |
Aamir Khan, yesteryear’s chocolate hero and today’s intelligent man’s actor is reinventing himself as the face of social activism in Indian through his well-publicized social issue-based show Satyamev Jayate. He is using his celebrity status in the noblest way among the three.
His show Satyamev Jayate has managed to bring a number and severity of social problems that have engulfed our country into mass consciousness. It isn't that these issues are new. Anybody who reads newspapers regularly knows about these evils. But clearly a lot of people didn't (or maybe didn't care) and only found out about them when they tuned in to Satyamev Jayate on a lazy Sunday just because Aamir Khan was hosting it. The trick worked. Water cooler discussion in offices; gossip sessions in the parks by homemakers, conversations in the pub on a Friday night started to be dominated by the social issues showed and the pain they have caused to so many innocent people. Authorities, sensing the pulse of the nations swung into action and took (or at least announced) steps in some cases. Since the show has come on-air, Aamir Khan has been invited by a lot of prominent politicians to discuss the social evils shown on Satyamev Jayate. Clearly his star power did what thousands of social activists haven’t been able to do for years (maybe decades). Kudos to Aamir Khan for that.
ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE: Former Prime Minister of India
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| Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee |
ELON MUSK: Founder PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla Motors
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| Elon Musk |
