Literacy: Is it truly necessary?

The letters are easy, yet read the names and words and see that their pronunciation and usage are anything but easy

Many of us schooled in India, perhaps even elsewhere in the world have been told that a good percentage of the population of India is still illiterate. They are literally unable to 'write'. Most of us (at least within the groups I have spoken to) have been taught that the "lack of schools" or the "lack of primary education" is the primary cause of illiteracy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Indian systems of writing were extremely well developed and evolved. Evidence of a 7th Century CE carving here, shows the "engineered" Grantha script - ('Grantha' literally means script, and is a phonetic script that can ideally be used to represent any language.)  Those who made these carvings that remain today are unlikely to be royalty or even priestly folk suggesting that language was available to artisans and craftsman. Further written scripts were to be taught after the fundamentals of speaking a language was taught.

Expressive!

Today, a good part of the day was spent in trying out some techniques that my mentor recommended for a technical problem. There were results, not dissimilar from prior ones that I had passed through. Either way, it was seen as a positive development.

Most of the day was spent in meetings. A friend who had provided training to colleagues had come to update me on his availability and schedule for the year. I admire his planning and self-driven nature. The usual weekly meeting (normally scheduled on tuesdays), today was mostly driven by me. There was some apathy towards my boss who chaired it, which I did divert by going pretty expressive on ways we could do better going forward.

The one thing I hate is retrospective thought and doubtful thought. The two most hated lines I have heard are "Why didn't you think of this solution which has solved a major issue prior?" and "Do we really require high-end equipment and tools to improve product quality, can't we just improvise with what we (don't) have?" These statements form the lingo of a colleague of mine whom I have been trying to convince with great effort to avoid retrospect and to employ intuition, lateral thinking and risk in solving tough problems. As he has been least receptive, it has been difficult to convince him in one shot, but with expressive moments including today increasing, I am hoping I shall get to him.

I did get a little overboard with my expressiveness towards the evening swallowing almost 1 hour of my colleagues' time in the evening. This basically was in an attempt to converge attitude, thought and method across our team. I do hope that despite whatever boredom I generated, it would have had some help to the ends I've tried to meet. Today has been one of the most expressive of my days where more time was spent on output than on input.