Wireless 101

The Tech World is going crazy. Apart from medical science I don't know of any field that is advancing at such a supersonic speed. Just about two decades back we had a POT (Plain Old Telephone) which could do nothing more than make and receive calls. It had that dial which took almost 30 seconds to make a call (compare it to: if it takes more than 3 secs to load a webpage now we swear the browser, call it quits and change to another browser), that too might end in a wrong number or a hillarious cross connection! That POT, often in shiny black would have only one ringtone which was NOT customizable, no skins, no fancy headset or holster and it happily served 12 people of a family. No one had any issues with that!

In the last few years we have seen a sea change. With the advent of the internet era, people seem to have gone crazy. PC itself was a revolution but that too seems backdated now. Next were the laptops but the first gen laptops are huge and heavy compared to the ones we have now, say MacBook Air. Having a wire attached to stuff would limit your movement, get rid of that, make it wireless. Even better, have many wireless devices and make a seamless transition from one to another. Put all your stuff up in the cloud and get only that one which you need at the moment. You're not going to lose any data even if you format your hard drive! Devices are getting shipped everyday. You don't even have to go twenty years back for it. In the first few years of 2K when I was in undergrad I was one of the last people in my college to get a mobile phone. It was a Nokia 8100 with a small b/w display. Now, last year I had an iPhone 4 only to find that it has become backdated by now. I don't know where to stop.

Now in the wireless era when one person has multiple smartphones (I have separate ones for personal and business use and a tablet to meet both) - that do everything, check email, surf the web, take pictures, stream video, play games, read books, spend time on facebook, navigate, have millions of apps (some interesting, some utterly useless) and do make calls when you need it it's time we take a quick look at the person whom IEEE has named "The Father of Radio science".

This is definitely not going to be his biography, but it is about Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose as I see him. My first aquaintance with Acharya Bose was with the simple lesson that plants have lives. Sometime in my early childhood I was told not to tear leaves off plants because of this reason. Later, I read "Bhagirathi'r utso sandhane" which also had nothing to do with Radio Science, but I admired the writing and felt awe at the way he has described the Himalayas, the mountains I have always adored. I do not see him just as a scientist, I see him as a philosopher, a patriot and a wise man, like our ancient sages who has the power of knowledge. The way he always demonstrated his experiments and encouraged students to try and see practically what science has to give show how advanced he was for his times. When he became a victim of racism and was not given proper pay or a laboratory to work at, Acharya Bose fought against this by rejecting his pay check for three years! I admire this man for refusing to patent his inventions. Like other scientists like Roentgen and Pierre Curie, Acharya Bose also believed that "knowledge is free". He invented "Wireless telecommunication" but did not want to patent it. Later Marconi received Nobel Prize for the same invention. What value does a Nobel Prize have for someone who was at least 60 years ahead of his time?

So the next time you feel proud to own an iPad2, spare a though for this humble man who is at the base of modern wireless technology. To him, I repeat my favorite poet Satyandra Nath Dutta's poem "মনীষী মঙ্গল" :
"জ্ঞানের মনি প্রদীপ হাতে
ফিরিছ কে গো দুর্গমে
হেরিছ এক প্রাণের লীলা
জন্তু জড়ো জঙ্গম এ
অন্ধকারে নিত্য নব পন্থা কারো আবিষ্কার
সত্য পথ যাত্রী ওগো
তোমায় করি নমস্কার"