That was before a certain corporate behemoth came into being...These days when I get an email out of the blue - like the one that arrived day-before-yesterday - I usually run a google search on the name.
That email came into our inbox courtesy of the career network of one of my alma maters. Searching the name of the person who wrote the note on google brought me first to a lady who had donated US$ 2300 to Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. A quick look at the address of the striking middle-aged donor showed her as unlikely to be the email author. She lived half-way across the US from the august college. Looking well into her 5th decade, she was also from an unlikely demographic age group (though in the US college system you never know).
Within the next two search pages, however, I was pretty sure that I had found the person who wrote the note. Same college. Part of a Christian fellowship group on campus. Studying the same field. Amazingly, there was an account of how this person had been involved in genetically determining that an Amazonian epiphyte sample assigned to her was a totally new species. She had used genetic tools to determine that what she had was an unknown part of the tree of life!
To think of the freedom and encouragement students are given in the US! What we call a 'graduation' student doing primary scientific research is almost unthinkable in our higher educational institutions. Most students are mugging for exams - or playing catchup because things out of their control (like their professors going on strike like most Mumbai colleges had this year). Would that our colleges here in happy Bharat-land would experience such bliss.
Doing this to your own name does bring up some interesting links too.
Sadly, I have found out that one of my namesakes (written the traditional way as "Andy") is accused of child molestation. A slew of Andreas Eichers seem to be hanging out in Germany and Switzerland (not surprising since Eicher is a die-hard Mennonite name and Andreas is about as German as you can get - other than the odd Greek that is...).
Where do our digital footprints lead us? Will someone 40 years from now 'searching' the phrase you are reading now be led to this page? Or will the sheer mass of electronic detritus actually overwhelm the systems that we are using now? Will things written today return to haunt us, over and over again? And what about the ever-expanding bubble of information that we are sending out into space (most of which of course is sheer blather) from our blue planet?
The issue of saying something and then not being able to retract it has been around with us since the beginning of time. Jesus put it succinctly: "Let your 'yes' be 'yes' and your 'no' be 'no.' Anything else is from the devil."
Our words - every single one of them - are not just stored in the massive storage vaults of our sub-conscious mind - but exist forever in the eternal mind of God Himself. Anything less would mean a less-than-omniscient God - thus an entity hardly worth thinking about. Only a person who is at least a google times better than google is worth worshipping.
Did anyone say 'to the power of a google'?
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