Editorial
The Beginning
By Ashish Garg ('97 - '01 Instru)
It’s five thirty AM on the Eleventh of December, Two Thousand Seven. I am home. In Dehradun. I landed in India two days ago at the New Delhi Airport and then took the arduous ride lasting two hundred and seventy one kilometers to beloved Uttaranchal. Now is when the jetlag is at its worst.
I lie in my bed listening to the alarm clock go tick tock, tick tock. I also hear bhajans from nearby temple, gurubani from the nearby gurudwara and namaz from the nearby mosque. No, this is not a Manoj-Kumar-Mera-Bharat-Mahaan-Bollywood-Movie script. These sounds are real and are the only things that have stayed the same since I left home ten years ago. Everything else has changed. Very rapidly.
I like the change for the most part. Just that I have no friends left in my town. Everyone I knew is either in America, Bangalore or at some call center in Gurgaon. Actually all but one. Aishwaraya Raina an old classmate is still in Dun. Why don’t I ping her and find out if she is really in town. Good idea. The only problem is how do I get in touch with her. I don’t have her phone number, or address. And it’s five thirty two in the morning.
Brain wave! I log into the Cambrian Hall (my high school) community on Orkut. Find Aishwarya’s profile and guess what, she has her email id listed for public view. Two seconds later I am sending her an email asking her if she would like to meet for coffee later that day.
This is Web 2.0 in action. Or that is what Sandpaper’s young editors Arun Maharaj and Uzma Barlaskar will have you believe. In the cover story for this issue, "Web 2.0 – Angles and Demons", Arun and Uzma educate us on what Web 2.0 is and how it is changing our lives forever. Web 1.0 was about websites. Web 2.0 is about communities. Online communities allow many more of us than ever to collaborate, communicate and find long lost classmates.
As Don Tapscott, writes in Wikinomics, if you want to be a successful Internet entrepreneur then replace website with community in your dictionary. The cover story itself is an excellent example of Web 2.0ish collaboration. Arun (in Germany) and Uzma (in Hyderabad) wrote the entire story based on interviews conducted (over email) with BITSians all around the world.
This also happens to be my last editorial for Sandpaper. Taking over from me is Dileepan Narayanan. One of Sandpaper’s most prolific writers, little-boy Dileepan has grown in our organization over the past three years. He managed the Sandpaper newsletter, lead on-campus teams, wrote cover stories and hand-produced this entire issue from scratch. Little-boy-no-more Dileepan is now ready. To take over the magazine to even greater heights.
So here it begins. The wait, in suspense, for Sandpaper. For the next issue to appear in my Inbox. Magically. And unannounced.
