Curiosity, Work and Consequence.

Still Curious

A personal archive of curiosity, experiments, failures, persistence—and learning to let go of the result

This is not meant to be a catalogue of achievements. It is closer to a record of curiosity at work—questions asked, things tried, ventures built, some sustained for a while, some abandoned, and a few rediscovered many years later.

The thread began before the digital age properly arrived.

Around the time I was leaving school, I was already wondering about artificial intelligence. The machines available then gave little reason to imagine what we now casually call AI, but the possibility fascinated me: could a machine ever think, learn or reason? Could it become sophisticated enough to force us to reconsider what we mean by intelligence itself?

I had no technical background. Curiosity came first.

As a medical student in Assam in 1988–89, that curiosity occasionally took me to Assam Engineering College at Jalukbari simply to acquire some understanding of DOS and computers. I was studying medicine, not computer science. There was no career plan behind it. I simply wanted to understand something that seemed likely to matter.

That habit—encountering something unfamiliar and wanting to know what might be done with it—has never quite left me.

Manchester and the computer cluster

The next important encounter came during my MSc in Manchester in 1994–96.

Windows 95 arrived during those years, and personal computing was visibly moving from the specialist world into everyday life. I became fascinated not only by the computer itself but by the computer clusters in the University of Manchester library.

I typed my MSc thesis on one of those shared machines.

Today that sounds utterly ordinary. At the time it did not feel ordinary at all. A room full of computers available to students suggested something larger than word processing. Here was infrastructure through which information, tools and productive capability could be shared rather than privately possessed.

The idea of shared technological capability stayed with me.

A Fujitsu in a doctors’ residence

When I later began earning as a Specialist Registrar trainee in microbiology in the Northern Deanery, I bought my first desktop computer from my salary—a Fujitsu.

I still have it.

It sat in my bachelor room in the doctors’ residence at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle. Internet access came through a dial-up connection. Connections were slow, webpages primitive, and putting Assamese on the internet required considerably more ingenuity than it does today.

There was no convenient Assamese Unicode environment for ordinary users. Assamese fonts had to be downloaded and installed before the script would render correctly.

Nevertheless, I experimented.

From that room came Purbabharati.org, a socio-cultural Assamese website. Readers might first have to install a font simply to see the page as intended.

It was awkward, fragile—and exciting.

The attraction was not merely technological. The internet appeared to offer a new way of doing something very old: sharing language, culture, ideas and conversation across geography.

Later came AssamChronicle.com, a current-affairs site that I ran for several years.

These were largely single-handed affairs. Others contributed ideas and content, certainly, but the technological side could be rather solitary. There was no ready-made ecosystem, and much had to be learnt simply by doing.

A pattern was beginning to form.

A possibility would appear. I would become curious about it. Curiosity would become an experiment. The experiment would become a project.

Then came the much harder question:

How does one turn a project into an institution capable of living independently of the person who began it?

I learnt that answer much more slowly.

Open-Source Northeast

By 2007 my interest had moved towards Free and Open Source Software and the broader philosophy around it.

The result was Open-Source Northeast, published through Prag Foundation.

Three issues were eventually produced. For a time I believed two of them had disappeared; happily, all three have now been recovered.

The first appeared on 15 August 2007, as Volume 1, Issue 1. It ran to 54 pages and described itself on the cover as a “Guide to Success in Today’s Emerging Knowledge Society.”

That phrase is important because the subject was never really Linux alone.

Linux, OpenOffice, and other open-source tools interested me because they seemed to offer a route toward something larger: digital inclusion, affordable technological capability, access to knowledge, and a degree of independence from proprietary systems.

The magazine described itself as a quarterly publication for academics, scholars, entrepreneurs, businesses and the wider public. Its stated aims included ICT awareness, digital inclusion and literacy, and helping readers acquire useful technological skills affordably.

Its contents ranged across open access, open courseware, Linux distributions, professional certification, computer basics, OpenOffice and institutional adoption of open-source technology.

Even the magazine itself was typeset using Scribus, a Free and open-source desktop-publishing application.

There was something almost missionary in our enthusiasm.

I believed that open technology could help people acquire capability, reduce dependency and participate more fully in the emerging knowledge society.

Perhaps that was romantic.

Perhaps it was also partly right.

Only three issues appeared.

The enterprise depended on too few people and, increasingly, on me. Alongside it was a demanding medical career. Creating something proved considerably easier than creating the human structure needed to sustain it.

At the time, I probably experienced that as failure.

Age has made the interpretation less simple.

The Open Institute

The memory of those Manchester computer clusters never entirely disappeared.

In 2014 I tried another experiment at the Software Technology Park in Jalukbari: an initiative called Open Institute.

Part of the idea was to reproduce something of what had impressed me in Manchester years earlier—a shared environment where computers, connectivity and structured learning could give people practical digital capability.

I tried to introduce the ECDL—European Computer Driving Licence—programme there.

It did not catch the imagination.

Why?

Even now, I cannot answer confidently.

Perhaps structured digital-literacy certification had not yet acquired sufficient perceived value.

Perhaps I misunderstood what people actually wanted.

Perhaps I underestimated the difficulty of creating an educational institution in Assam while personally living thousands of miles away.

Perhaps I was romantic enough to believe that if the infrastructure and opportunity were provided, the community around them would somehow form.

And perhaps some of it was simply my incompetence.

With age, I have become comfortable allowing several explanations to remain true at once.

The comforting retrospective claim that one was simply “ahead of one’s time” can easily become vanity. But dismissing every unsuccessful venture as incompetence is equally simplistic.

Perhaps an idea can anticipate a need while its creator simultaneously misunderstands what is necessary for society to adopt it.

That distinction took me quite a long time to appreciate.

Technology is easier than society

Looking back across Purbabharati, Assam Chronicle, Open-Source Northeast and Open Institute, I can now recognise a recurring assumption.

I was repeatedly fascinated by technologies that seemed to reduce the distance between an idea and its execution.

A desktop computer allowed one person to publish.

The internet allowed someone in Newcastle to communicate instantly with Assam.

Open-source software removed licence barriers.

Desktop publishing allowed a tiny group to produce a substantial magazine.

A computer cluster could offer access without requiring every learner to own a machine.

All of that was true.

But another truth emerged much more slowly:

Technology can remove many of the technical barriers to creating something without creating the human institution required to sustain it.

A website can be built.

A magazine can be typeset.

Computers can be installed.

A curriculum can be licensed.

What cannot simply be installed is a community that feels ownership of an enterprise, improves it, sustains it and eventually carries it beyond the founder.

I repeatedly underestimated that intervening variable:

society itself.

Technology multiplies agency. It does not manufacture community, commitment, trust or consequence.

That lesson has become even more important in the age of artificial intelligence, when the technological power available to a single person is greater than anything I could have imagined while listening to the dial-up modem in that room at the RVI.

From information to knowledge

Another continuity becomes obvious only in retrospect.

The real subject was rarely the computer itself.

Open-Source Northeast distinguished between an information society and a knowledge society. It argued that access to infrastructure alone was insufficient: people also required education, critical judgement, cognitive capability and access to relevant knowledge.

That distinction has never quite left me.

Information is not knowledge.

Knowledge is not wisdom.

Technology can make information abundant without necessarily improving judgement.

Indeed, the problem has become more acute.

The internet that once appeared capable of democratising knowledge also democratised misinformation, certainty, outrage and performance.

And now artificial intelligence has arrived.

The schoolboy’s old speculation has returned in a form I could never have anticipated.

Today I can routinely converse with machines capable of analysing arguments, translating languages, examining data, producing prose and discussing philosophy.

Yet the old questions remain:

What exactly is intelligence?

What is knowledge?

What is understanding?

And what, if anything, remains distinctively human?

What is a holiday?

Another aspect of this story perhaps explains the persistence.

I have hardly taken what most people would call a conventional holiday for several decades.

I have travelled a great deal. But package holidays, cruises, or simply travelling somewhere in order to switch off have never really formed part of my life. Since 2008, virtually all of my annual leave—about six weeks each year—has been spent in Assam.

Yet I do not remember this as deprivation. In fact, those journeys, projects, meetings, experiments and periods of immersion gave me at least as much pleasure as other people appear to derive from holidays. Perhaps more.

So I am not entirely certain what a holiday is supposed to mean.

If a holiday means escaping routine in order to recover a sense of aliveness, curiosity and engagement, then perhaps I did take holidays—just not in the usual form.

Mine often happened inside a project.

Much of what someone else might have regarded as work did not feel like work to me. A trip to Assam might involve organisations, writing, technology, healthcare, meetings or yet another experiment, but I could still return with the sense that I had spent my time precisely as I wished.

Perhaps these ventures were not hobbies fitted around my leisure.

In many ways, they were the leisure.

That may have been excessive.

Perhaps it still is.

But I would not describe it as sacrifice. It was simply another way of finding pleasure, purpose and renewal.

A poem remembered; a meaning understood later

An older thread runs through all this.

In school I learnt Ananda Chandra Agarwala’s জীৱন-সঙ্গীত, his celebrated Assamese adaptation of Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life.

One passage remained with me throughout my life:

কৰ্ত্তব্যৰ পিচে লৰাঁ, ক্ৰমাগত কাম কৰাঁ,
ফলাফল ফলদাতা বিভুৰ হাতত।

I never forgot the poem.

What came much later was the understanding.

As a schoolboy, they were memorable lines.

Only at a mature age—after enough projects had succeeded, failed, stalled, revived or simply taken directions of their own—did their meaning begin to settle within me.

The teaching was not resignation.

It was discipline.

Do the work. Continue doing it. Do not confuse effort with sovereignty over consequence.

I later came to appreciate how profoundly this echoed the teaching of the Bhagavad Gītā:

कर्मण्येवाधिकारस्ते मा फलेषु कदाचन।
मा कर्मफलहेतुर्भूर्मा ते सङ्गोऽस्त्वकर्मणि॥

Karmaṇy evādhikāras te mā phaleṣu kadācana;
mā karma-phala-hetur bhūr mā te saṅgo ‘stv akarmaṇi.

The entitlement is to action, not to the fruits of action; and detachment from the fruit must never become attachment to inaction.

What I had carried for decades as remembered school poetry gradually became something closer to a personal philosophy.

And finally, a motivation.

The poem stayed with me first as memory.
Later, it became meaning.
Eventually, it became motivation.

“ফলাফল ফলদাতা বিভুৰ হাতত“

There was a period when unsuccessful ventures troubled me more.

If an idea seemed worthwhile, why did it fail?

If something appeared useful, why did people not embrace it?

If intentions were good and considerable effort had been expended, why could consequence remain so unpredictable?

Time has made me much humbler about causation.

Seeing a possibility does not give anyone the power to move history toward it.

An individual can think, act, persuade, organise and persevere. Beyond that lies an immense network of circumstance—timing, institutions, culture, incentives, other people’s priorities, chance, and forces one may never even recognise.

The line learnt in childhood therefore acquired a depth that the schoolboy could not have understood:

“ফলাফল ফলদাতা বিভুৰ হাতত“

The fruit is not entirely ours to command.

I do not understand this as fatalism.

Quite the opposite.

It separates the responsibility to act from the vanity of believing we control the result.

Perhaps Open-Source Northeast should have flourished.

Perhaps Open Institute should have succeeded.

Perhaps Assam Chronicle might have grown into something much larger.

Perhaps some of these ideas were ahead of their immediate environment.

Or perhaps I simply did not know how to make them work.

The honest answer is that I do not know.

I played my role.

Others played theirs.

Circumstances played theirs.

And life moved on.

Once the meaning of that old poem truly settled in me, however, failure became somewhat less paralysing—and success somewhat less intoxicating.

One still acts.

One still tries.

One still has a duty to prepare properly, think carefully and take responsibility for one’s own decisions.

But one gradually learns not to demand that the world produce precisely the consequence one imagined.

Do the work. Enjoy the doing. Let the ফল remain beyond your command.

Still curious

Some physical evidence of this journey remains.

All three issues of Open-Source Northeast have survived.

And somewhere among the objects accumulated over the years still sits that old Fujitsu desktop from my bachelor room at the Royal Victoria Infirmary.

I am rather glad that I kept it.

It belongs to an age of dial-up connections, manually constructed websites and Assamese fonts that readers first had to download before they could read the page.

Those things now seem primitive.

At the time they felt revolutionary.

The machines became faster.

Networks became ubiquitous.

Assamese became Unicode.

Publishing became instantaneous.

Computers shrank into telephones.

Artificial intelligence moved from schoolboy speculation into everyday life.

And I became older.

Perhaps a little wiser.

Certainly less certain.

But I have not yet learnt how to stop being curious.

This page therefore records things that worked, things that failed, things abandoned, things forgotten and things unexpectedly recovered.

I do not preserve them as evidence that I was ahead of my time.

Nor as evidence that I was right.

They are evidence of something much simpler:

I wondered.
I tried.
I learnt.
And I am still curious.