It was in the month of March 2009, when one of my friends, a rare one in the world of education, Tushar Tamhane, shared this video in our education conference ‘PRAVAAL’, I was taken aback to see the ingenuity of a young Indian, who from his school days has been thinking differently. Inspite of our education system, Pranav Mistry a boy born and brought up in Gujarat, managed to be steadfast in his thoughts and went on to give shape to his imagination is a tribute in itself to his personal vision and passion.

The SIXTH SENSE TED video that I saw then was this. Which was presented by his boss at MIT media labs, Pattie Maes.

This november when Pranav made the presentation at TED India in Mysore, I realized his Vision of reaching out this SIXTH SENSE to the masses.

As he shares, the impact of merging the physical and digital world can be enormous. Human beings so passionate about expressions and actions can move beyond the confines of desks, break the barriers of literacy. It will be a function of imagination and nothing else. Imagine what it can do to a farmer in any corner of the world, who can read his mother tongue, or can recognize symbols, by just the touch of his fingures, he would know about the weather, pricing, the moisture, the soil fertility etc. How a child can explore the world with touch and feel. How an extension of this technology can enable a physically challenged person to perform extraordinary things just with his thoughts….

I am still thinking about the wildest of the things I can extend this technology to and how to put this to use. I am certainly looking for the evolution of this over the next decade. The raise and raise of popularity of the internet and technology evolution in the last decade has added so much to our life, I am wondering what the world will be in 2020 with technologies like SIXTH SENSE around.

Jai Ho !

sreeni@iwsb.in