more dreams than memories

walking it out en route to the Taj Mahal (personal photo... please do not reproduce without permission)

This one’s for Ryan -

A few summers ago, I took a long vacation. For many years before that, and ever since then, I haven’t had such an opportunity. It wasn’t a trip for the faint of heart – I spent two months trekking through India and Malaysia with both parents in tow. The trip itself was remarkable, and at the time, much-needed. I was coming off of a very stressful, crazy, and unique year, and only had a few more months to go before graduation. It was my chance to relax, to rediscover pieces of India and pieces of myself, and to do some field research for my two senior thesis papers (one in biomedical engineering on design for the developing world, and one in economics on policy, poverty, and technology in post-1991 India). As such, I picked up The World Is Flat on recommendation from a professor just before I left.

It’s one thing to read a book and understand the context in which it was written. It’s another to experience firsthand, in real-time, that context, and to explore it both intellectually and emotionally. Friedman does an awful lot of writing on things that I’m familiar with – India, economics, development, Georgia Tech – but the most interesting chapter in my eyes was the last. There is a juxtaposition of two dates – 9/11, and 11/9. The former, most in my generation are familiar with as the day that the Twin Towers fell in New York. The latter, equally (or more) important, is the day the Berlin Wall came down and sparked a chain of events that led to the solidification of democracy worldwide (and the eventual opening of the Indian economy in 1991, for those that are interested in my economics research). He then takes these dates and puts them in the context of creation and consumption – of building and destroying. From Friedman:

"[…] then you and your generation must not live in fear of either the terrorists or tomorrow, of either al-Qaeda or Infosys. […] While your lives have been powerfully shaped by 9/11, the world needs you to be forever the generation of 11/9 - the generation of strategic optimists, the generation with more dreams than memories, the generation that wakes up each morning and not only imagines that things can be better but also acts on that imagination every day.”

I was only three on November 11, 1989, but I can imagine that there was a great sense of unity and pride in the world the day that wall came down in Berlin. Friedman goes on to say that what causes people to be driven to extremism and hatred is not a poverty of money, but a poverty of dignity. To see others with opportunities that you yourself have never seen, to live in a world where those opportunities aren’t fathomable, that is a poverty of dignity. The goal of development should not be to create monetary wealth, but rather to create a sense of empowerment, a sense of dignity in a population. When I design a device to be used in a low-resource environment, I’m not trying to give a clinician in Nairobi the same technology that a doctor in New York uses. I’m trying to give them the information they need to make informed choices – on their own. I'm trying to give them tools that are meaningful to them in the context that they live in. I’m trying to give them something to look forward to, to create a dream of how things can be better, not in my eyes, but in theirs.

More dreams than memories, indeed.