The world’s smallest nano-video camera

Now, now, just wait a nano-second! While we have all been driven to both delight and despair at the advent of the affordable little car, can we start thinking new nano thoughts? After all, our lives are dominated by gadgets that are shrinking in size from tiny MP4 players and miniature digi-cams to the diminutive phones.

But what has happened is that the small vehicle has suddenly spurred on big expectations. The aspirational levels of those who could never dream of owning a four-wheeler have gone into overdrive. In this hyped-up atmosphere, we need to pause to look back on the phrase Small is Beautiful. The person who coined it was E.F. Schumacher, a highly respected economist who worked with Keynes and Galbraith.

Germane to Schumacher’s thinking was that single-minded concentration on work was dehumanising and one’s workplace should be first of all dignified and meaningful and then efficient. Schumacher proposed the idea of “smallness within bigness”. In other words, for a large form to work, it must behave like a related group of small organisations. Carrying on from this logic was also his challenging of the “bigger is better” bent of thinking.

He questioned the appropriateness of using mass production in developing countries and felt strongly that it should be production for the masses that was required. Well then, Nano as the people’s car could definitely have excited him, but he would also have defended his theory that the capacity of nature to resist pollution is limited. Natural resources in his view were treated as expendable income when they should have been looked upon as capital, since they could deplete eventually. Most fascinating was his questioning of the use of GNP to measure human well-being. “The aim,” he felt, “ought to be to obtain the maximum amount of well-being with the minimum amount of consumption.”

So, are we to feel guilty about elasticising our dreams to achieve and purchase and enjoy what our forefathers could not do? Or are we at a stage when affordability is that invention which just tweaked us into a new league?

The argument should hinge, I feel, on this whole idea of how a small mirchi can give us mega spiciness. Or that a wee thought could trigger off bigger philosophies. What we propose is for organisations to start a nano-suggestion scheme where even the smallest of ideas would be given a hearing. Who knows, employees could come up, a la Girish Wagh and his Nano team, with inventions that could alter people’s lives drastically. After all, every employee worth his salt has those little grains of wisdom. Micro ideation could become the macro brainwave that makes the competition blink first.

What is your nano dream? Tell t2@abpmail.com