Continuous Learning – Few Thoughts

There were few old days when I felt like I know everything about computers. Soon I realized I was wrong.

When I was a Windows/Visual Basic kid, I felt like I am the master of computers.

At 2004, When I joined the mailing list of Indian Linux Users Group, everything was changed. They introduced me the deep rabit hole of the GNU/Linux world.

One fine day, Mr.Chandrashekar Babu, sent a mail to the ilugc list about his free classes on Shell Scripting.

Read his post here – https://www.freelists.org/post/ilugc/SlightlyOTTraining-Free-3-day-training-session-on-shell-scripting

Myself and my friend Balavignesh attended his sessions. He showed the wonderland of command line. After that, attended his training on GNU/Linux Administration. From those glory days, I am feeling that tons of new things to learn.

I have seen Chandrashekar sir was reading new things, learning new stuff daily. He can sit for hours and hours to read the books, manuals, practise, practise and master any technology.

Chandrashekar Babu, teaching Concurrency in Python at PySangamam on Sep 8, 2018

He inspired me to keep learning new things always.  Some times, I know things wider, for few things I go deeper.

There is another person who is inspiring me by his thirst for learning new things.

Dr. Parthasarathy. An old retired professor. His first mail to me was on 11 June 2010, querying on how to display Tamil with Latex. On that time we were making a Ubuntu Manual in Tamil at KanchiLUG. It was rendered with latex and he found it interesting.

Being a Math Professor, he knew latex well. But, showing unicode was new for him. He learnt to use unicode fonts in latex and he made few documents in Tamil using Latex.

Dr. Partha explaining Latex at Indian Linux Users Group Chennai on March 10, 2018

He was so happy to know a guy who can give support for his search on new learnings. Being a linux user on those days was to learn tons and tons of new things, ourself. There was no stackoverflow, no detailed blogs, no knowledged persons around us. Linux users group mailing lists, few forums like linuxquestions.org, man pages, tldp.org documents, big books were the only source of information.

So helping each other and sharing the knowledge was so precious on those days. I used to ask many questions to him on latex, math, encryption, cryptography etc. He used to ask configuring printers, KDE hacks etc. Being a unix man, he was confused on the fancy GUIs of Gnome2, Gnome3, Unity. KDE is better on keeping a consistency on GUI.

See his plain HTML site https://drpartha.org.in/drpartha/linux1.htm I wondered to know about his contributions to TLDP docs and POSIX standards.

Even now, we are sharing long Q/A emails. He is always inspiring me with the learning skills. He often comes to our home with a list of hacks, questions that he want to learn. We both sit together and learn the new hacks.

I am feeling blessed, when thinking on both Chandrashekar sir and Dr. Partha. Both of them are encouraging me, inspiring me to keep learning new stuff.

Nowadays, we have given a great gift called internet. We can learn anything now. There are millions of websites, blogposts, Q/A sites, video tutorials available to learn anything for free.

Ignorance of anything is a choice by ourself.

When I feel, I am not learning new things for a while, a thought about Chandrashekar or Dr.Partha, will ring the bell inside me. Then, I will push myself to sit with my kindle or read my readinglist on the things I want to learn.

I thank both of them for  being my Gurus.