GPS Ideas for a Digital India
Last June, I had the good fortune to visit Pangong Lake, in Ladakh, on the Indo-Tibetan border -- shown in the movie 3 Idiots -- and spent a cold and windswept night in a tent at Spangmik. The place is awesome. A huge blue-green mass of salty water -- a remnant of the seas that got trapped between India and Tibet when the former rammed into the latter and created the Himalayan range -- is surrounded by immense snowy peaks that turn golden at sunrise. But what was even more impressive was the night sky with its hundreds of stars, that we in the cities have forgotten about. Thanks to the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the Google Sky app on my smartphone, I could, for the first time in many, many years see and, more importantly, identify so many stars and constellations, including, Polaris - one of the most important stars used by ancient mariners to determine their position. Then it struck me -- in the past, stars were used to determine location but today the GPS location from my i...