It started early this morning when I woke up to the alarm on my smart phone. As it always happens, after switching off the alarm and waking up my daughter to get ready for her school, my eyes darted to the screen inviting me to check the newly arrived emails!! One thing lead to another and I ended up looking at the bing home page which had a very strange looking animal’s picture – that of the endangered Coquerel’s Sifaka (a Madagascar Lemur).

Curiosity lead me to fire up the browser and learn more about Madagascar and its various rare species of animals. One link on the search page caught my eye. It was a Seattle PI article published in ’07 about a Seattle doctor who periodically traveled to Madagascar to volunteer at a hospital there. I fired off an email to my son who is studying pre-med at UW and is majoring in Medical Anthropology and Global Health. He has been looking for internship opportunities that would combine his love for medicine with global health and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. I suggested he get in touch with the doctor to see if he can travel to Madagascar on his next trip. I continued probing further and learnt that this doctor is actually a faculty member at UW teaching in the dept. of global health!! What a small interconnected world it is?

What is fascinating is I was able to do all this research on my small handheld Windows smart phone while browsing the internet. Not too long ago this could only have been accomplished by number of hours (and perhaps days) spent at the local library researching and asking. We have indeed come a long way in how information is created and consumed. We live in a truly interconnected world which is a web of information waiting to be tapped to our advantage. Enjoy!!