Sharada Prasad

Even after two weeks of Bangalore and Ahmedabad serial blasts, police have not come up with any concrete developments. This is how this country works – bomb blasts, scandals, crimes, corruption etc. are all forgotten by people. Within few days of the incident, things will be back to square one and you will have only two sets of people then – people who lost their loved ones and people who lost their memories.

On the other hand information about making home-made bombs is easily accessible with simple search queries.

Two days back I got a new MP3 player for me though I have Sony Ericsson Walkman phone 810i. But the problem is the headset is damaged. A new one costs about Rs.1600 and the memory that comes with the phone is 256mb. So after calculating the cost, I decided to get an MP3 player. The reason is not just limited to memory and headset, but also to depreciation. A walkman phone or music phone costs about Rs.8000 + memory card. When you lose it or try to sell it, yo would get about 30% of the cost. Also, the battery gets drained by the time you reach office – Bangalore traffic is notorious.

To I got Transcend T850 – 8GB player from SP Road, Bangalore. Now I listen to music, radio, podcasts, audiobook etc. on my way to office and back home. Considering 2hr of travel time per day, I can listen to lot of things. I regularly download podcasts from Social Innovation Conversations , audio version of ‘The Economist’ and free audiobooks.

While searching for free audio books, I came across LibriVox. The website says “LibriVox volunteers record chapters of books in the public domain and release the audio files back onto the net. Our goal is to make all public domain books available as free audio books.”

So as we start spending more time on the roads, we will look for good options like listening to music and audibooks. May be now it is high time that we start a revolution for free audibooks. Let us volunteer!