In the movie Castaway, Tom Hanks finds himself on a small, uninhabited island, with few resources and even fewer chances of survival. But survive he does, using the tools that he had or those that he improvised. An ice-skating shoe is used as a multi-function tool for cutting, hammering and the like. And his persistent efforts to light a fire bring home to us viewers how dire life can be, and was, before the accumulation of our artifacts of civilization.

I’ve watched our carpenter in Calcutta work miracles in wood. Using the very basic woodworking tools like the hammer, saw, manual drill, planar and an assortment of chisels, he could, in a few hours, turn some planks of wood into a chair, a table, or any other piece of furniture that he had been commissioned to produce.

 Here in the US carpentry is a favorite hobby of many, and a livelihood of some. Most manual tools here have given way to power tools, which make life easier and task completion quicker. But leaving aside this apples- and- oranges comparision, Biren in India and Brian in the US both produce artifacts that are functinal, aesthetic, and of lasting value.

We humans have used tools to produce successively more complex and larger, or smaller, artifacts. Machine tools are machines that make other machines possible. Robots, which are another class of tools, make anything from computers at Dell to cars at Toyota.

The Space Shuttle, an engineering marvel, is a behemoth that could not have been produced without sophisticated tools. On a more down to earth level, a farmer has his tractor and a software programmer  has her computer. Beyond that, Peter Drucker’s “knowledge worker” carries her most important tool in the inner space between hier two ears.Yes, the brain is the most awesome tool of all.