I still remember the day when my aunt was supposed to return home by 5; but that day , the clock showed 8 and she had still not returned. My uncle who was quick to panic , started to make calls to common friends to check if she was with any of them. Not getting a positive response , he called up relatives and all of us started the search for my aunt , each in a direction . It was 9:30 when we almost gave up the search that she reached home safe and sound.She was delayed by a traffic jam and a tyre burst to the bus she was travelling in .
What an unncessary amount of tension we had gone through. The very next day my uncle got her a cellphone (they cost a bomb those days).
How different life was in those cellphone "less" days. True it is one of the most useful inventions andd we are so hooked to it that one hour of battery down would be capable of giving us the same amount of tension that we had when my aunt went " missing". Today it is difficult to imagine life without a cellphone. Slowly the STD booths ( those blue/ yellow colored ones) that used to occupy every turn in the street are slowly disappearing too.
We are so used to withdrawing money from the atm's that we consider withdrawing money from the bank a banal ritual. We are too lazy to walk down to the kirana shop next lane , so we call him to get a bottle of coke home delivered while we sit cozily and watch a movie. We are so busy working on the Laptops ( chatting )that we fail to notice that our waist size is getting wider in proportion to the screen of the TV/laptop getting thinner. Gone are those days when shopping would be a fun event with the members of the family taking hours to get ready and the children all excited, spend the whole evening walking the streets of the bazaar while the ladies of the house are ever dissatisfied with the variety being shown and the ritual winds by having food outside. Today everything is done at the click of a button online ( we just have to believe that the product is as good as it looks online).
Our life without the elevator in the apartment, our ipods while on a journey, a laptop without the internet connection, with a one hour powercut a day (there used days when this one hour would be the time when neighbours caught up on gossips and gyan, the children played uninterruptedly, grandfathers told stories about the stars in the sky etc ..), would be difficult ot even imagine....
Agreed these new technologies have improved our lives manifold but the fact remains that it has been successful in reducing our creative, socializing and physical abilities...
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4 comments:
Looks like you are getting nostalgic with the past, as we all(at some point) do. What I can say is that at every point in time, with progress, people will lose some abilities while they gain others. It is no use trying to judge what is "wrong" and what is "right", because change will happen no matter what we think about it. We can either embrace that change with open arms, or kick and scream and have to go though it anyway. Also, what we did "those days" was spend more time on stuff that did not warrant that much time at all. Just because we would go to a bazaar as a family, it doesn't mean it is a more virtuous way of buying than online.The STD/ISD booth is not there because it is outdated. There is no use romanticizing them, they are just what they are: objects of the past. So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, we need to learn to leave "the life behind us", behind us.
hmmm quite an interesting write indeed, yeah i can relate and imagine most of which yu have mentioned! Its hard to imagine life without Internet, electricity...wow! boy yeah and Ipod as yu mentioned!
Cellphones..yeah we didnt have telephones either, we used to run upto opposite thatha house whenever we get a phone from relatives..and that looks soo distant now! nice write..tak care
@KA
True that these tech have impoved our lives , its not that we din have things which " din warrant much time"
its just that we wud rather do things at the click of a few buttons and spend the remaining time less usefully than do it the same leisurely way we used to in those good old days and suffer from the "guilt" of "wasting time".
@ Hary
Thanks..
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