The following sentiments were echoed by my dear, late father, a man from the late 1920s. “Modern living, he said, is life, after a successful invention hits the market. A process that continues to dictate human life, invention after invention” Sadly, such sparks of invention would eventually kill some joy and at times, even all of it”.
In support of this, he quoted the example of the “humble” electric bulb. (Edison surely would not share the same sentiment as the electric bulb’s commercial success was anything but humble). But I believe this illuminating” journey into many lives was not so easy and not, just as fast. It was decades before the shiny, glass globes beamed its watts and shined over many Indians, “sparkling” their lives. As a metropolitan resident, I could not relate to the dark ages that my father was referring to and much less, by the generations that followed me. It took me a journey of nearly half a century and millions of hours spent in the virtual world to understand the profound wisdom in his words.
While there has been some talk doing rounds in the recent past about the “special” generation of those born in the 1970’s, I am one such. And there are many like me across the world. This is because we have “seen” it all. Or that we have been around when quite a few things “happened”, some literally life-changing too. I do not mean the WWI and its sequel, the WWII. Those were for my father. It is about the season when many inventions debuted, set the financial markets on fire and snared and enslaved us for life. It was rightfully, our slice of modern life! We tread the path lit by tube lights, exercised our vocal cords alongside cassette players and walkmans and sojourned across the world thanks to the fat tellys with their bulging bellies. Some where along, we anchored ourselves firmly to the boxy, personal computers, perplexed and perspiring over the mystery of “e-mails”.
As technology invaded and re-booted our persona, a new wave of befitting etiquette popped into our lives with the old-world charms jettisoned. We conditioned ourselves to constantly “mute” or “silence” a multitude of gadgets with seemingly, amazing grace and dexterity. Why, at times, we even switched them off, especially when the line that decided our future was thin, fine and hazy. This could be as miniscule as discussing a whale-sized, red blotch in the company’s profit or as you lay on the operating table, awaiting a silly, heart or kidney transplant, hoping that the surgeon will not stitch you up, leaving his mobile phone to “trill” in your internal caverns. Boy! we finally mastered the art of decorum in this babel, though it did not come easy.
In the meanwhile, infinite apps were unleashed upon us. The umbilical cords between the humble humans and their high-tech gadgets, we were chained unto them, for life. Or until the next app was released, of course. Having simply decoded the zillions of cryptic instructions, we now run our homes, finance, health and even have some fun time, without bungling, as humans are apt to. Why, we are constantly hitting a new “high” twittering, face-booking, pinning interests and instantly “gramming”, if I could dare to say so. In a blink, even as the “social” in our lives disappeared, we successfully bee-hived in this virtual world. But then, our brains secretly started to tattoo bleak codes into our souls.
An optimist that I am, I tend to see the brighter side. Hurrah! we might even be just a step away from those Martians, who seem to know it all. Today, by re-structuring the world economics on wafer thin laptops, our netizens brain-charged with e-books and cloud schools and flash-mobbing, when bitten by the urge to see fellow humans, with Eve virtually webbing and weaving the social fabric, we still remain as a whole, a generation illuminated, inspired, ignited and integrated by the tentacles of technology.
It is then I decided to sit down and write a blog. As I grabbed the bulky-black, slightly cracked, handed-me-down laptop, a veteran model, I reminisced that even if typewriters now belonged to the Jurassic era, I was glad that the “qwerty” managed to migrate to the laptop. Under the tutelage of the now forgotten stalwarts of English literature, I gathered my thoughts and my fingers went clackety-clack on the keyboard. Psst! did I imagine that sound - an exclamatory approval emerging from the over-crowded racks of my bookshelves? Was it from one of my favourite authors or a character from those dusty realms?? My blog read “Today, we sit, radiated, in the midst of smart gadgets”. “Elementary!” dryly whispered Sherlock Holmes and Watson chuckled. My fingers froze, thoughts extinguished, and I sat, absolutely electrified.
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