Monday, September 26, 2011

Tech-plosion!

Have you grown up feeling annoyed when your grandparents or parents comment on how things were in those days as opposed to now? Many a day have I gotten mad at my mom for making an ‘unjust’ comparison of things when she started out as “andha kaaluthala” (translated to: in those years).


But…………………………….


Is it just me or did we just explode into a new universe…


Reminiscing through my childhood, didn’t we look forward to the Disney cartoons on Sunday morning and weren’t we excited when TV opened up He-Man, Shazam, Glo worms and Tom&Jerry. Giant Robot was the coolest thing ever and StreetHawk was super uber-cool. Cable TV was strictly prohibited till we got into college. So I did live off Doordarshan and Channel 2 was by itself a bonus. Chitrahaar and Super Hit Muquabla was our music destination and our cassette collection was the treasured hobby. Now we are bombarded with a plethora of options, 24 hour cartoon channels, unlimited music downloads, online, streaming blah blah blah..and we need google and bing to help us through the options. We have tons of remotes to keep track of and tons of buttons in them that justify an extra thick manual. BTW, everything comes with a manual these days, even my son’s toy telephone. When Abhi was born, B commented on how a ‘user-guide’ would be handy. That’s us geeky confused new parents for you folks! Anyways I digress….Technology rubs on everyone.. My mom was super thrilled to watch her Zee soaps on DVR where she could rewind and hear the dialogues without missing them. B’s ears were up in smoke as he lost out his ‘24’ slot to the re-runs of ‘Pavitra Rishta’ but nevertheless. Technology has its pros and cons :)!!


My first home computer which was seen as an extravagant purchase by a seemingly money-indifferent younger generation justified only and only by the fact it was being used for my GRE preparation. Having a 20GB Pentium 2 processor was a huge step (BTW, I think the P2 had the shortest life span in the market and was the in-thing at that narrow moment of time). I had to make sure a technical looking screen was always up and my skills at Alt-Tab were good to make sure my dad was convinced that the computer was being put to ‘good use’. We also had rationed hours on the computer. ”Romba use panna kettu poidum” (Loosely translated: It will go bad if used for too long). Same was stated for the telephone. I would place my electronics and communications books and swear on the education I received that the telephone wouldn’t wear out with longer hours of talking..:)..No..i am just kidding, my parents knew that, it was more of discipline thing for them. My friends knew these and stuck to me in thick and thin even with no talking :D.I love you all :D! Anyways I won’t generalize. I was brought up in a stricter home with more rules than average. …But in hindsight, I would have a liked a cell phone then, it would have certainly been handy :)…but those were ‘those days’.


I didn’t have my first cell phone till I started looking for jobs in grad school. Bought one of those free after rebate ‘bricks’ which btw has stood the test of time …Brick it is ..solid and strong even now..Drop it, dunk it in water..it still works ;)! I educated myself on the coolness of Iphones and ‘smart’phones from the younger kids back home when I visited India.


Much as I was aware of a constant generational shift, my prof in grad school once calls me home for dinner and in a conversation with his wife, I slip on my own ice. She told me she didn’t have a cell phone even then and I opened my mouth wide enough for the world to be seen and quipped “what would you do if you car breaks down in a highway, how do u manage without a cell phone”. “How did we manage, all these years, when there were no cell phones?” she quipped, jamming my mouth shut and went to explain those blue pillars that I never bothered to look closely were call phones on the highway.


Tech Industry creates luxuries, makes us believe that we can’t live without them and eventually we all need them. Oh yes, they make life a lot simpler for us. Being right in the tech world, I support their noble objective “Necessity is not the mother of invention…Invention is the grandmother of necessity”. All of us have fallen in love with the change. B handed the Iphone to an endlessly-crying son as a new dad and looked up and said “God bless Technology” when that calmed him down instantly.


Yes, God bless technology indeed. I couldn’t have imagined so much information being available right in my lap in my early school years. I went over endless magazines collecting info and scrapbooking aspiring to be an interior designer some day. Well, that didn’t happen, but I can’t imagine submitting even a half decent thesis if it involved tearing down a library searching for information instead of googling it.


This information explosion also results in greater awareness as the generations’ progress and greater comfort with the increased awareness. Which may be good or bad..i don’t know! Right out of a college…I went to a particularly queasy movie with my friend, her sister and her sister’s college friends. I ended up watching the movie feeling more uneasy and squeamish than the kid sister and her friends all 4-5 years younger than me. I also realized these kids were way smarter than I was at their age. They all planned their future much more than I did and understood the choices in front of them. Thanks to the wealth of information available right in front of them, they didn’t jump and hope to land on their feet :)! Anyways we never stop learning, even if it’s from people younger than us!!!
In our parent’s eyes, we also sometimes fell as overconfident, confused kids with an attitude. My dad was a bit confused when two colleagues of mine from an Indian company where I briefly worked came home and discussed in detail on the x-figure salary that they so much deserved 6 months after college. To him, it took years to get there…’Appa, its all bcos of conversion currency, Suddenly our salaries look to have scaled much more’ I mention, as he pulls me aside. Anyways, I do think our perceptions have gotten modified a bit too in the process and our parents do find us insensitive to their spending habits. When parents come over and quiz you on how much you pay for produce (not as a whole, each one of them I mean), it threw light on my ignorance. It’s a card driven world, so much that it’s impossible to find a single men’s wallet that has room for change.


I love how dads and grand-dads have upgraded themselves to Mac and get into the Mac-PC debates. The Kindled grand-dads reading ‘Ponniyin Selvan’ off their recent handheld reader win my admiration. They have transitioned gracefully into this whole new cyber driven world. What could be more classic than the grocer (read maligai kadai karan) next to my home promoting his new online website for door-delivery and how I can go on a ‘church-engine’ to find it!! Honestly, I was more amazed than amused. But that’s a classic exhibit of how far we have come.


My son has held an Iphone since he was 3 months old. He has since then used it as a teether, a white noise machine, a music system, he has made calls to several people (including Amex and a recent one to my boss) and he has figured his way around with the apps… and I wonder if I am going to tell him a story one day “Once upon a time, when there was no internet….”..There shall be times when I am appalled at what he says and have the urge to go “Andha kaalathula….”


Amma shall be laughing out loud somewhere in my head when I do so!! Life comes a full circle!


Ahh Damn!!! I am growing old :(!