Time Pass

HOW WE PASS THE TIME

by Chinam Kali Prasad

In the days of yore, there was something known as the joint family, the neighbourhood, the village square, the sports ground (even if it wasn’t so legally), the akhada, the barber shop, the newspaper-wala and the verandah in front of most houses. These were the key factors in ensuring that people stayed in touch with people and every bit of news as well as gossip was spread far and wide. There was never an occasion when a townsman or woman did not know ‘what was happening when’, ‘what happened when’ and ‘how to prepare for any eventuality’. Every social more depended on such information spreading in a timely manner to every galli and chauraha of the town and being registered positively by every man, woman & child. If a person was ignorant, he/she was never pardoned as in those days, ignorance was not bliss, it was a sign of a pariah…one who was not in any social circle…one who was never invited to anybody’s verandah…one who was shunned even by the neighbourhood barber!

Then things started changing…the radio came into our lives…with all its diodes and triodes and a person’s standing in society was decided by the size of the radio he/she possessed. The radio slowly started cutting down on the meeting places but thankfully, it did not have too much of an adverse effect…the barber-shop debates still continued… only now, the arbiter was the radio and the same happened during the verandah meetings…the radio ruled the roost in restaurants, hotels, homes, shops and the chai-wallah outlets! But, the size was inconvenient and some day, somebody would certainly do something about the size!

And it happened, the transistor revolutionized the way we socialized…the portable became the status symbol and inversely to the radio…the smaller the doodah, the bigger the status… and finally it ended in the pocket, in the pen, in the nail cutter and the key chain…every ordinary gadget had to have a transistor…! From AM to FM took a couple of decades and the advent of FM ensured that even your razor had a transistor receiver built in! As big as the radio was as an event, the miniaturized version of the transistor receiver was an even bigger event. Now, people started meeting others of their kind a little lesser…their knowledge was improved by the little semi-conductor!

Then, as if sound was not enough, people were gifted with a picture to accompany the sound and television was born. From Black & White to Colour to LCD to Plasma to LED to OLED…the choice was without limits and wondrous! The verandah was replaced by a living room, the barber shop was now only for haircuts and shaves, the akhada was now a modern gym where one gave out only sweat and odour, the village square was now a traffic roundabout, the newspaper was now delivered home…so the vendor disappeared, the sports-grounds were now legal and designed by fancy names…and hence, meant only for running around or swimming laps! The joint family went nuclear and was ‘joint’ only in front of the television…which was later put paid by the invention of the remote…! It was commonplace to call the person wielding the remote as KING/QUEEN!

During this phase of civilization, the computer was also invented and slowly started making itself popular and indispensable…the size, of course, reducing from mammoth (radio sized) to small (laptop or transistor sized) to miniature (tables, phones and phablets) and the prices made so enticing that it became every man to himself and every woman to herself. The joint family gave way to the nuclear family and finally to ONE! Maybe we all are heading to zero anyway!!! The development of the computer also nurtured people to come up with communicating from one computer to another computer…such as LAN, WAN, Internet, etc.

These developments ensured that news and gossip could be spread at lightning speed and one did not need to meet any other of their kind…all that one needed was a computer (in any form) and some form of network. That brought in social networking like Facebook, Google+, Twitter, et al to help out mankind to stay up dated. So much so that one could not survive without any of these…even for four hours!

And that is what just happened yesterday…the Facebook and Instagram were off the net for four hours and all hell broke loose…! Every kind of conspiracy theory was put out, the North Koreans were blamed (by the way, the North Koreans are yet to see Facebook), the Taliban, the remnants of Al Qaeda, the Chinese, the Somali pirates and everyone who did not belong to the G8 or BRICS or ASEAN! People were found sweating and showing signs of dementia, Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s!!! People could not tell others what they were doing, how their morning ablutions were, what they had for breakfast, what their mother did and what their neighbors did! People could not upload selfies or any other snaps they took for showing their friends…that they had been to Paris, Beijing, Bangkok, Singapore, Sydney or Paharganj.

Four hours was all it took to bring the world to its knees…four hours was all it took for psychologists, psychiatrists and social scientists to be surprised out of their nighties and to see the levels of addiction and the results of denial! Four hours was all it took to make every human realize how stupid they were! Four hours was all it took for me to have the opportunity to write this!!!