Staying in vogue

There are some things which you can live without; there are some things which you just cannot live without after having lived with it for some time. This blog post is coming to you at 12:27 AM (to be absolutely precise) EST, and you can imagine, at this wee hour in the morning, how my mind is clouded with random thoughts. Life has taken a fast track in the last twenty years, and I just can't imagine how quickly our lives have got adapted to it. It is strange, but in the process of making things simpler, how we have lost out on some of the simple aspects of life. In the last many years, I have always fought for simplicity, trying to steer my life away from the norms, since norms are no longer associated with simplicity. Yet, the more I try to get away from it, the more I am interested in the development of today's world.

I clearly remember the day we got the land line phone back in Bangalore. I was in my fifth standard and was getting all excited about the new device at home. It was an important phase in my life; at least that's what I thought. We no longer had to go to the telephone booth located a furlong away to make long distance calls. We no longer had to run to our neighbor's house to receive a call in case of emergency situations. It was the first time the family was walking towards the era of modern development, and to us, the seemingly small device assumed significant proportions in our quest for quick communication. Prior to getting the phone, we were accustomed to life without the talking machine. Life did not change much after we got the phone. Well, that's what we thought initially. Just one day, we had to lose the connection due to network problem, or to put in simple words, the phone fell dead. It seemed that the lifeless phone had sucked our lives from the daily chores. I was in despair. I had to walk past two buildings down the road to ask my friend if he was interested to play, instead of making a quick dial. My father found it difficult to get across to his colleagues to make important decisions. My brother was a toddler and he was thankfully not affected by the deadly outcome of the dead phone. My mother was never too dependent on the mouthing device to carry out her daily household chores. It was not a big thing, but it marked the onset of many more things in the future.

Mobile phones belonged to the elite class initially. Top bureaucrats and important bigwigs ran around with the skimpy little handset. The smaller the handset, greater it was in vogue. Mobile changed the dynamics of coolness factor. All of them who were boasting about the big things in life were now trying their best to prove each other that they had the smallest. It was the beginning of the change of conventional perception. Things were changing dramatically and quickly. Slowly and steadily, the mobile bug caught on with almost everyone who entered the 21st century. School and college goers were creating their own film industry, thanks to tonnes of MMS getting generated in every nook and corner of the country. It was no longer cool to have a phone anymore. The stakes had just increased. The gadget had to be cool and trendy for the world to sit back and take note of you. As the mobile phones made its appearance in the market, I could feel a mysterious gray hair creeping out from behind. Why? I had entered work and I guess I was the only one in my friends' circle not to have a mobile phone. People were aghast, but my life was in no way different from normal.

Desktop computers were getting important as I got into engineering. I considered it impossible to do my daily work without a computer, and so after a lot of pleading with my parents, I got myself a computer with the best configuration at that time. As I type this post from my notebook computer, it is so difficult to imagine how life has changed in a short duration of time. We have moved ahead all along taking everything along the way to make our lives as comfortable as possible. I have to send my laptop to the service center to get a minor problem rectified, and I will be away from it for a few days; the thought itself makes me feel miserable, even though I have tried my level best to channelize my time away from the computer as much as possible. We have adapted to the changes and moved on with time, and it remains to be seen when there will be a time, when we would be laughing at ourselves for using mobiles and laptop computers. Who knows what's on the way!