[Did this piece for the Daily O website]
A few years ago I bought my mom a computer and made her say hello to the internet. This was long-overdue and I had been feeling guilty about putting it off for so long. Naturally, there were teething troubles: I had to keep an eye on things, tell her not to get hysterical each time a notification appeared on the screen, or when a new window popped up and hid an earlier one. Being in a position to provide reassurances, to supervise these baby steps, made me feel smug and in control – which is not something I often experience when it comes to technology. (Even today, after switching on my laptop, I sometimes reflexively look for the little “VSNL dial-up” icon that made getting online – via a medley of shrieking bell sounds – such an adventure back in 1998.)
My new role as improbable tech-guru didn’t last long though. While I stayed safely atop my Luddite plateau – using my computer mainly for writing and for basic net use, congratulating myself if I managed to pull off something as complicated as taking a screen grab – my mother was scaling new peaks just because they were there. And because she had now been gifted an iPhone by a cousin, following which the laptop was relegated to its bag. Later, an iPad or some similar tablet-like thing arrived and conversations in the house began to pivot around the word “Apps”. The realisation that Skype could be accessed on a small device, easily carried about the house, came with a roar of 
triumph akin to that of the primitive ape-man in 2001: A Space Odyssey discovering that a large bone could be used to smash in enemies’ heads and thence lay the road to civilisation.
Watching a parent learn to stand on her feet – to probe the marvels of the world for herself without constantly pointing at things and asking questions (“What is a Cloud?”) – was poignant in its way, though I felt I could do without this bratty business of having a phone thrust at my face (“Look look, Jai has just come in – isn’t that an ugly beard?”) so my maasi could glare at me all the way from Chandigarh.
As this sort of thing continued, I became increasingly self-conscious about the bulkiness of my own laptop. Feeling like the Jedi masters must have felt on learning that their precocious student Anakin had not only surpassed their skills but was now also a bad-ass in a shiny black suit, dispensing storm-troopers across the galaxies, I tried suggesting to mum that she use her computer once in a while because, well, all those Engelbert Humperdinck and Pat Boone music videos look better on a big screen. But she had moved well out of my ether. Worse, having grown up much too fast, she was becoming faintly parent-like again. “Jai, you aren’t on WhatsApp?” was no longer said hesitantly (as if wondering if I were using something more sophisticated that she didn’t know about) – instead it had the sharp, accusatory timbre of those cold 1982 pre-school mornings: “You haven’t finished your milk?”
Much of this could still be shrugged off, but when I began eavesdropping on her video conversations I was mystified. Smart-phone and tablet technology is so empowering for people of a certain age – people who spent decades being in touch with loved ones only via snail mail and expensive long-distance phone calls – you’d think it would lead to actual talk: gossip about the good old days, the childhood and college years in Ludhiana and Bombay, the problematic parents and spouses.
Instead, all the conversation now is about the very gizmos they are using.
It began simply enough (“Neelu, the Wi-fi doesn’t seem to be working, let me use the phone connection instead” and “Yes I can hear you fine, but I can’t see anything... why have you kept your phone facing down?!”), but then progressed to:
“What? Viber? V-I-B-E-R? Okay, wait, I’ll just download it. I heard Tango was better?”
“It says downloading.”
“It still says downloading. Now it is asking if I want to upgrade the App. Should I upgrade the App?”
“Of course I sent you a photo of the new iPad. I sent it through MMS. Should I email it too? Where’s the attachment?”
“I don’t have FaceTime on my phone – this is an old phone – so I’ll move to the tablet, give me a minute, okay?”
Few of these conversations are decipherable to me, stuck as I am with my old machine. But why be surprised? In a post-modernist age where literature is mainly about literature and cinema is mainly about cinema – and where the done thing is to ruminate constantly about the medium one is operating in rather than supply fresh content – perhaps it's natural for new technology to facilitate the sort of communication where all you’re doing is talking about the new technology.
Or maybe she needs a little more time to outgrow the teen-slang.
Reading this news item about cellphones being set to outnumber human beings somehow reminded me of a 1950 short story titled “Skirmish”, by the great Clifford Simak. (It is included in this brilliant science-fiction anthology, and in a few other collections.) Briefly: the story is about a newspaper reporter named Joe Crane – your average Joe – who discovers that small, machine-like aliens from another planet are scouting earth with the intention of “freeing” their brethren – the earth machines that are being controlled and held in slavery by humans. The problem for Joe, as he slowly begins to piece things together, is that he alone is in possession of this information and has no tangible proof of it: if he tried to take it to the authorities, he would be laughed out of the room, treated as a drunk or a potential psycho.
Even as he tries to figure out why he was the chosen one for the aliens’ reconnaissance, and weighs the limited options available to him, the walls are closing in; his typewriter has acquired a mind of its own – always a bothersome development for a writer with deadlines – and is turning out reports that read thus:
A sewing machine, having become aware of its true identity, […] asserted its independence this morning by trying to go for a walk along the streets of this supposedly free city. A human tried to catch it, intent upon returning it as a piece of property to its “owner”, and when the machine eluded him the human called a newspaper office, by that calculated action setting the full force of the humans of this city upon the trail of the liberated machine, which had committed no crime or scarcely any indiscretion beyond exercising its prerogative as a free agent.
The machines-vs-humans theme has of course been very popular in sci-fi for decades, including recently in the Terminator films. But there is a raw, uncomplicated immediacy in this Simak story, which is so often the case with science-fiction of the 30s and 40s, written by brilliant young visionaries who weren’t taken seriously by “literary” writers, for magazines with such names as Amazing Stories and Astounding Science Fiction and Fantastic Adventures, and in a world where technology was primitive by our 
standards. In a foreword to the anthology Dangerous Visions in 1967, Isaac Asimov noted how strange it felt when he was asked to write a serious opinion piece about the possibility of Moon-colonization for a "respectable" publication (the New York Times) when, just 25 years earlier, “the colonization of the Moon was strictly a subject for pulp magazines with garish covers. It was don’t-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk literature. It was don’t-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush literature. Most of all, it was escape literature”. The sense of wonder, Asimov said, was going out of sci-fi by the late 1960s because so much that had once existed purely in the terrain of imagination – lurid imagination at that – was coming true, much too quickly.
I don’t know how many sci-fi writers of the 1940s envisioned that just over half a century later a majority of humans on the planet would have access, or potential access, to small, wireless phones on which one could also watch movies or play games; or that there would be BILLIONS of these things around, blinking sinisterly, by the early 2000s. Which brings me to one reason why I like “Skirmish” so much: I sometimes feel a bit like Joe Crane in that story. To put it simply, many of the humans around me have been colonised by their smart-phones and I feel like I’m the only one in the know.
(Mild spoiler alert) Simak’s story ends with Joe realising that the best hope is for him, single-handed though he is, to give the machine-aliens – small metallic creatures that have overrun his house – a bigger fight than they bargained for; to make this initial, testing-the-waters encounter a psychologically costly one that leads them to expect organised resistance from the rest of the human species when time comes for full-scale battle.
His fingers closed around a length of pipe. He hefted it in his hand – it was a handy and effective club.
There will be others later, he thought. And they may think of something better. But this is the first skirmish and I will fall back in the best order that I can.
He held the pipe at the ready.
“Well, gentlemen?” he said.
If you ever chance to be in the Saket vicinity and see a wild-eyed messiah walking down the road with cricket bat in hand and many smashed iPhones in his wake, do come across and say hello.
Take this news item from Turkey, about a misplaced character in an SMS sent by a husband to his estranged wife resulting in two gruesome deaths. Of course, a language where the omission of a single dot in a single word can completely change the meaning of a sentence is begging for trouble, but this is a universal problem. Those of us who use the Dictionary facility on our cellphones will know that a particular arrangement of letters can create two or more very different words, e.g. “awake” and “cycle”, or “ocean” and “madam”, and that this can cause confusion. If the sender isn’t careful, a perfectly harmless sentence like “Federer just crushed Djokovic in the semis” can come out reading “Federer just brushed Djokovic in the penis”. (Don’t ask me how I know this.)
This puts me in mind of an incident from a few years ago. Some of us had been invited to a colleague’s place for a debauched late-night party – it didn’t have to be debauched (you could choose to be well-behaved, sip a mocktail and check out by 11 PM), but the possibility was always open. It was an all-night affair at a large house, the sort of place where a hormonally charged couple seeking privacy might at any time stumble into an empty room together, accidentally bolt the door from within and then get down to playing “Doctor”.
One friend who didn’t know the host very well had a younger sister with no plans for the evening, so he asked someone else to check if he could take her along (since they weren’t planning to stay very late, he figured she wouldn’t be exposed to any of the murkier sub-plots that might ensue). “Can we bring Amit’s sister?” typed Rajesh into his phone, except that he wrote “Amits” as a five-letter word without the apostrophe and didn’t closely read what he was typing, so that the message that went forth was “Can we bring bogus sister?”
To make matters worse, our host, an expert in all sorts of shady party requests, interpreted “bogus sister” (or “fake sister”, take your pick) as “a girl of pliable morals, whom you wouldn’t want to publicly introduce as your steady – or even friend – but who is good for fooling around with at binges”. Human beings can be wonderfully inventive when it comes to slang and euphemism.
Thus it was that Rajesh, Amit and the latter’s sweet and innocent sibling had barely arrived when the host – already high on some obscure weed – leeringly asked her if she wanted an empty room immediately and if she would take turns with her two escorts or handle both of them at once. He also recited a short poem he had made up on the spot, which employed a series of salty Punjabi words and, at one point, rhymed “sister” with the Hindi “bistar” (bed). A nasty scuffle resulted – one that could certainly have turned out worse if there had been weapons at arm’s reach. It didn’t end as unhappily as the episode in Turkey, but there were no more parties (or at least none that our group came to know about) at this house for several months.
Not that we ever learn from these incidents. In an earlier post, I’ve mentioned the time I bought the DVD of The Pink Panther and hurriedly dashed off an SMS to friends asking if they wanted to see it over the weekend, only to have one of them call back and ask why I wanted to show him pink panties on a Saturday (or any other day for that matter). More recently, I conducted a fruitless online search for an intriguingly titled book after a friend messaged to ask “Have you read Phobia Deer, new book, sounds interesting”, only to discover that he was asking about Shobhaa De’s latest.
[From my Metro Now column]
Back when Hutch was still Hutch and not Vodafone, I was puzzled by the ad featuring the boy and the pug - the one in which the ugly little dog (a stand-in for the cellular operator, one assumes) follows the surly little kid around everywhere, even into a changing room, and the boy's expressions make it obvious that he isn't pleased about this invasion of privacy. What kind of message was this sending out to potential customers, I wondered. (I stopped wondering when I noticed that colleagues in the men’s room frequently talk into their phones while they are communing with the toilet bowl.)
Now Vodafone has billboards featuring the same dog but with a much more sinister expression on its wrinkled face. The one where it sits at the entrance of its kennel, looking malevolently out at us, sends shivers down my spine, especially since the boy is nowhere to be seen. The only reasonable conclusion one can draw is that his half-chewed remains lie in the dark interiors of the kennel, behind the evilly grinning animal.
Moral of the story: eventually, your cellphone will eat you alive.
Not long ago, a sweet-natured acquaintance got concerned that I was too anti-social for my own good. "Here’s a good tip," she said, at which point my attention began to wander, “Go to your cellphone contacts list every day, scroll to a random letter of the alphabet and pick one person whom you haven't spoken to in a while. Dial their number, say hi, chat a little. It’s a nice feeling.”
She must have meant well, but I can’t think of anything I'd be less inclined to do with my time. The world is way too full of people as it is – constantly clamouring for attention, impinging on one's personal space and time, sending emails, Facebook sheep and SMS jokes that one might never be able to (or want to) acknowledge. Why would I willingly add to this clutter, especially since a randomly chosen number from my address book might easily be that of an annoying PR person whose details I forgot to delete back in 2002?
No, I have private cellphone rules of my own, and I’m religious about them in a way I could never be religious about religion. First among these rules is: Ignore three out of every four calls you receive. (If the fourth call is from a PR person, I ignore that as well, and make up the numbers in the next batch.) This might be conscience-pricking at first, but remember that we no longer live in the age of antiquated circular-dial phones, when dialing a number required physical effort and was therefore an act invested with significance. The person who is calling you and whom you are now rebuffing merely had to press a couple of keys on his cellphone, and chances are he doesn't have anything important to say anyway; he's probably doing this because he’s bored, or because a well-meaning idiot friend advised him to scroll through his contacts list and make random calls each day.
There was a recent news item about research showing that there are cases of "ringxiety" among cellphone-addicts who think they hear their phone ringing even when it’s silent. My advice is: be ahead of the curve on this one. When you get a call, don't bother to check your phone; just assume the sound is in your head. That way sanity lies.
Special note here for married couples/generic lovebirds: successfully following the “ignore 3 calls out of 4” rule means that it’s important that you do not give your better half permission to answer your phone. [This is something you should abide by anyway - you're only married to each other, you haven't magically become interchangeable organisms, and it's entirely conceivable that someone might be calling up in the hope of speaking specifically to the person whose phone it is. In such a situation there’s nothing more annoying than to have his wife/her husband answer the phone instead, with a delighted squeal of "Hey, how are you?! Long time! So, what's happening...blah blah blah..." Not sharing cellphones or email passwords is another of the tips for a successful marriage I mentioned in this post.]
Another important cellphone rule: if you call someone back after having missed one of their calls, NEVER start the conversation by apologising profusely and going into a lengthy explanation about why you couldn’t talk to them earlier. It isn’t worth it. Really. All explanations get monotonous, insincere and pointless after a while, and the basic demands of etiquette can just as easily be met by a terse “Sorry about before, was busy. Now let’s see if you have something worth saying.” Anyone who lives in our lunatic world should be able to understand that there’s just no way every call can be attended to immediately. (If they don’t understand this it probably means they live in a tree, in which case they shouldn’t be using cellphones anyway, the radiation is bad for the leaves.)
Cellphones, I’m pleased to report, are set to cross the final frontier and enter swimming pools with the rest of us muscular, fitness-conscious types. There I was this morning, shark-hunting in my favourite Olympic-sized tank at the local sports complex, when a genuflecting assistant-like person carries just such a phone to the edge of the pool and deposits it into the waiting hands of an elderly lady contained therein.
Lady (after wiping her left ear dry with a hand-towel thoughtfully provided by the genuflector): Haan, bolo.
(Pause)
L: Arre, main pool mein hoon, pool mein.
(Pause)
L: Kya bol rahe ho? Lagta hai signal kharaab hai. Main pool mein hoon!
(Pause, during which two boisterous and ill-mannered boys splash noisily past a line of us)
L: Arre, paani ki awaaz kaise nahin aayegi? Aakhir yeh pool hai!
(Significantly longer pause, which raises my hopes that the conversation might finally be headed for more productive avenues)
L: Sweeming pool!
(Nervous-looking man paddling nearby requests lady to kindly remove the phone from pool region, “because if it falls into the water we will all catch radiation poisoning”. Or be electrocuted. Or something.)
L: Achha? Achha! Theek hai, bye-bye.
(Hands phone back to assistant, smiles winsomely: “She was just calling to say hi.”)
I envision a day when people carry cellphones in the little pockets in their Speedo costumes. Swimming goggles will come equipped with hands-free wires, face masks will become integral to swimming gear so that underwater conversations may be facilitated. Special satellites will be installed on pool floors in collusion with cellular service providers, permitting experienced swimmers to SMS their friends in the shallow end. Then the monopoly will be complete and years from now, as we sit in the movie hall and take calls from friends eager to chit-chat with us in between laps, we will marvel at the thought that cellphones were ever considered a nuisance.
[In other news, I watched two great films yesterday: Carl Dreyer’s magnificent The Passion of Joan of Arc, which has variously been described as “the most powerful silent film ever made”, “a masterful study of the human face” and “a historical document from an era in which the cinema didn’t exist”; and the Mithun Chakraborty classic Disco Dancer, which is none of the above but contains the famous “Jimmy Jimmy” song (which did so much to improve Indo-Russian relations), the always-edifying sight of Rajesh Khanna bobbing his head to the tune of a guitar, and many other delights. Will blog about the first film soon; in matters Mithun, I defer to GreatBong.]
