Times to modern times

Over the recent times, there has been an explosion of intelligence across the world. We take cognizance of intelligence through multiple and sometimes confusing choices of machines and instruments. Every other product is fast getting outdated in time with life becoming faster every day. To cope with life’s speed we have household and office instruments serving us. The objective of all these is to make our lives more convenient and comfortable. However, the price we are paying is that of impatience and insecurity, widely visible in our domestic and work environments. I marvel at the number of passwords we need to remember and the number of security checks we have to go through every day! It is alarming indeed; as for passwords, it started from simple to complicated, then to complicated ones with special characters and now there is a need to changing them periodically. Also, with the not-so-ignorable evolution of security checks, we need to innumerably swipe our identity cards. We have various new forms of secured banking nowadays, trying to make our lives easy and with as less of human contacts as possible. You call a number and you have a voice talking to you. Even if you are in a tragic or in a heavy mood, the mindless voice would warmly ’do the needful’ welcoming you, thanking you and then, on choosing a series of options, you will either have to hang up or get disconnected with your query un-answered. Well, if you are lucky, you could also talk to a human being! On withdrawing money from an ATM machine, you might have to answer a series of marketing questions and in the course, might miss the bus, or, if in haste, might even forget to collect your ATM card. With several debit and credit cards in our wallets, we are pinned down with more and more numbers, and the magnitude of fear of losing them is no less than losing yourself. Our dependence on machines and instruments clearly endorses our trust and submission towards them as a response to the changing period we are living in – that of mistrust and insecurity, the two new perceptions of ‘modern times’.

Invisible produce of machines

All of this produces tension in the human minds and is displaced with cynicism and mistrust. Life is uncontrollably becoming faster and pragmatic with little room for the slowness and abstraction. To cope with this horrendously fast life, our perception of sports and entertainment is also changing. We have shrunk the five-day test matches to less-than-a-day 20-20 matches. In the very few children’s park we have, there are more adults than children because it is not safe anymore for children to be in the children’s park. Our insistence to mechanically driven fast life is childish notwithstanding. My objective is not to give a list of examples, but to understand the implications of this not-so-old phenomenon. With more gadgets, more machines, more instruments, our menu-driven lives are becoming more convenient and simple. And yet there is a growing mistrust, discomfort and un-ease in terms of connecting with people. We tend to be glued to our machines, sometimes overlooking human companies. Now then am I suggesting that we go back to our olden days? Incidentally the old barter system has re-started since quite some time in a new name called countertrade. And in Spain, there is a group of people who have gone back to the old barter system. But I am suggesting none of that. I am just trying to look at the pattern and understand its implications.

Mechanical wave of inevitable-isation is perhaps best in the west

More machines means less people. Is it a mental model? Was this the apprehension of various Indian trade unions who protested against computerization? While these union leaders were talking from a job perspective, a demand-supply imbalance, I am not talking at all from that perspective. However, in a country where population is forever increasing, how can we afford to shoo away people? Mechanization is not an option in the West because their population is perpetually at stake; they have to make a lot of effort to inflate their decreasing population. They need to depend on machines more than we do because they lack people. We do not. Do we have the sense to understand what is good for us and what is not? I am not against machines, neither against technology, and I would be out of mind to blatantly deny the benefits, predictability and objectivity of mechanization. It is thanks to technology that I am a blogger today – I do have a virtual corner where I can write about my conviction. Even in the Indian context, I’d say that technology has also brought a huge section of our population into reading, because in order to use a particular machine, you are obliged to read, either numbers or letters.

However, my point is that of bringing out a balance between use and overuse, that of setting a limit. While it is inhuman to make human beings work like bonded labourers, it is equally cruel to convert human beings as nincompoops. We invent a machine and invariably ‘inevitabilise’ them, as if the world would come to a halt without them. It may be more appropriate in the west, where crudely speaking; there is a dearth of people.

Times

For doing a simple calculation, we do not need calculators in every single shops and groceries, for talking to our family members locked up in different rooms, we do not need to send mails or text them, and for our day-to-day living, we certainly do not need credit cards, for showing people how much up-to-date we are, we do not need to change our mobile phones, neither do we need to 'respond' to the explosion of intelligence with the several i’s and e’s. Every household does not need to have thirty-nine TVs, forty-six laptops, ninety-eight computers, sixty-five A/Cs, nine hundred mobiles and countless remotes to run those lifeless objects. We don’t need to order everything on-line might as well go and fight with people to do the daily buying and selling; might as well meet up with friends and relatives rather than texting, mailing or ‘virtualising’ them. Not everything that is applicable in the west is applicable throughout the world, however much enticing and convenient they are. We are forgetting perhaps, and this is for the world at large, that human beings are a replica of nature, not of machines, however predictable and unmistakable the robots are. Our escapades from life and its understanding seems to have been routed through attractive machines with their expertise and zero-defect capability. But it is also making us intolerant towards human imperfections. Their overuse is paralysing our senses.

We need to have to stop somewhere. Otherwise we will have tired hands and myopic eyes running and gazing at those lifeless machines with heavy and indolent legs, that of dinosaurs. When and how we say times to modern times is the question.