I am sixteen. Sweet sixteen. But
my wife says I am getting old. I just completed the sixteenth anniversary of my
30th birthday last week. They say a person is as old as he or she
feels. I dont think I am a day over thirty.
All women start developing a new
strand of DNA when they get married. And this DNA is so firmly entrenched it is
not funny. It is the DNA of showing the mirror to the husband. While she continues
to rib me about being old, I consider myself young.
When she points to my being out
of shape, I say round is a shape. She can outrun me, outwit me and outsmart me.
But I point all of that to genes and not to age. What do I do if she has a
manufacturing defect and is better than me in all these areas? After all I am
human.
The one area where she is right pertains
to roller coasters. While life is a roller coaster, I can’t sit on one. I am
afraid. I don’t know of what, but I refuse to sit on one. She then proceeds to
turn the screws by saying, that a big
sign of old age, is that I am slow to adapt to new technologies.
There are four kinds of people in
this world. There are people who are technologically savvy, technologically
friendly, technology agnostic and technologically averse. I believe I am on the
cusp of technologically friendly and technologically agnostic. My wife
maintains that I am on the cusp of technologically agnostic and technologically
averse. It is time for me to accept
reality as mirrors don’t lie.
When I board a roller coaster, I
lose control, especially of my life and safety. My survival depends on the
safety equipment, and how my intestines react to the ups and down. I get the
same feeling with technology. It is moving at a very rapid pace from being
helpful to being intrusive Every website I visit, I end up leaving a footprint
and I am not comfortable with that.
Last week I wanted to see how the
White House looks. So I entered what I thought was the website of the White
House. I was shocked at what I saw. It was a porn site. Just imagine, if I had
accessed it from my workplace. I would have lost my job for inadvertently
stumbling into objectionable content.
I love innovation. I love the
comfort it gives me. But it makes me lazy. Makes me a parasite. Once upon a
time, I used to remember the telephone numbers of my friends and relatives.
Today, I dont know a single number. For survival reasons, I have to state that
I remember my wife’s telephone number. But I dread the day, when l leave the
cell phone at home. I am completely handicapped.
Last week the latest version of
an iconic phone was launched. There were a host of jokes around how one needs
to sell a kidney to buy one. The phone came with face recognition features.
Apparently it would unlock only if it recognised the face of its user. There
were another set of jokes about how women would be unable to open the same
without applying makeup. There is an old saying “Jiska Bandar usise naache?” I
am more worried about disasters. What if one is caught in one, and the
onlookers who want to help and can’t unlock the phone to identify the person?
As mentioned above, I leave an
indelible footprint every time I visit the world wide web. If I search for a
flight ticket for Chennai, immediately my screen is flooded with hotel options
for Chennai. Artificial intelligence is getting intrusive. I hear that
companies are hiring psychologists to view facebook photos and fathom the mood
of the person, so that an appropriate product advertisement can be pushed. A
day will come when I may start getting sucked into the whirlpool of the
internet and the internet will start guiding my thinking.
This is exactly happening with
the Blue Whale game. Players are getting sucked in resulting in disastrous
consequences. I know of exactly fine people who want to try out the game for
‘kicks’. We are at the cusp where technology will slowly take over our brain,
and we will not even realise it. Daily we are getting sucked into it.
I use technology, love it but don’t
want it to take over my brain. I love
the highs of technology. But am hugely scared of the lows.
That is why I stay away from
roller coasters – real as well as virtual. I am not getting old, I am getting
wiser. That is what I would like to believe. But mirrors and birthdays don’t
lie
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