London diary: Life in the clutches of modern technology
The clock is no longer my master, the song strumming in my head to bolster up this spirit is the Beatles number “Here Comes the Sun” as I snug away the boarding stub into my coat’s pocket for the flight-attendant to stow it away in the closet till one reached London. Alas, however, fantasies of such kind have little flight when one’s life is planned, synchronised and minuted to get the better hand of the second hand of the clock.
But one must welcome, tootling cheerfully, to a new rhythm even if it has to follow a well-worn clock. So with the watch adjusted to London time (rather BST) half an hour before deplaning, I decided, while exhaling, to rid myself of such higgledy-piggledy thoughts, and make it demonstrably true that a quasi-holiday can be, without pushing boundaries, made into a vacation despite a lens-hugging, cheek-to-cheek time-table. (Of course, I had to locate a consumerist nerve to bribe myself that a brand new watch would make the regimentation less chafing, and so that the first on my, so far nonexistent shopping list.) Four days into the day—without the new watch—and at the cost of sounding dry and procedural I have made it to a reasonable measure without checking in on the time. I, however, must talk of what has to be said without this considerable introductory correspondence regarding the roadworthiness of matters in general. (Given this context, whoever said, “life is not worth waiting for the storm to pass but dancing in the rain” had it all sorted out.)
As already mentioned a few days into the “Capital of the World”—so sing-songs the 3D neon psychedelic coloured billboards at Heathrow, while you are on your moving walkway, or as the Brits would say, Skywalk, wheeling your hand-baggage, and I happily took note of the fact that mobile phones were banned from being brought to many a school. A policy condoned, full-bodied by the Education Secretary, Mr. Damian Hinds.
Kids, students are so busy with their mobiles cradling in the folds of their skirts or creasing their trousers for them to go on auto-enfold that they are deaf, blind to their poor dear teacher’s lectures, who need lozenges at all hours, to soothen their rasping throats; they think, with a hopeful head, that they are teaching, perhaps to a remaining few of the fast-growing extinct student community. And here we are crying hoarse on “Save our Tigers”, when our children have long flown the nest, with ill-prepared wings insufficient to carry them far. Mobiles are a limb-extension, we know and cringingly, should not one confess that the same be the case with adults?! Correction: not to get into technology-mad statistics but the phone has morphed into a limb, and the arm, an artificial appendage! One might, at a reasonable price, get an arm booted in the axilla but one’s phone is one’s heartbeat, beg to differ, if you may...
However, back to this ban: school kids, no longer, can spell since their word-spell puts every letter in the right order, far before they thumb out, with nano-effortlessness, the next three-worded sentence. Arithmetic?! 2 + 2 = 4. Even numbers might be totted up if they do not come in double digits, but as far as subtraction goes, how can a Zero (0) become a 10?! And once the bus or Papa’s Land Rover drops the youngster 20-odd yards from the school, it is quite impossible to make it to the gate unless the pupil’s face is pasted to the screen, demanding directions.
A diversion: for a major part of December and a good patch of January, I had to commute back home in cabs, and to my shock could not comprehend why supposedly seasoned drivers, with receding hairlines to support the years clocked in, needed a GPS to get from point “A” to “B” or upper limit “C”. This, their Alexa. Alexa—the nauseatingly know-it-all automaton who has made a slave of their owners, allowing no room for sighing or crying without it cheekily informing the Master that the query was muzzled, so kindly repeat again, for the needful to be played back. Alexa, apart from making one trash one’s brain, needs to be binned. So, the point, if there is any, why this shatteringly stupendous dependency on these drugged-to-the eyeball machines?! Overdosed on information, one would say...
Speaking of which, while leafing through The Times I stumbled on an article narrating how a hotel in techno-frenzy Japan had to dismiss more than 150 or so of their staff of 243 robots, and set up round-the-clock interviews to hire back good old human beings. Picture this: Japanese, in general, are not well-conversant with English, so little wonder a Robot Receptionist stood still, staring glass-eyed at a group of foreigners wanting to know how long happy hours lasted since they had not yet checked their phone’s clock to look over the time difference, say between Sydney and Tokyo.
I would think that a Bionic Personal Assistant attached to each guest, would, to say the least, be in one’s way, bumping into each other while a helping hand is extended for unpacking. Or this She-butler, who happened to be called Churi, perched on a metallic shelf which ejects itself when she has to wait, watching your every move with rotating camera eyes that would make a Samsung Note 9 camera, for all its filmmaker’s delight, wear a sheepish, hangdog look. Last heard, with humans back at the job, the hotel is back in business. So, all’s well that ends well. For now, have a train to catch from Paddington, and look forward to chugging away with no GPS manning the tracks and jubilantly sipping on hot chocolate.
And here we are crying hoarse on “Save our Tigers”, when our children have long flown the nest, with ill-prepared wings insufficient to carry them far.
Dr Renée Ranchan writes on socio-psychological issues, quasipolitical matters and concerns that touch us all