When the very last telegram is transmitted on July 14, India will witness the end of an analogue era.
As the watershed of 1991’s liberalisation disappears into history, the numbers of those who remember a time when we wrote letters, developed film roll and recorded a cassette will also start to fade into the background.
Future generations – with their ubiquitous touch screens – might not even know what it is like to communicate through a device that has actual wires.
But as we put the beloved telegraph to bed forever, it is time to pay tribute to the remnants of a past age.
Convergence has become an oddly corporate buzzword in recent times, alongside fellow jargon staples such as synergy and ideation, but it is impossible to ignore its all too real effect on the middle-class household.
Step into an ordinary living room today, and you’re likely to find one or two shiny screens that do it all: send messages, post emails, make phone calls, save your contacts, act as an encyclopedia, take photos, play music, record videos, control video games and even map out your neighbourhood.
Barely a decade ago, we had a whole host of beloved devices to help us do the same thing – albeit with much more patience added in
Coming generations will never know the anticipation of waiting to get your Kodak film rolls back from the developers before you see whether the pictures were taken well, they’ll never know the pleasure of receiving a painstakingly written love letter through post or the joy of hearing the song you have been waiting for on the radio.
Even the wait for that scratchy sound on a dial-up modem to end before connecting to the Internet could be excruciating. Instant is in, everything else is ancient. Even our roads look different.
The Ambassadors and Fiats have been replaced by a veritable army of little cars that simply look like variations on a single box-on-wheels theme.
Ask a kid today what a Yezdi or a Rajdoot is, and she would have no idea that they come from the same family that is now populated by the banal-looking Pulsars and Karizmas.
The rapid switch to an entirely digital universe also has a serious impact on how we come to value things.
No matter how ‘real’ the online world is to us, tangibility has its own appeal. The physical act of using an ink pen to write out a letter alters the person writing in a way that tapping out an SMS can never do.
Swiping through a Facebook photo set will never replace the joy of looking at albums printed out and carefully stored years ago – not the least because the spread of digital cameras and cameraphones allows practically all of our lives to be documented, making individual moments much less valuable.
If everything can be recorded, nothing is particularly precious.
The digital world does attempt to be a facsimile of this past age. Your iPhone still pretends that a switch has to be pulled every time you unlock it and the phenomenal popularity of Instagram – which simply attempts to recreate the look of a vintage photograph – bears testimony to this nostalgia.
But even these remnants will slowly give way to generations that have little recollection of what came before them leaving no need for designers to appeal to a sentiment from a different world.
The advent of technology is not a thing to be mourned, and yet it is important to pay our respects to the passing of an older way of life. We come not to praise the telegraph, but to bury it.
Older styles of writing were minor art forms. It is why, to this day, official letters are still typed out by professional typewriters – they couldn’t be entrusted to the layman.
The same held true for writing with ink pens, where the act of cursive writing – and better yet calligraphy – did get elevated to an accepted form of art.
Today’s keyboard word processors and ball pens have been much more democratic, allowing one and all to conveniently put their words onto paper (digital or otherwise) but have little of the charm of the old devices.
The film roll, made ubiquitous by Kodak over the 20th century, is a delicate object. Treat it badly, and all your photos will be lost. Hurry it, and your pictures will be damaged.
Give it enough time and you have a batch of pictures to cherish. The digital photo, on the other hand, is a prolifically dispensable object: you can take hundreds of pictures in a matter of minutes, and discard all of them in seconds.
There may not have been many designs to pick from back in the days of Ambassadors and Yezdis, but they were all fine looking vehicles.
Following liberalisation, the market was completely revolutionised, and while the tremendous spread of automobile technology has been excellent for households and corporate India (if not particularly beneficial to the environment), the cookie-cutter nature of most box-on-wheels models make our roads look a lot less interesting.
Music is more precious when you cannot listen to it. Or rather, its value is much higher when you only hear it very rarely.
From a time when you had to wait for certain songs to be aired on the radio to the need for you to buy or record cassettes and CDs, kids today simply have to click a button – usually without paying – for them to listen to any song they want
The land-line is an endangered species. Few can even remember how we used to find a way to meet up before the cellphone became common, or the anger at someone else in the house – usually a parent – picking up the line while you are talking to that special someone.
Land-line phones were once a luxury but now everyone has a touch-screen cellphone.
The entry of VHS tapes and later VCRs into households were occasions to be celebrated. Until then, movies were confined to the cinema or the tyranny of the single national broadcaster.
When VHS first showed up, everything changed. Suddenly the entire catalogue of movies from the past were now welcome into your homes and the Handycam meant you could even make home movies.
The cold exterior of the CD and DVD doesn’t carry quite the same cachet, and even they have begun to be replaced by the USB drive !!!
source:::: Rohan Venkataramakrishnan in mailonline india
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