Thursday, January 19, 2012

Networked society

Yesterday, I received a phone call from Hyderabad on my mobile phone while having lunch at Maris, next to our office. Hari Mohan Paruvu, former Hyderabad medium pacer and author of a couple of bestsellers, wanted to know why I hadn’t replied to his email of a couple of weeks ago. Though I am rarely guilty of such bad manners, I had not even acknowledged receipt of his message. It was all the more unpardonable, as he had wanted some help from me.

This is what happened. I was travelling on vacation and had deliberately left my laptop behind. Though I did check my email on my phone, I forgot all about Hari’s missive at the end of the vacation. In the days before email, Hari’s handwritten letter would have awaited my arrival back home and I would have probably replied to him at once.

Things have changed, haven’t they? Everyone is so much more accessible, through email and text messages, conference calls and googlegroups. But do we really communicate? Do we remember birthdays, unless Facebook reminds us? Can we cut through the clutter and attend to the really important letters?

When I was a college student, I tried to write letters full of descriptions and anecdotes, humour and human interest. This was a valuable legacy I inherited from a family whose elders prided themselves on writing regularly to their loved ones and investing their letters with warmth and love.

One of the nicest compliments I received came from a friend, then a student at JIPMER, Pondicherry. He said that not only he, but also all his friends in the hostel eagerly awaited my weekly letter full of stories real and apocryphal. This good habit stayed with most of us before the communication revolution towards the end of the last millennium. I lived in Hyderabad and my brother in New Jersey, but my parents at Madras could count on both of us writing them every week.

9 December 1973. I was a 26-year-old bank officer, but still did not have a telephone at home. Suffering an acute toothache all night, I waited impatiently for dawn to break so that I could go out and find a drugstore to buy a painkiller. As I tried to start my Rajdoot motorcycle, the machine decided to punish me for not looking after it well and gave me a violent “kickback”-for want of a better word—opening up the back of my left foot.

Later in the morning, after a quick visit to the dentist, I rode to the Lal Bahadur Stadium where my team, State Bank of India, was playing a match, to inform my captain (he too did not have a telephone connection) that, with my already swelling foot, I could not play that day. Unfortunately, we had only eleven men at the ground, and I was forced to take part in the match. In excruciating pain all the while, I fielded near the boundary (you would have gathered by now that I was not the captain’s pet) all day long.

When I returned to the dressing room, it took me a good half hour of effort to take off my left boot, because my foot had swollen so much. I somehow managed to ride my bike back home, with changing gears proving a most painful exercise. I was furious with the game of cricket, Rajdoot, traffic police, dentists—in fact all of humanity, as I dismounted my steed.

“Congratulations,” the voice of my 2nd floor flat’s neighbour boomed, much to my annoyance. Even as I was mulling a caustic retort like “Thank you for enjoying my misery,” came his next words: “You are the proud father of a little daughter. We opened a telegram meant for you.” I hobbled upstairs, unable to contain my excitement, to a hero’s welcome at my neighbour’s, with his wife and kids greeting me with a delicious cup of payasam that Mami had made on receiving the good news from my in-laws at Bombay, where my wife had gone to deliver our first child.

For at least a couple of decades more, telecommunication continued to be grossly inefficient and inaccessible to most Indian citizens. I had to wait for nearly ten years after applying for a residential telephone connection. I remember the ridiculous scene of two different gangs of Indian Telephones employees descending on my seaside home in the distant suburbs one afternoon in the mid-1990s to install two different phones. One was my humble NOYT (Non Own Your Telephone!) and the other an OYT connection my employer had granted me. This seachange had come about largely as a result of the efforts of the dynamic Sam Pitroda who revolutionized Indian telecommunication.

Sorry, I must leave this story here. I have an urgent message from my next-door neighbour—who lives alone and has a chronic medical condition—asking me if I can get her a hard-to-find drug ASAP. I messaged her back a promise to look for it immediately. At the pharmacy, I will be stumped when the druggist asks me for the patient’s name. I have to text a message asking for her name, because I have it saved on my phone as “Neighbour1.”

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