I was a university student in the sixties. My family was
based in a smallish industrial town in Assam. Banaras Hindu University was my
alma mater. The train journey took three nights with a couple route changes on
the way. I never travelled alone. There were always a few friends to keep me company.
We ate at every station till we ran out of money, sang at our heart’s content
and also indulged in mild mischiefs. It was fun.
Our parents came to the station to see us off extracting
promises of writing a letter every week. We did oblige; to the extent possible.
Having reached the campus on the fourth day, it would be a day of rest before
picking up the pen to scribble a few lines; mostly stating how difficult it was
to squeeze out the time to write a letter in such a busy schedule. Once posted,
we would jump on our bikes to watch the latest movie in town. The letter took
another week to reach home. In short, there was no contact with the family for ten
to twelve days! And, the letter that our parents received contained news that
was at least a week old. There was no question of talking to them on phone.
Telephones were a rare commodity those days. Applicants waited for decades to
get a faulty connection that remained “dead” most of the time.
The Old Unfaithful
Many years later, in the early nineties to be precise, I had
to communicate the news of a death in the family to close relatives scattered
all over the county and beyond. By then, we were the proud owner of a black
outdated telephone installed by MTNL in our house in Kolkata, which did not
make any noise or sound of any sort. All the other telephone in the
neighbourhood were dead too due to a chronic ailment known as “cable fault”. I
had to hop into a taxi to travel all the way to the Telephone office at
Dalhousie Square, stand in a queue to make a phone call, return to the back of
the queue to make the second one and then the third etc. I was physically and
emotionally drained out at the end of the gruelling exercise.
Slowly and gradually the situation started to change from
the mid-nineties. After a lot of political hiccups, the government allowed
mobile phone companies to set up business in India. The impact was stunning. In
15 years’ time, the industry went through a phenomenal growth. According to
latest information, there are over 900 million telephone connections in the
country. India now is recognised as having the fastest growing communication
network in the world.
Running simultaneously, the internet technology also grew
fast and steady. However, the impact remained confined to urban India only.
Mobile phone connection reached the remote villages due to low tariff and mushrooming
of transmission towers but the internet remained inaccessible to many. However,
the privileged ones are audio-visually connected to their friends and family
all around the world.
It is really amazing for someone of my generation to have
experienced the revolution that communication has gone through. It would have
been crazy to think twenty years ago that someday in future I would be able to
call a friend of mine in California while walking out of a movie theatre in
Kolkata.
The Contemporary Gizmos
This is a dream. However, there is indeed an adverse
fallout.
As mentioned earlier, our parents had no clue of our
whereabouts for almost two weeks. But these days, the parents tend to keep
their young children on a communication leash. It must be pretty frustrating
for the young generation to be just a-phone-call-away, particularly when they
are taking a break in a cafeteria or a movie theatre or even trying to catch up
on sleep. There are parents who expect their children to send text messages at
least twice every day and an email almost daily. The kids of this generation
lost their logistic freedom.
However, I cannot even visualise what the young lots of
today will experience in the future in the field of communication. It will be a
revolution that will be beyond our wildest imagination.
Alas, we will not be around to cherish it.
18 September 2012
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