Fascinated

"He who can no longer pause to wonder & stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead." - Albert Einstein

Does technology kill curiosity? Do technical advancements inhibit our spirit of adventure & wonderment? “Yeah right! So what?”, “What’s the big deal?” is a response you get if you interact with teens today. The eternal question is ‘What Next?’ Remember the Samsung ad. It’s a mad rush for new products, new features in existing products, new accessories, new applications, new tools, basically new everything. With so many ‘new‘s, where’s the time to be captivated? By the time I purchase a thing, go home & sit down to explore its features, the marketing for its new, improved & upgraded version would already be out on the telly. Watch the show ‘It’s a Guy Thing’ on NDTV & you’ll know what I mean.

My first handset, the Sony Ericson “brick” model, was still a cherished one. Quite an accomplishment because it was a gadget bought with my salary. And it was taken at a time when I did not feel a compelling need to own a mobile. I bought it only because someone sold it to me for Rs 1500/- way back in 2002! When I look at my present handset - touch-screen Motorola & recall the tiny display of that first handset, the gap & difference is not just in the price of the things but also in my own personal growth in terms of increasing earning capacity & a proportionate willingness to spend. But what has remained constant is my fascination for both. I was fascinated then, I am fascinated now.

My eyes light up at the very sight of a new gadget or application. Like, the first time I saw the LG fridge with its water compartment outside the body of the refrigerator. It was a ‘wow’ moment for me. The journey of Indian cooking, from the wood & fire chulhas to LPG gas to induction cookers to microwave ovens is a remarkable one too. I am still spellbound when I go over some of the latest models in the electronics section of a mall or when I watch the gizmo updates on T.V or the description of features in magazines. I’m like, “This thing can do this?” followed by ‘How’ & later ‘Wow’.

The variety of children’s books & toys available today – I like, I like. As a child, when I was growing up in Bombay, it was all about running around the gullies with a gang of boys. And later in Udupi, it was mostly playing ‘house’ with leaves & assorted sticks & stones. Chasing butterflies & failed attempts at milking the cow were our most fun games. Today, the sheer range of toys to be had is amazing – from tumbling honey bees to an ironing tool set to cash register machines to road excavation equipments – they’ve the whole gamut; that too by categories of age. Playing in mud is so passé!

I’m not skeptical of technology nor do I fear its effects on my daughter’s growing mind. As a parent, what I do dread is the loss of fascination for things. With everything available at the touch of a button, & so easily seen & experienced, the sense of curiosity & allure, the absolute thrill of discovery, the romance of a new sensation, the wide-eyed wonder, wouldn’t be there, would it? Wish we could take time to savor each of these experiences & satiate our senses before we move on to the next conquest. Seems like asking for a lot.

Most scientific inventions & discoveries owe their birth to one emotion: an overwhelming & over-powering sense of fascination. One genius was fascinated by the falling apples, another by the movement of a train in relation to his own movement or lack of it in a car, one was mesmerized by the power of sound, another by the way light travelled, one dug into the deepest recesses of a cell, another into the vast expanse of the universe. Oh, without a sense of wonder, what would man be?

Younger = smarter ??

I am faced today with the eternal question of intellectual supremacy, the newer generation versus the older generation. Am I smarter than my mother was? And, along the same lines, is Tanvi smarter than I am?

I refuse to believe she is smarter than me (although it would delight me no end, if she were!). I feel her so-called ‘smartness’ is only a result of a bigger & better exposure to the things around her. She is more exposed to the world, social situations, the media & technology today than I ever was. Same holds true for me & my mother. I wasn’t smarter than her. I just happened to be far more aware of things happening around me than she was, thanks to better & easy access to information sources. My daughter started ‘playing’ with a mobile phone by the age of 2. It was one of her earliest ‘real’ toys. Compare this to my first brush with mobile communication. I bought my first handset in 2002 that was just eight years back at the (ripe, by today’s standards) age of 24!

It’s like a twenty year advance introduction to mobile technology for my daughter. A giant leap in the ways of the altered communication systems! Obviously she is going to find it easier to understand the nitty-gritty of a handset, is going to make/receive calls with ease, run through the features of the mobile like a pro; in short, she is “smarter” when it comes to usage of mobiles. Unlike me; whenever I have changed handsets I have taken pains to get used to the new features on the new set. Most often, I have missed the familiarity of the old set & felt lost in the jingo of the new one. But then, that doesn’t make me any less smart than my daughter or any smarter than my mother who actually never went beyond using the BSNL instrument for calling people.

I was still actively using our dear old Indian Postal service as a main channel of communication right till I was 20. My daughter might never lick an envelope to seal it - ever! She would most likely send her first letter through an email or better still a text message or maybe even a ping on Skype! But that in no way makes her smarter than me! It only gives her the ‘at the right place, right time’ kind of privilege. Of course, she may be ‘better’ (in the sense of ‘faster’) than the others of her class/age in how she uses it but definitely not more intelligent than a previous generation. And by the same logic, I am no smart-ass for knowing the do’s & don’ts of email etiquette compared to my mother whose greatest & most complicated use of postal correspondence was a telegram.

Even when it comes to the world of movies & entertainment, the same thing holds true. Tanvi knows the names some of the Bollywood actors & actresses & their movies & their songs & dances to their numbers simply because she has been born & grown into a world of an entertainment overload. Calling out for Shah Rukh in a theatre & doing an impromptu jig is so normal for her. On the same lines, my father-in-law has been a Sean Connery fan from like forever. In fact, he introduced Sathya to the action & thrill of Hollywood films. But now that Sathya shakes a leg to the beat of Eminem doesn’t make him any more ‘cool’ than his dad. If his father would have had the on the ‘click-of-a-button’ access to youtube & dime a dozen DVDs & posh multiplex screens in every street worth its name, during his youth, maybe he would end up being ‘cooler’ than Sathya!

The newer generation is NOT smarter than the older generation. If circumstances could be controlled & if we could live in the same world so to say, we both would react & respond similarly & also excel equally. Our sensibilities are shaped by the availability of all forms of media. The lack or surplus decides how comfortably we relate to the ‘in’ things of today, the newest trends, whether it is in social networking, or entertainment or communication.