Prisoners of technology, are we?

Sometimes you tend to miss the old days. Life was much easier. There was no internet, no technology in that modern sense of the meaning. Not much of tension was there. In broad terms something of the pristine was there about existence. You loved poetry or loved people reciting it. There was the radio which gave you news. It gave you the songs that gave a lilt to your soul in your teenage, melody which you have not forgotten.

So why do we speak thus? Indeed, we might as well ask ourselves if we have succumbed to brooding. You might wonder if this is a complaint. But when everything is at the tip of the finger, all manner of information about all manner of subjects under the sun, why must we complain? We know, as we sit in our little huts in our little villages, what goes on around the world. It is all there on our mobile phones. You could say the world is in our grip.

But that precisely is the issue. Last week, a huge problem with Microsoft caused chaos all around, with financial institutions and airlines collapsing, in a manner of speaking, because computers were not being able to do what people expected them to do. Passengers suddenly became grounded; and bankers were worried about the chaos that was beginning to take charge of people's lives. It was a failure, albeit of technology, which hit us squarely in the face.

So there you have it, this yearning in us for the life we once led. It was life where writing letters mattered, where telegrams speaking of family emergencies were part of our quotidian activities. Yes, the telephone was there, for many of us a novelty. We made long distance calls to our loved ones, our voices rising to the level of screams because of all that crackling noise accompanying our words. Yet we loved it. We sat down with the radio, the transistor, in the evening, turning the knob to try getting to know of the events of the day around the world.

The times were of a thrilling sort. The world was our oyster and we explored it every moment of our lives. We trooped down to the local library to borrow books we needed to read and enhance our knowledge. The library reading room was very heaven, for you were in the company of bibliophiles like yourself, happily discovering past and present in those books. There on those pages shone places where magic worked. You read of Timbuktu, and Timbuktu came alive. You turned to science to have your ideas burnished on space exploration. Shepard, Glenn, Tereshkova and Gagarin turned into living embodiments of mystery in your mind. And you loved it.

Yes, life was charmingly simple. You loved the women in your family --- your mother, your aunts, your sisters --- for they wore saris in a Bengali way that was almost literary, that reminded you of Rabindranath's heroines. Those women in your clan, and in other clans, had long hair redolent of poetry. It was hair, braided or made into buns or simply kept loose, which you spotted in the beautiful women who were the leading ladies in the movies. Their sartorial elegance rested on aesthetics even as they consorted with their leading men on screen.

Those were black-and-white movies. Indeed, the times were black-and-white. The newspapers carried pictures poignantly black-and-white. If you lived in places away from the cities that produced those newspapers, you waited in cheerful anticipation of reading your copy of the newspaper a day later. So what if it was a day late? You did not complain, but went voraciously into reading every bit of the newspaper. Not even the page advertising the new movies in town, with images of the stars peopling the movies, could escape your attention. You perused the news and then shared it with your friends, with your parents and grandparents in the pastoral isolation of your village.

It was a poetic world. Until modern technology came in and by swift degrees bound you up in a straitjacket. You were told you did not have to go to a bank to withdraw money but simply press a button and wads of notes would be yours. You who had all your life stood in line, in a queue, to come by railway or airline tickets were now being educated on things that were online and offline. Life has certainly become easier. You order food from outside; you send money to your child even as you stay home. You order books online and they arrive within days. You book a ticket for your flight, even reserve the seat you prefer on that aircraft.

We have made progress. We have gone to the moon. We are now into exploring the vast outer reaches of the universe. But note how technology, this use of Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram and what have you has slowly given us a new though not necessarily positive perspective on life. Where before the arrival of mobile phones you watched with admiration your fellow travellers on the British underground reading books, now you have them, or their children, boring into the mobile screen. No one can stay away from that gadget. Adults, fathers of teenagers, have been spotted, here in Bangladesh and elsewhere, spending time playing games on their laptops.

Technology has come at a price. There is kindle, which many of us decline to have anything to do with because we love the smell of the pages of books. The laptop has caused our divorce from handwriting, so much so that we have almost forgotten to write, to make notes on the scripts before us on the table. Ah, but there are no handwritten manuscripts anymore; men and women who produce fiction and biographies and other works in future will leave nothing for the record, in their handwriting. Everything will be in Documents, in files on that laptop, which will be terribly unappealing.

But we have grown accustomed to technology, haven't we? These past few days, with all internet connections snapped with Bangladesh and within it, we nearly lost our minds. We could not sleep but kept going back to Facebook and Whatsapp to see if the links had been restored. Your grandchild was at the airport, about to depart on a visit abroad and you had no idea if he had boarded the aircraft; your sister and niece were stranded in a beach town, their holidays at an end and you worried from afar if they were safe, if they had enough finances to stay the course until they could go back home.

The internet shutdown shut you off from the rest of the world. You were a monk in an ancient monastery, rosary in hand, praying to the Almighty for a reopening of the doors and windows built of unassailable technology. You watched the rain beat against the windowpane. A prisoner of technology, you went nostalgic about the times when the world was a bucolic expanse of dreams.

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