The Crusoe life

Living the life of Robinson Crusoe is tough. Especially if you are not living on an island. And you can just walk out of the door and get a sealed pack of potato wafers.

The fact that I was going to be catapulted into such a scenario came to me as a divine sign a few days ago. My laptop started acting funny. This came at an inopportune time as I had still not recovered from the grief of the sad demise of my desktop computer a few months back. I saw a huge amount of lively music and wacky photographs in a heap of dump and I could do nothing about it.

No intravenous or intensive care could do anything about it. So we indulged in a painful (for me) euthanasia and my friend through school and college lay dead., reduced to a piece of furniture.

Now my laptop had managed to salvage a part of my music and photo collection (I have lost my complete Pink Floyd and a few birthday bash pics though). So when my laptop started acting funny I had the biggest butterflies doing all sorts of things in my tummy. The power wasn’t coming. The screen would not shine bright the moment I hit the power button like it used to. I was totally angry, frustrated and generally dissatisfied with life. I wanted to shout at someone, but it felt like I was simply filling in a lot of noise in a cocoon and all the outer world could see was a Brownian motion experiment in process.

I was doing all sorts of social activities but I felt like no one could understand what I was going through.

Anyway that issue got resolved after I plucked out the battery and wiped off a huge amount of dirt with the help of painting brushes (Tip # for all those facing similar laptop problems)!

Today morning the Crusoe syndrome came back to haunt me, in an all new avatar. This time my other favourite gadget was on the firing line. My phone has stopped working. But it is not the fault with my phone. Vodafone has suddenly decided that they do not want to earn revenue through a valued customer like me. So what do they do? They stop all kind of calling facilities on my phone. I cannot make calls, no one can call me, the works. And it is a trouble my entire office is facing! The entire bloody series tends to fall into the trap.

I cannot call anyone, or receive any calls. Just goes to show how dependent I am on the phone. I am cut off from all civilization. I mean I can very well walk out and talk to people but I cannot do it from the comfort of my space. So , yeah, Crusoe had one hell of a time. I wonder how he lived through it.

New lingo..

Why have we become so driven by acronyms? Everything we talk about, we see, we use, places we go to needs to have a shorter name. It is sort of like giving a nickname, only it really is not so.

If you are not part of the acronym churning crowd you are not “in”. You must Lol and not laugh out loud. When we have a chat window open at work, and suddenly there is some high priority work which needs to get completed we inform our friends that we’ll “brb” and not be right back or better still they would say “ttyl” which is short for talk to you later. I must confess the first time I got that reply I was stumped! I had no clue what that meant. When I asked my friend he was aghast at my lack of knowledge.

This immense shortening of expressions is not only restricted to informal modes of communication. It has percolated into formal modes of communication too. In an extremely formal letter sent via e-mail you find “KFA” or “FYI” which are actually respective acronyms for “Kindly find attached” and “For your Information”.

We swear by the ATM, it is our life line; but very few of us really know that ATM is not Any Time Money or All Time Money but it actually is Automatic Teller Machine.

When you are out in a fab (which itself is a shorter version of fabulous) place hanging you do not check out nice looking people but you indulge in “NSP” which is nayan sukh prapti (Hindi for feasting your eyes). Things are LS (low standard) and btw (by the way) we are SC (super cool). Then of course there is "toldja" (told you) and "wassup" (what's up, which itself is pretty short!)

Hanging out with friends reminds me of this conversation I was having with a friend the other day. We had not met in a long time so she wanted to meet up. I asked her to suggest a place and she said” why don’t we meet at SCM?” Now my knowledge leads me to believe that SCM is Supply Chain Management which is a very painful paper and I would rather not get back to it. So I looked at her with a bewildered-this-totally-beats-me expression and she rolls her eyes to inform me that she meant “South City Mall”! Seriously?

Why do we have to make LSD( life so difficult ) ?

Love in the time of the Cell phone

The cell phone, as we will all agree has revolutionized communication. Our love lives have also not been shielded from it’s effects. In fact it has been changed forever.

Communication between lovers is a subject of much interest. In old times it would be the pigeon with a message tied to one of it’s feet. They would wait long hours pining for a reply from the elusive beloved. Then came an age where the servants, attendants and pages came in very handy. Instead of attempting a rendezvous with the lady the young man would seek a private moment with the attendant of the same lady only to covertly slip in a note into her hand with a couple of coins. Then of course came the age where you would befriend his best friend or brother/sister just to share a moment with him. Decoys are aplenty when the lover really puts his heart to it.

Nowadays love has taken an all new dimension altogether. No more are the lovers shy. She does not hide her lover’s secret letters in her bosom, or he does not hide a lock of her lovely hair in a pendant around his neck. Now they show off the fact that they are in love.

Coming back to the cell phone then…

For simplification sake I am representing the situation from the point of view of a girl. I am sure my readers can give inputs to the other perspective. So lets imagine this girl, who is talking to a significant other quite often on the phone but does not want nosy relatives (namely noisy kid brothers, tell-tale aunts etc.) , what would she do to hide this fact? Either the number would be bare, i.e. it would not be saved. But if you are calling an unsaved number too many times for your own good it is sure to raise some eyebrows if you have really nosy relatives. So she does save the number in the name of a very common girl-name, you know the sort of name girl you are sure to have been acquainted with at some point in your life. Some examples for ready reference – Upasana,Amrita,Sohini, Puja, Priyadarshini, etc.

Another phenomenon is the use of the hands-free device. Now as the name suggests if you are using the device your hands should remain free. But for a lover whispering sweet nothings on a public conveyance moving through a busy road it is a bit of a problem. The mouth piece of the hands free device is dangling near the collar, the ear piece is also poised in the ear rather precariously, much like the gracious ballerina on a tip-toe. With such minimal contact you can neither hear anything nor say anything which the other person (who is in an equally appalling position) can hear. What this leads to is the person pressing the earpiece inside the ear and stopping short of eating the mouth piece, which is held in position by the other hand. Hence, instead of being “hands-free” the device is successful in being “hand-engaging” ( no connotations please ).

And what is funny is that the content of their conversations is quite in a loop during such adventurous journeys.

“Hi, I am at so-and-so place, how far have you reached?”

“Hey, morning, will you be free for lunch today?”

“I have a client to attend today, how much work do you have?”

With a few service providers providing interconnectivity for free the lovers talk for hours on end even if they do not have anything to say, suckers for freebies that we are. I know people who do not disconnect the phone ever. They keep it connected all the time, anytime they would want to talk, they would take it out of the pocket start jabbering. I remember talking to a friend over a cup of coffee, and she suddenly picked up the phone from the table and started talking. We asked her what the deal was and discovered that the phone was connected all the while. It is like having someone hear whatever is happening in your life all the time. It is the closest I have gone to Orwellian eavesdropping.

Another friend of mine spoke to his girlfriend so much over the phone that even when they met he would not say bye when they bid adieu but “rakhchi” (which is Bangla for “I will hang up now”)

The communication is great and all that jazz, but at the end of the day are we losing that personal touch?

It’s just a phone, it’s not who we are.

Acknowledgement: My fellow passengers in ST6