Technology integration over two generations

(A college student could have used this title for his project submission and been proud about it. Sorry about that. I suck at conjuring up titles and have to improve on that aspect of my writing. The following piece might really not be as boring as what you read above.)

I vividly remember the first television that we bought in our rented house, back in Valluvar Kottam, Chennai. I think it was the early nineties (with a tolerance of 3-5 years on either side) and televisions were slowly becoming common, from lower middle class families up. And we were in that bottommost band which explained the initial reluctance of dad, who had come from a remote village in TN to make a living among the bright lights of Chennai, to jump in on the trend. My mom and I cajoled him a lot, even sulking at times. Eventually we discovered that our affluent neighbors were upgrading to a color television and had no need for the Solidaire black and white piece that the family had.

We ushered in the TV on a Sunday afternoon but past the time when the (usually) award winning regional language movie was shown. Mom and I gaped at it unable to fully grasp the beauty of the device. Not until Fido - our German Shepard – would come to our house a decade later, would we feel the same thrill. It was a huge rectangular box inside a wooden cabinet that had sliding doors designed to lock the TV and protect it from dust, falling objects and the like. It had all of eight channels to choose from using the rotary dial that would click and lock into place with a small thud at the stop of every channel. I don’t exactly remember how the volume control looked like. Before switching it on, we smeared kumkum on the TV’s forehead and also did a small puja praying for its long life. Even the black and white static (looked like ants crawling at a very busy pace) on the screen denoting the absence of programming at that ‘odd’ Sunday hour excited us.

Mom made hot bajjis that evening as we gathered around, awaiting five o clock. White static turned into multi colored bars that ran from top to bottom and made a constant hum. Then started the countdown from, what was it… a minute? Doordarshan’s cult graphic of those days appeared - the rotating solar system in the midst of which appears a moon. The word ‘Doordarshan’ then shows up in the moon, written in perfect symmetry. This was followed by some Tamil movie that was Sunday special. Dad was not much of a TV person and so, it was mom and I that made full use of the television.

I was studying in class eight of nine… much later, after we moved from that rented house to another. Video games were the fab. Talk of 8-bit games and 16-bit games, slowly moving on the coolest of them all – the 32-bit games, were becoming common amongst us school children. I only fantasized these, I knew there was no way my dad could afford any of these for me. But that did not stop me from pestering him. He had by then quit his salaried job and taken to business, partnering with a group of Marwari friends that he had. All these men had shops around Annai Sathya bazaar, a place for buying the fanciest electronics (Video games, remote controlled cars you name it) and the choicest of garments. I think the pani puri wallah that put up stall in that extremely busy lane was the only pani puri wallah in T.Nagar. Since my best friend’s house was quite close to that place, after we hung out together in the evenings, I used to go to dad’s shop to return home with him. His fellow shop owners in that bazaar soon became my friends with me and Riaz, the guy who owned the electronics shop, was my best friend there. I had little interest in those that sold garments. Riaz bhayya offered to lend me one of the 8-bit video games from the shop. Though my father did not like the practice and chastised him for spoiling me, Riaz was calm and told him that I was just a small boy and that I “should enjoy it at this age”. It became a regular habit, I would take a loaner from Riaz bhayya on weekends and play games like ‘Duck hunt’ and ‘Super Mario bros.’ (The former actually had a gun that you had to point at the screen and shoot ducks that would fly into the air. How cool was that!)

Cut to 2000! This was serious stuff. The days of fun and frolic were over. I was in college. Engineering. Filling ones head with knowledge of computers was deemed to be as necessary as filling up ones tank with gas when going cross country across the Sahara. GNIIT and DNIIT were fighting the royal rumble with similar courses from Aptech and SSI. Unless you wanted to end up on a shop floor with a meager pay that would doom you for life, you had to get into one of these courses (that’s what the advertisements confidently proclaimed). We had moved yet another time. This time we had a color TV. But no cable connection. (This last part came from a stolen connection that I was the proud architect of). Dad also was building a house for us in some part of Chennai. A lady who worked in SSI and was a regular buyer of garments at dad’s store suggested to him that instead of enrolling me in an expensive course, he should invest that money in buying me a computer and that I could always learn most of that stuff by myself.

I could not believe my ears. A computer? For myself? I felt like how Raja would have if he were asked to distribute 4G spectrum. Boy, would I use the machine to learn Java and C and C++ and AutoCAD and what not. I promised my dad a hundred times. And the poor man fell for it. So many students were buying assembled computers (My friend got his assembled by some hack who installed a 'Priya' motherboard and not the more popular 'Pentium' that he paid for. After all, students would not bother opening the PC and looking in. At least thats what the hack thought.) that though my dad did not really believe that all of them were actually putting those machines to good use, he was pressurised into buying one for me. I never learnt Java in my life. Hell, I didn’t get beyond the first 10 pages of the most popular JAVA book on the planet at that time. The 96% that I scored in C++ at school in my twelfth standard was not due to my self-learning at home using the assembled computer (the PC came at a cost that I won’t take lightly even today with my plush dollar to rupee Xoom assured exchange rated salary). Instead I got addicted to playing video games! Illegal copies of Heroes of might and magic, Unreal tournament, and Need for Speed gave me sleepless nights and my parents, utter frustration. When dad used to go on business trips to North India, I started playing at 5 pm (immediately after college) and went on till 4 AM when I would eat eventually eat dinner and hit bed dreaming of capturing the flag on the new planets.

Now - and now is almost a decade later - I bought a television of my own. 40 inch, LED technology. I can browse the internet. Play games. Post updates on Facebook. Even watch TV too. All in one box. And it does not even look like a box. TVs don’t anymore; they rather resemble flat boards, don’t they. It is amazing how much integration technology has done in such a short span of time. When my son grows up, he will have all the entertainment that his dad had over a span of a decade and a half, sitting right there in the living room. What more is left? Coding C and C++ or whatever the new languages out there are, in your TV itself? But that would make it just a computer with a big screen right? Exactly. So that eliminates yet another device. Whichever way you twist and turn this tech crystal ball, the future seems exciting. For gadget freaks at least. It’s a pity I have other not-equally-interesting priorities now than playing games on my large screen HD television.