Technology and Me: A story of two parallel growing entities

In this narrative, the writer wishes to take readers bit back in time. It was the time when connectivity was a serious issue. This was not the age of internet connectivity. Instead, placing a call to a distant relative was a humongous task. Let’s begin..

I come from an era where while growing up, we have seen landline telephones. It was the time when phones were new thing in the market and was out of reach of the masses. It was more of a status quotient then being just a service. In short, it was sign of a wealthy family.

Recalling some of the instances when the first ever landline was allocated to us at our familial house in Chennai, my dad once accidentally mentioned to me how naughty he was.

The story goes like: My Grandfather had applied for a landline telephone connection. He received the connection line and the tabletop set in a month’s time. At that time, he also received a small booklet with yellow pages and text in black colour. It had a lot of telephone numbers of the city residents who had telephone connections. It was the telephone directory.

Now, my dad always found it amusing to just pickup receiver>dial number>ringing>and speak to the person on the other end of the city, if not world. He mentioned, on a number of occasions, he used to pickup telephone directory>select and dial random numbers>soon as the person takes the call, he used to scold him saying, “Who asked you to pickup??”

As the time gained pace, technology gained momentum, fixed landline telephones were replaced by cell phones with an antenna. In the meantime, I was born to my parents. I saw the first fixed line phone in our Indore residence then, I purchased a small Motorola phone with blue light background and black texts. Today, the world runs on smartphones and powerful platforms like Android, iOS and what not??

In the days to come, new and even more powerful technologies will be invented. I just hope to remain updated and friendly with the tech till I survive.