Here I am, back on my blog after a long while. And this time, I am blogging from the train, on my way to Chennai from Kakinada. Plug points in every cubicle. And next to it, bold letters saying, for laptops and mobile phones.
(And this pic from the mobile phone, transferred directly on to the laptop through the data cable and so on. Yawn.)
This time last year, and I was wheelchairing to Kakinada via Vizag… I managed to stay “connected” with the world outside (read, my mail and my blog) and my husband with his week old job then through the very moody Reliance mobile cable connection. And in the years before that, autorickshaw trips to the main “junction” in the town to find an internet cafe (bring on the capuccino, kids) that was open and had a free seat for us in all those semi-closed cramped cubicles where earnest young engineering gradutes wrote to prospective employers (always in the US of A) through their yahoo mail accounts and other equally earnest perspiring young men stared at the screen, bewitched while keeping another nervous but steady eye behind them…
Point is, technology and all that… that stuff we take for granted, but not always accessible to everyone… and the small innumerable ways in which we have adapted to it. An architect I met last week in Mumbai was speaking about tech-friendly homes, and described to me all manners of innovation he adds to homes he creates that makes life, in his words, so much easier for the occupants, without them having to do anything major, or sometimes even realizing it. He mentioned the analogy of personal clothing – now we have companies like Levis that make jeans with separate pockets for ipods. Ipod pockets!, I thought…
And then I landed in Chennai last week and on my way towards the city from the airport, I saw a large hoarding for the world’s first sari with a pocket. A mauve silk sari draped oh-so-perfectly around an enviably slim waist, and just below the waist, ta da! a pocket, and a mobile phone peeping out of it. Camera not at hand, I could not stop in the mad traffic. But here it is, for your viewing pleasure… (as the gods say, google and you shall find)
And here is Pavithra Srinivasan on Chennai metblogs with more practical concerns in pocket bonanza
Some days I wonder if all of these things to make things easier is really doing that… or just creating more confusion.
Charu, glad to see the fetching waist featuring on your blog. But you know what? I’m not impressed. I’m told the next innovation is a saree with belt loops. I’m waiting for that.
On another note, do explain, what were those earnest perspiring young men bewitched by?
I’ve always believed in a sort of universal balance. So when weinvent something really convenient here, the universe compensates by making something more difficlt there. Traffic is the universal balance. So man invents microwaves–poof, more traffic. Man invents cell phone–poof, more traffic.
Want proof? Has traffic gotten better or worse in India since cell phones became popular?
(of course I’m partially kidding–but really our lives don’t seem to be getting any easier with technology)
Sheesh…. I tend to focus on the ‘enviable slim waist’..for the lack of it :-)!
well technology makes our life comfortable but we keep on adding new tasks / habits to our activity list that its all the same in the end….
Please visit my Blog……
shrawan
Ooh, where was this saree when I wrote this:
http://lak-inprint.blogspot.com/2006/12/cells-bells.html
?