The other day my wife pointed to my pile of cassette tapes gathering dust in a corner and asked me to get rid of them. "You don’t listen to them any more anyway", she said and then added for good measure that I didn’t have a functioning cassette player. That night, after every one was asleep, I took out my crusty tape recorder and inserted a tape to see if it worked. The ancient tape spool creaked and screeched for a while and then settled down into a rhythm, producing a sound that was ghastly in the eerie silence of the night.
The next weekend I looked through my collection which was impressive enough. Some of my cassettes were purchased more than two decades ago and kept me company for years, but somewhere along the way, they just became pieces associated more with nostalgia than music. Wistfully, I looked at the collection of CDs sitting next to the cassette tapes and wondered about their longevity. As my wife had reminded me, we didn’t have a proper CD player either. Either we listened to music through our laptops or through the Sony Walkman MP3 player, that wonderful midget sized gadget that can hang around your neck and entertain you for hours together.
I am forever amazed as to how fast technology is changing and I wonder always as to how far I will be able to keep up. I remember two instances from my past. It was the first time I was old enough to be interested in cricket and there was an India – Australia series. These were days before the present-day television, when Doordarshan showed excerpts (black and white of course) a day after the day’s play. These were also the days before the transistor radio.
So I used to crane my years to the old cathode ray tube driven radio tuned to the short wave station which was relaying the commentary. I still remember the frustration when a burst of static would block out transmission just as one of the commentators Rajan Bala or Bobby Talyerkhan was raising his voice to deliver some exciting news. Eventually we outgrew the radio and today in urban settings; even the transistor radio is gone. People are beginning to listen again to radio again, thanks to FM but that is again through devices built around the cell phone.
I remember my first tryst with the computer. In those days, the computer room was a sacred one with an air conditioner installed to keep its temper cool and people had to remove their footwear outside the computer room and the CPU itself was accorded a reverence that a deity in a temple could envy. The operating system at the time in am speaking of was DOS and the litany of commands that one had to remember to get any thing done was not dissimilar to the chants in a temple to mollify the presiding deity. After a couple of tries at learning the commands, I gave up in despair thankful that my office had given me a secretary to work with this complicated machine. Today I have no secretary but technology has moved a long way from those days of DOS commands that a person like me can manage the typing, the saving and the uploading.
I look at the pile of old cassettes and wonder if their days are well and truly over. After all the Audio CDs and the MP3 CDs that came after are already beginning to be passé. With the advent of the broadband has come the era of the streaming audio and the downloaded rather than the recorded music. Similarly the old black and white television was replaced by the cathode ray color television which was replaced by the flat screen television of which there are two genres – the LCD television and the plasma television fighting tooth and nail to capture the market. And in the meanwhile, when all the time, I thought that the television signals landed in my home either through the old fashioned television antenna or the cable wires or the dish antenna, my telephone company has announced that it is providing television through the conventional telephone wiring.
Technolgy is whirring and whizzing around me and I am spinning around trying to make the right choices in a very rapidly changing environment.
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