“You have to have it,” I overheard a teenage daughter explain to her father, about the new Apple phone that got launched in a live event that rivals a Rolling Stones concert or a Narendra Modi rally (increasingly almost the same thing because both are equally likely to sell out Madison Square Garden).
“I don’t understand a telephone that’s Rs 65,000,” was the response from the curmudgeon father who had not caught up with the smartphone wave that is now more necessary for Indian teenagers than water, food or an education.
The hapless father reasoned: “They just give the thing an additional alphabet or number like a C or an S or a 6 and charge you double. It’s still a phone. MTNL gives them for free. They don’t make them larger and call them the MTNL plus and charge them a middle-class Indian household income.”
“Whatever” was the daughters’ response, which in universal teenage subtext means “You do not want to see your only child grieve, so you will get me an iPhone.”
Much has been written about the genius of Apple’s marketing that makes a product feel like it is about as necessary as having oxygenated blood running through your body. Making us forget that there was a world that functioned without such a phone and a world a thousand years before that as well. I cannot recall Napoleon saying “Dammit, which way to Russia, my Google map is not working on my I-Phone” or Julius Caesar saying, “No I didn’t get that text about Hannibal, my IOS 7 needs an update.”
As the iPhone runs more and more of our lives, questions are being asked about how it has changed fundamentally the rules of living. Starting with making the phone itself, the least used part of the thing that is the iPhone. You’ve got movies/ music (iTunes), everything there is to see (YouYube), reading (Kindle), Information (Google), Travel (so many apps), memories (Instagram) speaking (Whatsapp), sex (Tindr), food (whatever your Zomato equivalent is), social relationships (Facebook), what’s going on (Twitter), speaking to really close people during an emergency (texting). There’s Games: games to be a farmer, be a marine, throw birds, crush sweets, so there is no need to look outside a window when traveling. A recent New York Times survey said that couples spend more time romancing on their iPhone than they do in person.
The goal is to make sure you don’t take your eyes off their (now bigger) screen for anything. The real world, (orbis or mundus in Latin), is not a place you need to look at. The Lord Krishna had it in his mouth, they have it in a phone. Perhaps one day in the future, laws will be made forcing humans to make eye contact with each other, one day of the week, compulsory, by government health regulations, looking away from your iPhone. It will be an awkward day because you wouldn’t know what to say to the other person ‒ you already know everything about them, including a photo of the muffin they half-ate that morning. Even if you are asking them to marry you, there will probably be an app to get down on your knees making any need for actual human contact useless.
Before that world arrives (it is already here), I’d like to, just for the record, list a bunch of professions and people in India that are now obsolete, along with things now gone, just so some proof exists that it was how we lived once.
1.Travel agents: Tickets are all on your iPhone from your online travel agent. There is no one to call and shout at when they send you to a wrong city on a wrong day or not send you the ticket on time because the peon got scurvy.
2. The Directions pan shop guy: With GPS, he’s just going to be sitting there with no one asking him where anything is. Eventually he’ll have to get another job.
3. The Relative who knows two single people and suggests they meet: a relic.
4. The Uncle who talks nonsense with incorrect facts and says things like, “See I know ok…”: Fact-checked by Google on your phone and will appear a fool.
5. Showing up somewhere not knowing what the hell to expect: impossible in an era when you’ve seen pictures of the venue, who else is attending and what they will wear.
5. Having to recount stuff just from memory: no need. Your phone has photos of what you did. Has proof of what someone said. The memory now is just an accessory, like a handbag. The phone is the brain.
6. Blaming a person for giving you the wrong information: “How can you tell me it is only 20 minutes from the airport? You said so and so city would be fun. It wasn’t”. These sentences. Not double-checked by you on phone, relying on human instead of an app, makes you dated.
7. Hotels/ restaurants without reviews: there was actually a time when you relied entirely on gut instinct.
8. A Proper Stranger: someone who would enter and leave your world without any information about them before or after. No Linkedin, no Google, no Facebook. The word mysterious had mystery.
9. DVDs Why does that have to go? Movies should have a separate thing in the world. It feels like natural order.
10. Having Nothing to Do. Literally. Time where you sit and ponder and look at things. There was such a time. You forgot your book, didn’t have your MP3 player, Walkman etc. Today, if there is such a time, there’s only one thought in your head. My iPhone is being charged.
We welcome your comments at
letters@scroll.in.
“I don’t understand a telephone that’s Rs 65,000,” was the response from the curmudgeon father who had not caught up with the smartphone wave that is now more necessary for Indian teenagers than water, food or an education.
The hapless father reasoned: “They just give the thing an additional alphabet or number like a C or an S or a 6 and charge you double. It’s still a phone. MTNL gives them for free. They don’t make them larger and call them the MTNL plus and charge them a middle-class Indian household income.”
“Whatever” was the daughters’ response, which in universal teenage subtext means “You do not want to see your only child grieve, so you will get me an iPhone.”
Much has been written about the genius of Apple’s marketing that makes a product feel like it is about as necessary as having oxygenated blood running through your body. Making us forget that there was a world that functioned without such a phone and a world a thousand years before that as well. I cannot recall Napoleon saying “Dammit, which way to Russia, my Google map is not working on my I-Phone” or Julius Caesar saying, “No I didn’t get that text about Hannibal, my IOS 7 needs an update.”
As the iPhone runs more and more of our lives, questions are being asked about how it has changed fundamentally the rules of living. Starting with making the phone itself, the least used part of the thing that is the iPhone. You’ve got movies/ music (iTunes), everything there is to see (YouYube), reading (Kindle), Information (Google), Travel (so many apps), memories (Instagram) speaking (Whatsapp), sex (Tindr), food (whatever your Zomato equivalent is), social relationships (Facebook), what’s going on (Twitter), speaking to really close people during an emergency (texting). There’s Games: games to be a farmer, be a marine, throw birds, crush sweets, so there is no need to look outside a window when traveling. A recent New York Times survey said that couples spend more time romancing on their iPhone than they do in person.
The goal is to make sure you don’t take your eyes off their (now bigger) screen for anything. The real world, (orbis or mundus in Latin), is not a place you need to look at. The Lord Krishna had it in his mouth, they have it in a phone. Perhaps one day in the future, laws will be made forcing humans to make eye contact with each other, one day of the week, compulsory, by government health regulations, looking away from your iPhone. It will be an awkward day because you wouldn’t know what to say to the other person ‒ you already know everything about them, including a photo of the muffin they half-ate that morning. Even if you are asking them to marry you, there will probably be an app to get down on your knees making any need for actual human contact useless.
Before that world arrives (it is already here), I’d like to, just for the record, list a bunch of professions and people in India that are now obsolete, along with things now gone, just so some proof exists that it was how we lived once.
1.Travel agents: Tickets are all on your iPhone from your online travel agent. There is no one to call and shout at when they send you to a wrong city on a wrong day or not send you the ticket on time because the peon got scurvy.
2. The Directions pan shop guy: With GPS, he’s just going to be sitting there with no one asking him where anything is. Eventually he’ll have to get another job.
3. The Relative who knows two single people and suggests they meet: a relic.
4. The Uncle who talks nonsense with incorrect facts and says things like, “See I know ok…”: Fact-checked by Google on your phone and will appear a fool.
5. Showing up somewhere not knowing what the hell to expect: impossible in an era when you’ve seen pictures of the venue, who else is attending and what they will wear.
5. Having to recount stuff just from memory: no need. Your phone has photos of what you did. Has proof of what someone said. The memory now is just an accessory, like a handbag. The phone is the brain.
6. Blaming a person for giving you the wrong information: “How can you tell me it is only 20 minutes from the airport? You said so and so city would be fun. It wasn’t”. These sentences. Not double-checked by you on phone, relying on human instead of an app, makes you dated.
7. Hotels/ restaurants without reviews: there was actually a time when you relied entirely on gut instinct.
8. A Proper Stranger: someone who would enter and leave your world without any information about them before or after. No Linkedin, no Google, no Facebook. The word mysterious had mystery.
9. DVDs Why does that have to go? Movies should have a separate thing in the world. It feels like natural order.
10. Having Nothing to Do. Literally. Time where you sit and ponder and look at things. There was such a time. You forgot your book, didn’t have your MP3 player, Walkman etc. Today, if there is such a time, there’s only one thought in your head. My iPhone is being charged.