Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Technology - the brighter side of sixth sense!

This is perhaps the longest interval between two posts in my blog... But then, things can't always be in a straight line - theory of non-linearity as explained in the movie '21'. Ok... this is not a philosophy post so you can carry on without any caution :D

I've always believed that life is driven by needs but the extent to which it has influenced the US life is unimaginable. As the urge to break apart and remain as individuals, free from any strong relationships, increases; the society and the setup needs to transform a lot to accommodate the change. A typical example is driving to an unfamiliar destination in US vs driving to an unfamiliar location in India. In India, we just get the basic idea on the direction of the place and after that you'll have tea shops, auto (it's not just automobile, it's auto :)) drivers, pedestrians, waiters at road-side restaurants, old ladies sitting at the 'thinnai' (sitouts) of their houses and a gazillion others to guide you. But over here, things ought to be planned and things ought to let people be as detached from each other as possible. Cities are neatly planned and you have to come out of the 'free ways' (which are literally free from everything except vehicles) to get anything from food to fresh mints. None of the gazillion persons I mentioned earlier would be on the streets to help you out and you are on your own all the way unless you deliberately get into a mall, order a pizza and ask for directions. However, I should admit that this detachment has improved the lives of Americans to a great extent.

Moving from one place and settling down at the other is nothing less than a nightmare in India. Poor bank officers would often combat this nightmare and tune their minds to such a great extent that they boast on their abilities to move anywhere, anytime. Everything sounds new (as it is supposed to be) in the new place and it takes at least a month to comfortably settle down. But even after that month, people keep thinking about the good neighborhood and the so called 'prestige' they had in their previous locality. But here, life moves on a Fast forward button and if you just have your credit card, mobile phone and a laptop with Wi-Fi; you rule the place. Booking tickets, movers, hotels, transportation, finding accomodations, locating nearby places of importance and anything that you would need in a new place is brought to your finger tips. With a GPS, car, the destination address and a fat wallet; the need to know the place you stay completely vanishes, of course given the fact that you choose and you 'love' to be independent. Whether this promulgates a good trend or not, it definitely proves that the greatest gift of mankind - 'the sixth sense' would make him turn the world around him as he likes. The best part about it - someone's sixth sense helps me enjoy the benefits! :))

5 comments:

Lakshminarayanan S said...

Fundamentally there are lot of differences between the Indian way of living and American way of living...we too have almost all the amenities here, but the majority still prefer to use the non-technology driven way as we need the 'human' touch which is terribly lacking in America and other developed nations...the other reason is the population which has never allowed the government to plan the cities and infrastructure as they were concentrating mostly on controlling the population and basic necessities...

Not all the Americans are educated enough to use the sophisticated technologies...if they are, then Indian call centers would have died long back...the ratio (I said ratio and not the count) of Intelligent Americans would be far far lesser than Intelligent Indians...having said that, Americans are the most gullible people in the world...Indians are way far better than them though we do not have the technologies implemented everywhere like they have...

I prefer our way of living...the American way of living which you have explained is very monotonous and doesn't have room for interacting with people for which we are on earth...

Agni said...

I agree with you for the most part except one - Many Americans are not educated enough to use their tech and that's why we have call centers. Americans (at least for the most part) get used to technologies real quick and even truck drivers here use GPS extensively. The conservative red-neck population or oldies might not be as good with it but many Americans are. Call centers survive not only on stupidity but also on the cost effectiveness. Our of 100 calls a CC gets, 10 might be on how to plug in the system or how to view My Computer but the remaining 90% will be on not-so-explicit problems. Further an Indian works at a rate that is 1/10th that of an American. That speaks for itself...

Lakshminarayanan S said...

Most Americans using a technology are like trained robots...they don't know how to handle some unknown situation with that technology...they are spoon-fed in anything and everything...definitely I don't want that kind of culture to be implemented in India to make all of us lazy...

Agni said...

I never want Indians to be addicted to technology! But at the same time, the inventions/discoveries that keep the Americans going are truly mind blowing.

Unknown said...

Looks like few intellectual tussles between you and this guy on this post ... :)

India is far too crowded place for any good technology to work :) Think of google maps not being able to calculate driving distance from Tiruvanmiyur to Adayar :P
Anyways, Nokia has bought even maps to India. That was one example ...
Other than that, I can see technology is getting in ... a little slowly as you can expect

Smiles,
Vinayak