I'm pretty sure
you've been in a situation where you've had to explain the workings of the
magic web to kindly old people. Or at least to old people. That’s the problem
with being from our generation. As we came of age, so did the internet; and
people who got left behind the times have made desperate attempts at playing
catch up, using “young people” to catapult them into the promised land of the
http. From Grandparents who thought standing in front of a webcam could cause
radiation poisoning to uncles sent you the same email thrice… just to be sure,
I’ve seen it all and have finally decided to rant about it, since ranting seems
to be the evergreen flavor on the web and complaining about rising petrol prices is too mainstream.
After giving it very little thought, I have come
up with the definitive way to split the e-literate from the illiterate (in a
manner of speaking) using some cultural icons from the days past. Welcome to
the Babi-Baba-Beiber theory.
That graph should do the trick. Now, for those not familiar
with those people, here’s a heads up.
That’s Parveen BABI. The first hindi film heroine to wear a
bikini on-screen. She was like the Sunny Leone of the times gone by. That was
the poster hanging on your Dads door. No jokes. He’ll probably do a double take
and look guilty if you show him this photo, stare hard and say “I know”.
90s Rapper, BABA Sehgal. Need I say more? Oh, I do? He did
those odd bits of nonsensical-rapid- English-rappy bits in hindi songs. Also wrote some
horrible music on his own. Definitely
worth a listen. At gunpoint.
Wait… that’s not Beib… oh right, troll. So not funny.
The last time I was home, I heard the one sentence that I
had been dreading. Quite like how all that coke you drank earlier suddenly
needs to find it’s way out while you get to the climax of that new movie you’re
watching at the theater. Anyway, my mother comes over brandishing her new phone
in my face and demanded to know how to make Facebook and “what zap” work on it.
I tried to explain to her that it couldn’t, because she didn’t have a GPRS
pack. Then I spent ten minutes defending Sony, explaining why they had nothing
to do with her phone not having a GPRS pack. Then, I recharged her phone,
enabled GPRS and showed her how Facebook works, by that time she had already
lost interest, and cursed me and my kind for coming up with these useless
gimmicks.
Grandparents have a
more fanciful take on technology, they consider all of it magical. How do you
send photos on a mail? Pixies and fairy dust, obviously. But as long as they can watch Guru Dutt songs
on a loop on youtube, who cares? I keep thinking about how different life would
be if the internet was as ubiquitous in pre-independence India, as it is now.
There probably would have been an autotuned version of Jana Gana Mana soon
after the original. And there’d be an Independence-Tips page on Facebook. And
Gandhi would have had a twitter account and if people asked why he was bent on
fasting till death? #YOLO.
And as luck would have it, I just got a message from my mom
saying she wanted to talk to some relatives in the US. Would she like an
ISD recharge? No, of course not. That’s
just stupidity. She might as well talk to them for free using Spyke. What?
