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03:43 PM
Bikram Vohra
JournalismPakistan.com
July 7, 2013
There was a time not so long ago when we had one black phone with a dial that used to sit in splendor in the drawing room and had a ring that would explode the feathers off a parrot.
Then we got a phone in the car and with much ceremony we’d drive around making calls for no real reason just so folks at red lights could see we were someone important.
I look around me now and the house is littered with mobile phones, Ipads, mini-pads, laptops, Ipods, all of them with their serpentine chargers and life is one big search for the right charger and the charger was here a minute ago, has anyone seen the Kindle charger no, that’s the white one, this one is pink and it has a pointy end not a flat one.
Then there are these damn USBs that have their own power of animation and they get lost like Hansel and Gretel and you can never find them and if all this isn’t maddening enough there is the perpetual hunt for the 10 different totally obnoxious remote controls to switch on TV, change channels, increase sound or whatever and if one of them ends its battery life there is panic and I have been thinking as this sentence unravels like a train on a bridge that we are slowly being taken over by these gadgets and have no life of our own outside their captivity.
Life is one blinking red light after the other. One message from the other after the other. One charger to the next. One electronic crisis after another. Low signal, no activity, fibre optic gone bad, call 101, my mobile isn’t working, the email is down, Google is off.
We are beaten. Defeated. Like Napoleon’s army, battle weary getting all these things to work and collectively achieve exactly the same benefit as that little black telephone with the dial; getting in touch with people you do not need to.
(The writer is a Senior Editorial Advisor of Khaleej Times and the paper’s former Editor. He has also been the Editor of Gulf News, Gulf Today, Emirates Today and Bahrain Tribune)
If my call is so important to them, why don’t they answer it for 22 minutes?
How come when I want to, but something specific online is the only item out of stock.
When I get into a queue or lane going fast, the moment I get in, it becomes the slowest and refuses to budge.
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