COMMUNICATION

I was a university student in the sixties. My family was based in a smallish industrial town in Assam. Banaras Hindu University was my alma mater. The train journey took three nights with a couple route changes on the way. I never travelled alone. There were always a few friends to keep me company. We ate at every station till we ran out of money, sang at our heart’s content and also indulged in mild mischiefs. It was fun.

Our parents came to the station to see us off extracting promises of writing a letter every week. We did oblige; to the extent possible. Having reached the campus on the fourth day, it would be a day of rest before picking up the pen to scribble a few lines; mostly stating how difficult it was to squeeze out the time to write a letter in such a busy schedule. Once posted, we would jump on our bikes to watch the latest movie in town. The letter took another week to reach home. In short, there was no contact with the family for ten to twelve days! And, the letter that our parents received contained news that was at least a week old. There was no question of talking to them on phone. Telephones were a rare commodity those days. Applicants waited for decades to get a faulty connection that remained “dead” most of the time.

The Old Unfaithful

Many years later, in the early nineties to be precise, I had to communicate the news of a death in the family to close relatives scattered all over the county and beyond. By then, we were the proud owner of a black outdated telephone installed by MTNL in our house in Kolkata, which did not make any noise or sound of any sort. All the other telephone in the neighbourhood were dead too due to a chronic ailment known as “cable fault”. I had to hop into a taxi to travel all the way to the Telephone office at Dalhousie Square, stand in a queue to make a phone call, return to the back of the queue to make the second one and then the third etc. I was physically and emotionally drained out at the end of the gruelling exercise.

Slowly and gradually the situation started to change from the mid-nineties. After a lot of political hiccups, the government allowed mobile phone companies to set up business in India. The impact was stunning. In 15 years’ time, the industry went through a phenomenal growth. According to latest information, there are over 900 million telephone connections in the country. India now is recognised as having the fastest growing communication network in the world.

Running simultaneously, the internet technology also grew fast and steady. However, the impact remained confined to urban India only. Mobile phone connection reached the remote villages due to low tariff and mushrooming of transmission towers but the internet remained inaccessible to many. However, the privileged ones are audio-visually connected to their friends and family all around the world.

It is really amazing for someone of my generation to have experienced the revolution that communication has gone through. It would have been crazy to think twenty years ago that someday in future I would be able to call a friend of mine in California while walking out of a movie theatre in Kolkata.

The Contemporary Gizmos

This is a dream. However, there is indeed an adverse fallout.

As mentioned earlier, our parents had no clue of our whereabouts for almost two weeks. But these days, the parents tend to keep their young children on a communication leash. It must be pretty frustrating for the young generation to be just a-phone-call-away, particularly when they are taking a break in a cafeteria or a movie theatre or even trying to catch up on sleep. There are parents who expect their children to send text messages at least twice every day and an email almost daily. The kids of this generation lost their logistic freedom.

However, I cannot even visualise what the young lots of today will experience in the future in the field of communication. It will be a revolution that will be beyond our wildest imagination.

Alas, we will not be around to cherish it.