According to Archimedes’ principle, what happens when you jump into a bathtub full of water? Answer – The mobile phone rings. Anon.
It is more than just axiomatic that no sentient human being can exist without a mobile phone these days. Every waking minute is taken up ogling at the little instrument that can provide endless entertainment, chit chat on Social Media till you are blue in the face, keep you abreast of the stock market movements, not to mention the cricket, football and tennis scores, enable you to make payments to suppliers and retail establishments by simply tapping a few buttons (always assuming you have enough money in the bank), you can even check your blood pressure and sugar levels by pressing your thumb on an indicated image and much, much more. I draw the line at TikTok. And all that is probably just the tip of the iceberg, if Apple, Samsung and their tech boffins have anything to do with it. Lest I forget, you can also make and receive calls on your mobile phone, provided the signal tower in your vicinity is not playing truant.
The obvious corollary to what I have just stated can be found in these two quotes from the great Chinese philosopher and sage, Confucius – Man who forgets to plug in phone at night wakes up to a morning of great sorrow / He who walks down the street staring at a screen is destined to introduce his face to a lamp post. The cynics among you who are about to make the trite claim that Confucius was sleeping soundly with the fishes when the mobile phone was invented, hold your horses. A writer should be cut a generous length of slack when making a telling point. Somehow, apocryphal quotes like those do not sound credible if attributed to anyone other than a Confucius. Larry Ellison or Steve Jobs could never have come up with anything remotely ironic like our oft-referenced Chinese sage. A spot of willing suspension of disbelief never hurt anyone.
From those sublime thoughts on mobile telephony, I now descend precipitously to the mundane. This is going to be all about how an ordinary denizen such as myself, whose knowledge of his mobile phone, with all its myriad and wondrous technological treasures, can at best be described as basic. I do not wish to be too hard on myself. As a proud owner of a state-of-the-art smartphone (it was a birthday gift), I can and do tinker around with it to pass an idle hour. Make that about 12 idle hours! One of these days, I will almost certainly wrap my face around a lamp post! Let us tick off the things that I am reasonably familiar with. Emails, check. WhatsApp, check. YouTube, check. Facebook, check, Instagram, check, Twitter, sorry X, check. Old habits die hard. Speaking of which, the natural verb for Twitter was tweet (like the bird). What is the verb for X? I Xed? Makes you sound like a twit! If Elon Musk had been asked that question when X was launched and had he replied with a counter question, ‘What’s the sound of one hand clapping?’ I would have raised a loud ‘Three cheers for Elon’ and clapped noisily with both my hands. Then again, he would never have said that. Unless he was well-versed with that paradoxical Zen Buddhist kōan. Had I been an inveterate betting man, which I am not, I would not have placed my last rupee on Elon being up to speed on Zen.
Then there is this plague called AI. Open or closed, I can’t tell the difference. We have been sailing along quite comfortably all these years with our own native or natural intelligence, but no, a little bit of artifice, so the geniuses felt, will do us no harm. Result, the American stock markets boomed as money was poured indiscriminately into AI stocks. And before you could say bull run, the bears stepped in and the markets in the US are plummeting southwards rapidly. The dot.com bust revisited. Aided and abetted by Trump’s Republican Party’s disastrous performance at the mid-term elections. A lot of that money is now coming into the Indian markets and we are having a spell of bull run ourselves. We were being criticised for not investing enough on AI. The critics are now laughing on the other side of their face. One man’s poison is another man’s sweet. All that could change before you can say ‘profit booking.’ That is the nature of the beast.
I also deeply resent the constant intrusion of AI or Chat GPT into everything that I am doing on my desktop. No sooner do I start a sentence than a window opens intrusively and some brand of AI will ask me if I need help with my sentence construction. ‘We think we know what you wish to write about. Just leave it to us. In just 5 minutes flat, we will have a 1000- word article, error free, ready for you. Just sit back and relax.’ Thanks, but no thanks, Mr. AI. I am perfectly capable of constructing my own sentence. At least the errors, if any, will be mine and mine alone. If you are that smart and can solve all the problems of the world, helping fledgling columnists being the least of your accomplishments, why don’t you help the medical fraternity to cure cancer? That, if nothing else, will earn you the Nobel Prize and the world’s everlasting gratitude. If Donald Trump can stake a claim for that honour for starting and stopping wars, surely AI, you should bring ‘joy to the world’ during this festive season. Tell then AI, cease and desist.
Finally, I am fed up to the back teeth with adverts interrupting just about anything that I am watching or reading on my mobile, desktop or television. I shan’t place the blame on AI’s door for this nuisance. They may or may not be responsible. I surf YouTube and decide to watch the highlights of a tennis match involving the charismatic genius, Alcaraz playing old man Djokovic. It is a 10-minute clip. Guess what? Every three minutes or so, I am treated to some company peddling a brand of shampoo or a newly launched SUV, and if you happen to be watching it after 10 at night, a well-endowed couple ecstatically singing the praises of a new brand of perfumed contraceptive! Look, I earned my living from advertising during an era when we simply ‘put it out there’ for customers to take it or leave it. Not force it down their throats. The way it is now done, potential customers will be disgusted with the intruder brand (assuming they can recall it) horning in just when Carlos is about to execute a magical passing shot. The problem is greatly exacerbated if you happen to be watching an old Bob Dylan concert and a commercial for a brand of medical insurance butts in just when the bard is in the middle of crooning, You just kinda wasted my precious time / But don’t think twice, it’s all right. It’s not all right, Bob. Of course, you are provided an option to watch programmes ‘ad free’ for which benefit you are expected to shell out a pretty penny. How did that famous song by ABBA go? Money, money, money / Always sunny / It’s a rich man’s world.
In the final analysis, I have just one word of advice for every youngster and oldster walking down the street staring at his or her mobile phone. ‘Just mind the approaching lamp post.’
