Saturday, July 13, 2013

Another one bites the dust!

Even as there is another Dodo in the making, one realises that technology becoming redundant is a prime example of the human's god like abilities – innovating, creating and then finally disposing.

I went to the CTO on Saturday to bear witness to another technology getting off our life support system. I wasn't alone, there were many like me. Most had never been inside before nor had they ever received what it spewed out. Some journalists from radio, print and TV had come to record this farewell, they captured faces and quotes and another moment of history that would soon be forgotten.

The crowd was young, you could have counted the grey hair in the hall on your fingers. The one grey spot among them reminisced, to anybody interested, how this technology had connived with others and got him married, sent him to the eastern front in the 1971 war and seemed to have served as milestones in his life. 


The other side of the counter was a different matter. There was grey everywhere and it was noticed. The young who had come to bask in the glow of something that was being propelled into the black hole of history saw those with the grey in the same light as the technology that was operated by them.


They both were irrelevant, their soon to be obsoleteness made all the more apparent by this sudden and short burst of interest.

Terms like VRS, inept,  unnecessary, waste of government money, were mouthed not as foul language but as hard reality of the young world they seemed to inhabit. These were of the generation that understood that bits and bytes and 0s and 1's made a language, they had never experienced the world of dots and dashes. They all clutched more than one telegram form sending messages to friends and family with things like 'congratulations this is your first and last telegram'.


Through the dark humour of reality it did not come to them that the grey that
they see today was jet black once. That both the human and the technology operated 24x7 sending and receiving messages that not only brought the world closer but also changed it.


This technology did keep up with the times. The 0s and 1s of the computer age replaced the dots and dashes, the key board replaced the Morse Code Machine, and so the telegram found a little corner of relevance in the world.


But today in India where more people have access to a cell phone than a toilet the relevance of the telegram has finally come to an end.


Soon people will forget that CTO meant Central Telegraph Office, it could come to mean Check This Out or Click To Operate, and by then another queue would form to catch a glimmer of another fading star.


 Web Based Telegraph Service

 The queue at CTO


CTO Janpath New Delhi

The Old and the New
Telegram Messages
 Inside the counter