REJECT: If you are forced to take a digital guarantee on a consumer durable that you have bought rejecte, demand a hard copy of the guarantee. Your mobile phone on which the guarantee is may crash and you have lost it!
By Rajan Narayan
It is only the young and old and the beautiful and rich, and the powerful who can keep up with digitalization by leaps and bounds in the world. For the above 50’s generation the world is becoming a nightmare!
I BELONG to the typewriter era. I belong to the age of black and white television and to tabletop BSNL telephones. I belong to a generation which did not have even ordinary mobile phones, leave alone smartphones. The consumer durables in my home are all manual. They were no digital washing machines or refrigerators. If you wanted to submit any forms or any of the million permissions needed by to the government, you had to physically fill up forms and deliver them to the various offices. If I wanted to make any payments, I had to stand for hours in separate queues to pay my electricity bill, water bill, house tax and the scores of other application forms one has to fill, like forms for admission to colleges, to competitive exams and so on.
In the last 10 years and even more so since the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns, the world has transformed in a hurry because of further pandemics let loose upon us, new infections and screw-ups and the upsetting of business routines and the working of factories and offices private and government – nothing functions normally for there are daily scares.
Like section 144 imposed for preventing the gathering of crowds, Covid-19 protocol forbid more than two people from sitting close to each other, there had to be a 10 feet gap or something like that.
The consequence was that all teaching even at the primary level went online. Even kids in kindergarten had to be in possession of a smartphone. All the lessons the teacher imparted was through the smartphone and other ultra mod con technological radiation screens. Offices which could do so, particularly IT companies, permitted employees to work from home, unfortunately an option not available in factories as production assembly lines were hands-on work and could not be distributed across a 100 locations.
DIGITAL REVOLUTION
THE digital revolution was embraced by the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chief Minister of Goa Dr Pramod Sawant. Soon enough the Goa government declared that now you could register property online. Unlike in the past, you need not go to the office of the Registrar of Marriages the first time. You could submit all the documents online.
The greatest relief plan was the facility to pay official bills online. Never mind that the power tariff is going up steeply. There was a time when you had to make out a check, go to the bank and cash it. If you wanted to give a check to a third party it would take three days to be cleared. But now as if by magic you could transfer money instantly through Google Pay or PayTM or even WhatsApp among the dozens of payment gateways.
You can pay your grocer, your pharmacy the restaurant bill or the home delivery bill online via your credit or debit card bank account. When it comes to telephonic conversations you cannot only talk to the person you want to, whether he or she is traveling to the Antarctica or Lapland, but even see them, through video conferencing and zoom meetings.
The better half makes a transatlantic video call to her sisters in Chicago and New Zealand and a brother in Malaysia and they all chat away for hours. Remember, in the old days if you wanted to make a trunk call as it was called then, you had to book and wait for the BSNL operator to connect you. This was one of the which facilitated the arrest of charming criminal Charles Sobhraj, “the bikini killer,” while he was making trunk call from the few restaurants then, the famous “O’Coqueiro” at Porvorim, which had installed the facility of long distance trunk calls overseas.
GREAT OR NOT SO GREAT?
THE digitalization is great for young generation who are growing up in the midst of the ongoing digital revolution getting more and more sophisticated rapidly. Teenagers have taken to it like brilliant students and may be seen tick-tocking away on their smart phones for hours on end. Even 10-year-olds operate a computer and turn out to be champions with the smart phone plus, plus.
Kids know much more than their parents do. So their games cannot be blocked because they can preempt and out guess their parents any time. But the extension of digitalization to consumer durables is a disaster. Particularly for the over-50’s generation which has never been exposed to say digital washing machines. Our old IFB washing machine was very simple. You loaded the dirty linen in from the top or the side or the front and pressed one button. It washed the clothes automatically within an hour.
We bought a new fancy six kg load Tata Croma washing machine recently from the heavily advertised showroom at Porvorim and it comes with 15 programs for washing a variety of clothes, never mind that practically speaking only five programs are enough to meet a small home. The salesmen and saleswomen talk leads down to add-ons of a few thousand rupees and the machine is home-delivered and installed without one practical demonstration of how to use the machine with its digital panel – only later one learned that if one wanted a raised stand for the machine, it would have to be ordered separately for Rs2,000 (inclusive of Rs500 for delivery and fixing), so finally the grand total comes up to Rs24,000! Plus, not one of the Hindi-speaking technicians can give a demonstration of how to use the machine. We also wonder why when for a normal middle-class household a washing machine offering at most three or four wash is adequate, it offers 15 programs most of which will never be used! Plus, there’s a three-hour wash for cotton jeans which we fail to appreciate. There’s a notebook guide to the washing machine but it is complicated enough for you to wish you had an engineering degree in washing machines. The same is the case when buying smartphones, new model TV sets, computers and laptops, other electronic gizmos with add-on bits and pieces of useful hardware at additional cost. The normal television set in a friend’s home collapsed and since were doing well financially they bought a sophisticated LED flat TV with digital operation naturally. The friend is still trying to decipher the fine print on how to work the installation.
LATEST DILEMMA!
MY latest dilemma is what to do with a Samsung tablet (a sort of mini computer) a friend has gifted me. I am even too scared to touch it or hold it for any length of time. As a compulsive pill popper because of health issues I am used to prescription tablets, but not smooth black tablets which are slick mini-computers. What are the side effects of all the new digital technology entering our homes? Most of it makes me feel hot as I learn to use it minimally or not at all. Accepting that the size of my computer tablet is like that of a notebook I’m still uncomfortable holding it, although I am used to the standard size PC which I’m used to fortunately.
The problem with manufacturers of today’s plethora of consumer goods is that they are in a mighty great rush to sell you the latest digital technology. A friend’s Volkswagen sedan which took me for a medical appointment did not actually need a driver. It had so many gadgets willing to play the traditional driver’s role that even my digitally savvy friend struggled to operate her brand new car. But she is doing a great job being far younger and more educated in the ways of digital technology.
When it comes to consumer durables the multinationals do not realize that most senior Indians expect consumer durables to last forever and not only on 10-year or fewer warranties for various parts. We don’t come from a use-and-throw cultural background as in the countries of the West where they are forever changing their television sets, cars, washing machines, etcetera…as often as they change their clothes.
The engineers or inventors who design all these fancy consumer digital-based hardware in their upmarket air-conditioned workshops forget to educate the frontline soldiers or consumers seeking to invest in a whole series of desirables but feel challenged and fear that they will be injurious to wallet and/or health sooner or later. Perhaps we are going to return to the Stone Age one of these days, to sticks and stones. If we do not know where to draw the line about how much technology digital, laser, robotic or even artificial intelligence and whatever else to come – how sustainable is it for the earth and for human life to continue to thrive without so called human beings becoming robots themselves and with no time for the finer joys of life as the old world used to know it.