Days gone by

It is very difficult to tell the new generation of the days gone by. More so because my children, like all typical teenagers, have no time to listen to their elders. This is the E-generation, always glued to some device, talking to others hundreds of miles away but not having the time to pay attention to those sitting a few feet away.

I remember when I was their age, my father would regale us with stories of his days gone by — we would be told about the mango orchards outside his ancestral home in Sandila or of the pranks he and his friends would play at Aligarh University. No such luck for me. My children have neither the time nor the attention span to listen about my adventures in Nigeria as a child or hanging out of minibuses as I went to St Patricks College in Saddar.

My friend Dr Ayeesha Kamal, who works as a neurologist, told me that addiction to devices has reached such a point that there are now rehab centres for those with addiction to their phones and computers. She mentions how in South Korea there are rehab centres for internet-addicted youth.

This is not a surprise as South Korea is considered the most wired country on the planet. This is a country where it’s entirely unremarkable for elementary school students to carry smartphones and where the cell network is so good that people livestream TV on the subway. The flip side of this is that South Korea is grappling with a growing number of digital natives who don’t know how to live an analog life.

At the risk of sounding very much like our parents, one is tempted to recount the days gone by. For us, this would be what is now referred to as our ‘analog life’. I remember the occasion when a landline phone was finally installed in our house in Karachi after years of struggle. One of my friends, Imtiaz Ahmad, who now lives in the US, told me then that this development would play an important role in my social life. And it did.

These were the days of crossed lines, wrong numbers and what we called ‘dumb’ calls. That was the closest we got to be connected. And that connection would often be broken when the phone line would go dead. I recall how our phone would get ‘held up’ for days on end and we would agonise on how we would get to talk to those that mattered.

Even Nazia Hassan, the singer who lit up our lives with her pop songs in the dreary days of General Zia, had a song called “Telephone Pyar” — the lyrics of which all of us knew by heart.

Our world as we knew it was turned upside down by the arrival of the mobile phone. The first mobile phone I saw belonged to Humayun Akhtar Khan, who if I am not mistaken, was a minister at that time. A man was deputed to carry his mobile phone — it was so unwieldy and bulky. Just like today one buys a Vigo and has to have an obligatory guard in the open cabin at the back, in those days one possibly hired a person to carry their mobile phone around as well. Some things have not changed.

Between the analog and the mobile phone, we also saw the DC pager. I remember as a junior reporter being envious of the senior reporters in the paper that I worked for at that time who were given pagers by the company. We were denied the privilege.

One would laugh at the technology today. The pager would beep and a message, somewhat like a ticker, would run on the little display screen of the pager. The wordings were similar to the days of the telegram of our parents’ generation. I believe there was a limit to the words that could be sent. So the message would be abbreviated. But it was cutting-edge technology at that time — even if it meant calling an operator at the company to dictate the message to be sent to the pager.

Today technology has overtaken our lives it seems. And I am not one to complain. But maybe it’s time to also slow down a bit. I don’t know whether we have that choice any more.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 23^rd, 2016.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.