Backfiring Magic

There are a few days when I sit and contemplate. I think about how our world has changed so much, about how we were there when Federer won yet another Grand Slam, or Nadal the French Open; and then my thoughts wander even farther. I think about my childhood.

When I was a wee lad, we had a landline telephone. It had a receiver with a cord attached to it and a dial pad with numbers on it which you had to push in order to make calls. Then they made a mobile phone. It was black and white with a simple UI and nothing very special under the hood. It allowed us to take calls even when we were not inside the house and for me, that was nothing short of 

a miracle. We were the last non-wireless generation

Another thing we had was a music system with a turntable to play LP's on. We had a varied collection of LPs and we would listen to them frequently. But, the charm of this music system was the cassette player. Sometimes, when rewinding or fast forwarding, the tape would get stuck and we had to stop what we were doing, take out the tape and use a pencil to manually wind it forwards or backwards. My child will never know the relation between pencils and cassette tapes. I doubt if the next generation will know how a cassette tape works.

We also didn't have eBooks. We had books. There was no Kindle in our times, unless you count the word kindle.  Smartphones were also a distant futuristic invention. Computers were big, consisting of three parts- a monitor, keyboard and mouse and a CPU. No octa-core processors or 16GB RAM. They were simple machines, capable of what (at the time were) wonderful things. Computers today have become so small you can carry them with you.

We had no WhatsApp. Yes you read it right. We didn't have Facebook either, or Snapchat or Instagram. When I was 10 years old, Facebook launched itself. We saw WhatsApp being born and smartphones being made. We also saw the XBOX and PlayStation's 1st generation and saw them rise to XBOX One and Playstation 4. We lived the rise and fall of the compact disk.

The world has become very small indeed. I have Facebook friends all over the world and have had video chats with some of them. Just this one fact boggles my mind. The fact that I can talk to someone in Romania or the Philippines without moving from my chair. The coming generation will be born into this small world, with all kinds of technology surrounding them. They won't be able to identify with my childhood, and when they grow as old as me, technology's very face will have changed yet again.

But, by making this world so small, I feel it has lost its wonder. We used to go out for walks and admire nature. We used to like going on trips, with our primitive phones, some of which did not even have cameras. We met face to face and talked that way too. We didn't know Pokemon beyond 150.

Now, we have all this magic. But we are not magicians. We were innocent and now that innocence is lost.

The Bilge Master