Seven decades of one’s life and it is almost impossible to look back and comprehend the exponential growth of technology which brought both hope and despair to the humanity !

My earliest memory of technology is the gas powered bus which took us in eight hours covering a distance of 50 miles from our father’s place of work where we lived to our maternal ancestral home for summer holidays . It was immediately after the second world war and everything was rationed . This bus , I believe, used some industrial oil which produced gas to  work the engine . The big chimney or mast behind the bus was very prominent .

I had my first train journey from Trivandrum to Quilon with my father in Interclass [ the highest class permitted for Indians before independence ] . The steam engine threw out a lot of soot and was very slow moving. I had a taste of water transport when I was five or six when a motor boat  took me to my aunt’s house across the backwaters near Quilon. The so called pleasure cars were the norm for the rich  those days and the concept of a taxi car was evolving .

I learned cycling at the age of ten , owned a two wheeler [ scooter] only during my initial service with the Army as a captain . My first journey by air was in a Russian transport aircraft – the AN 12 of the Air Force from Chandigarh to Leh in 1967 .

I learned typewriting when I was 14 years old , saw a  mainframe computer during 1972 , worked on a PC ten years later , bought a laptop only in 2005 .

As a young boy , we used to wait for a trunk call at the telephone office for hours together . Sam Pitroda changed all that for India by introducing the STD service , soon the mobile phone revolution happened in India and we now have almost 900 million users of cell phones. I can now browse the internet on my cell phone and watch a video with clarity . The phones have become smart as well.

The bio scope with silent films of the 40’s gave way to the talkies and movies . The video cassettes soon took over and then came the Compact Discs and DVD’s . We now have flash drives , HD and touch screens not to talk about bar codes and NFC [ Near Field Communication] .

The pin hole camera , photographic paper   and hand held camera all have given way to digital devices and satellite imagery and google maps and You Tube with web 2.0 and social networking .

I fired a 0.303 rifle as a cadet , an air defense weapon system as an Army major during training , and worked on modifying a coaxial helicopter mounted weapon for use in counter insurgency operations. Today , we have laser and chemical weapons and hand held nuclear devices .

The Singularity University in the US predicts exponential growth in technology with resultant benefits in longevity , health and genome revolutions in the future . May be it is too much to expect in one’s life time !


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *