These days every time I go out, I see someone or the other driving a motorbike while talking on the mobile phone, balancing it between the face and shoulder. What is there to communicate that cannot wait a few minutes?
I have great admiration for all the techies in this world, which includes our dear Alexander Graham Bell who invented the phone. How connected we are today in every sense of the word! Distances have shrunk. My children living in European lands hardly seem away from me. London rains and Swedish snow have become very normal these days. I experience their weather sitting in my cozy Coimbatore home with the sun beaming on me. For someone in her 60s, who grew up without a television or a computer, these technological developments are indeed magical. The telegram used to be the fastest mode of communication those days. My father who was a businessman used to get an average of 15 telegrams a day!
We always had a telephone at home. But making a long distance call was not easy. You had to book a call and wait in queue till the people from the telephone exchange would connect your call. As a businessman who had his associates in African countries, my father used to get calls from those countries after 2 a.m., and it would continue till the wee hours. My mother had named our phone her black villain that regularly disrupted her sleep. Later came the STD days, when one could make a call to any place by dialing its code, followed by the phone number. Yes, we have come a long way. But this doesn’t mean you should attempt those juggling tricks with your mobile phone while driving. Better civic sense will make for safer roads.
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