June 10, 2005

Renaissance

Time travels unidirectionally and continually. Life is a chronology of events. Everything fades away with time but sometimes I wonder how some experiences are rejuvenated. There are certain things which follow a fixed cycle of time like day night, seasons, crops etc. which are tenable but at the same time certain phenomena strike back off guard. I remember few days ago a person(ex-tenant) asked me for my number. I gave him my home's landline number. He was bent down to write it on a piece of paper and suddenly he rolled his eyes to look up impressively and said "oh, you have a landline no.!" and I just smiled and replied politely "yeah, it's a reliance landline." So what is the whole idea??? Mobiles have outnumbered landlines, not just in quantity but also in popularity and ease of use. Youngsters, especially girls, have mobiles all the time in their hands. This is the reason why my uncle was surprised to know that I've a landline number too, and settled people these days choose landline over mobiles thanks to radiation, high rates and senility.

One of my online friend wrote in her profile that she doesn't like shorthand sms-lingoed typing, nor do I. At one time it was even a fashion to make grammar mistakes intentionally( i cum for I will come) alongwith raping spellings, but now I see many people showing their faith in english grammar. I agree it saves time, but don't you think it is avoidable, if possible? Thanks to blogging, I'm back to real English. Fashion repeats itself, very true. There was a time when it was jeans, jeans and blue jeans everywhere and now people have shifted back to good old trousers. Thankfully I was never guided by jeans mania, readymade trousers looks good, feels good, costs good and is good. Girls were eager to shed their clothes one time but now I feel that full length trousers/jeans and top have become a feminine symbolism on most general occasions. However skirts are more sexier as they leave a scope for imagination to run wild!

When I was a school kid, I discovered chess and I liked it a lot. I asked my other friends to play with me, and they retorted back " Are you a nerd? Chess is for old people and politicians." and I consider this as a highly offensive and derogatory remark, but time has changed. Now when you hear someone playing chess, the general impression is that the person has intellect, patience and sharp thinking abilities. Playing chess is nowadays not considered to be old-fashioned, thats very good. There is a tremendous uprise in cultural restaurants like the ones where you'll get to feel like village, being served on plant leaves by waiters dressed as villagers. Hubble-Bubble(Hookah) have found a decent place among all classes of people esp. youngsters. These entities were considered outmoded once, but now with time they are back in a city resident's life.

What brings them back in action? We have not reached at a saturation level where nothing else can be invented anymore, but then why do we redeem outdated stuff? One reasoning I propose is that we may not pretend but from inside we consider too much modernization as a fad and we have some sense of cultural heritage. We accept new world of ATMs, wi-fi readily, but we do not wish to let go what our previous generation has accomplished. This way we maintain a delicate balance between modernity and old practices and extract the best out of both worlds.

6 comments:

Smartalec said...

neat post! who said lightening never struck twice at the same place?! things keep repeating in life... people keep coming back to things they had abandoned thanks to new fads! realization has to strike at some point of time...
true that mobiles have outnumbered landlines but people definitely seem to be shifting back to the "immobile" phones;)!
sms lingo! thatz d in thing! but blogging sure has helped in keeping us acquainted with its decent version!
jeans! well... i still prefer 2 "live in" my pair of jeans! not a fad but yeah! i do wear my share of trousers too! for gals, jeans with short tops else skirts! sadly neither would seem attractive (repulsive, yes!) here at da-iict
chess! ok! need lotsa grey cells for that! but remember! i give it a shot now n then! remember sem 1?? almost beat ya:P!

but many things unlike the ones u mentioned are here to stay. for example, e-mails, e-banking, tms, etc. try we might to revert back to the older means of mailing or handling monetary transactions, never woould we be able to stick to the same!

Y.M. said...

heyyy amod...nice post...
n firstly,SMS LINGO!!!!*red cheeks*...even i m one of dose sms lingo addicts...it smtimes gets worse wen i m writing an exam...oh i tend to write..right as rite etc etc etc....n now i guess i should improve my habit...but u know...it helps wen u r msgin smone...anyways..
oh n even i tried hooka!!...umm..i tried strawberry flavour..
n who told u chess is meant for old ppl!1...grr!!...oh agreed chess is meant for ppl wid intellect n patience...its not dat i dont like chess but no one in my place or in coll is int in chess...n i m not supposed to play alone...n most importantly,i dont know how to play chess..he he!!though i know few basic steps...
but overall...liked ur post..:)

Bhavesh said...

its basically a fashion loop. new designs are an imitation of the ones available 50 yrs be4. only technology(which means all of engineering, science, maths, bio,etc,etc) moves ahead. rest all is eye candy and it is a finite set. fashion moves ahead in new styles but the basics remain the same and hence the fashion loop. unless a new way to wear clothes(which not only has to look good but feel comfortable) comes up or a new gender comes up (e.g. a hermaphrodite human being, cmon now ppl, i do know a bit of biology ;)). so every person in every age feels like you. ask my nana and he will tell u all about the fashions that we have these days and wht they were called in his days, he was a chess fanatic in his school college days n still has some of the trophies to prove that. today computer is, what TV was, 20 yrs back. things change but the patterns remain the same. 10 yrs from now every home will hv a comp n i m not wrong coz it has already happened in america. its just that the best civilization at anytime brings in new trends and the rest follow suit.

Anonymous said...

@steve-whoa, blog ka jawab blog se!! good!
@shikha-yo sms junkie, one advice fr u- when u r writing blog use proper english, trust me it helps a lot in becoming normal!nd play online chess with me at www.gamecolony.com do u know that i'm crazy abt chess?
@bhavesh- ya bhav true! fashion goes in a loop, i really wish there's a PC in every house and free internet icing the cake!!

That Girl said...

Everything's a circle. You keep going farther and farther away from the origin, you look back to see how far you've come and when you look ahead again you find you just crossed the starting point. Damn, now how did THAT happen??

And sms-lingo - PFF!! That really irritates me! It's hard enough trying to manouevre your way through strangely-spelled words, without having to cope with the annoyance due to the fact that some of these modified versions are nearly as long as the original 'propah' words - so WHY the assault on my eyes?? Answer that, Shikha!

Chiquitita said...

Hey, amod... good post. When you think about it in a deeper way... even seasons repeat year after year,. Nature in, itself comes a full cirlce.. and people are but a part of that.. ideas, thoughts, fashion, everything has to come a full circle and then again..