"We had the railways, the hawkers, the coolies, the rickshawwallahs. We tried to recreate both the order and chaos of India. We could have gone hi-tech, but we didn't. China is hi-tech. We're hi-touch. We're a tactile nation. It was all about touching lives, bonding."
- Prasoon Joshi on Commonwealth Games 2010 Opening Ceremony
"Thumbs down The result of two million years of evolution: C U L8R.
The great biological watershed that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom and puts us on top of the evolutionary heap on this planet is our opposable thumb: our ability to fold our thumb against our fingers which enables us to hold things. Things like tools, and weapons, and paintbrushes, and pens, and screwdrivers. Other animals don't have the opposable thumb. That is why no animal other than man could have constructed the wheel, made spears and knives (and, later, AK-47s and nuclear bombs), written the works of Kalidas and Shakespeare, made the Taj Mahal and sent rocket ships to the farthest reaches of our solar system. The story of human civilisation is the story of our opposable thumb. No opposable thumb, no human civilisation. And no text messages on our mobile phones.The great biological watershed that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom and puts us on top of the evolutionary heap on this planet is our opposable thumb: our ability to fold our thumb against our fingers which enables us to hold things. Things like tools, and weapons, and paintbrushes, and pens, and screwdrivers. Other animals don't have the opposable thumb. That is why no animal other than man could have constructed the wheel, made spears and knives (and, later, AK-47s and nuclear bombs), written the works of Kalidas and Shakespeare, made the Taj Mahal and sent rocket ships to the farthest reaches of our solar system. The story of human civilisation is the story of our opposable thumb. No opposable thumb, no human civilisation. And no text messages on our mobile phones...........................................By now my thumb is sore with all the effort. But the game of SMS ping-pong isn't over. I get another message: WHR? I look up the SMS dictionary I've bought and confirm that WHR? means WHERE? Where? Where - or rather, what - is the shortest location to text? I steel my thumb to one last effort: HRE. And let the other guy figure out which HRE (HERE) I mean when i say - or rather, text - HRE (HERE).
Why do we do it? Why do we SMS? When it's so much less effort, and less costly, to just phone up and talk to the person instead of all this back-and-forth SMSing? We do it because telecoms, which make more money on SMSs than on calls, have convinced us that SMSing is KEWL (COOL) while calling is UNKEWL (UNCOOL). Besides, what else but to SMS with do you (U) think Darwinian selection gave you (U) your (UR) opposable thumb?
Putting an ice pack on my traumatised thumb, I reflect that a medieval instrument of torture was called a thumbscrew. Are SMSs the 21st century's thumb screw?"
- Jug Suraiya in The Times Of India
This all published in the today's edition of ToI.
The Horizon is always there waiting. Touch the Horizon, please!!
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