Obsolescence is an unavoidable truth. It is best reflected in generation gap, where our behaviour and choices fail to match the changing times. There is nothing new in this phenomenon. Our grand parents must have felt the pinch of generation gap in the same way as our parents did. Yet this time it is different!! No generation prior to ours may have seen such profound obsolescence of iconic products and services that once dominated daily lives.
One thing that comes to mind is the telegram service, which used to be the fastest way to communicate in earlier times. Introduced to the public in the year 1954 in India, telegram had become a ubiquitous mode for important communications. When one travelled long distances, one would send a telegram to confirm safe arrival to his near and dear ones. Messages of death and ill health usually travelled through telegrams giving the service a sense of notoriety in the Bollywood. Telegram was professed as a scientific wonder, which contributed greatly to human welfare. Contrast this with the communication technology available today.
‘At its peak in the mid-1980s, more than 45,000 telegraph offices dotted the country, with tens of thousands of telegraph workers and delivery men dispatching more than 600,000 telegrams a day’ (The Telegraph, UK – 15 July 2013). However, with the advent of alternative communication methods, telegram services looked archaic. By the year 2013, the service was withdrawn as unviable and unnecessary. Thousands were seen queuing up in front of the Central Telegraph Office in Mumbai on the last day of the telegram service in 2013 only to experience sending the last telegram of their lives. It was an emotional moment bidding goodbye to the telegram service as it transited to the pages of history.
The other thing that has practically vanished from sight is the humble typewriter. We could never imagine an office without the click-clack of the typewriter. It looks incredible today that hundreds of ordinary people possessed the ability to type out neat pages without having to use a ‘delete’, ‘back-space’ or ‘copy-paste’ button. The carbon paper was the inseparable companion of the typewriter helping it to create multiple copies, as the typewriter had had no memory. Further, every street corner boasted of a training school teaching the art of typing – it definitely served as a source of ample employment! The advent of computers pushed the typewriter out of its useful life first in the West and thereafter in India. Godrej & Boyce in India produced the last batch of typewriters in 2011. The extinct species of typewriter can still be found quite inexplicably inside the court premises producing affidavits, lease deeds and other documents related to the judiciary. This is perhaps the last phase after which the typewriter will pass completely into oblivion.
There are many more things that have come and gone in our lifetime: the music cassettes and the cassette player, VCR – the owners’ pride of yesteryears, and pager that lived a short life in the world of telecommunications; to recount a few. Smartphones and Internet have changed our lives for good. When we look back about two decades ago, our own ways of doing things at that time look archaic to us, not just to the generation younger than us. This type of obsolescence is really amazing.
As overwhelming changes on account of Internet and smartphones took over an existing generation of people, they had to upgrade their skills and adapt fast – even by unlearning a thing or two of the age-old habits. Interaction with a touch screen comes naturally to a teen-ager today because he has seen no other, but it has taken a process of adjustment for a generation to get a hang of it.
Obsolescence is perhaps setting in quicker than ever before. Rapid change in technology is bringing in frequent twists and turns in the way we interact with others including with the inanimate objects.
Imagine, a person who was once sending telegrams as the fasted means of communication, is now using on-line video chats. Gone are the days when he tried his best to minimise the number words he would write in a telegram message, as every additional word beyond the first few would be very expensive. His office is no more dotted with busy typewriters, as e-mails and other applications are seamlessly doing things with greater efficiency. The changes around such a person are absolutely transforming.
This generation is indeed lucky to experience obsolescence of unthinkable magnitude.
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Manoranjan Mishra 