I am on my way to drop Mimmi to the school bus. I call the lift (or the elevator, if you prefer American). It arrives. The doors open before I reach them. I am already speaking into my phone, dictating notes that organise themselves into sentences, punctuated and sequenced, sent into the ether before I have pressed a single key. A response arrives before I have made tea.
I seem to live my life in a science fiction future without realising that I am living in a science fiction future. I call it the science fiction present!
I grew up watching Star Trek, fascinated by doors that slid open automatically whenever a crew member approached. To a young boy in his teens, they felt like magic. The first time I walked through an automatic door in India, at some fancy bank in Bombay in the mid-eighties, I was genuinely tickled; I walked through it twice (and I don’t even know where to begin with escalators). Our television set was a communal one, shared by the entire neighbourhood. Cricket Test matches drew people in from three lanes. We watched the Asian Games and Rakesh Sharma on a black-and-white set, adjusting the antenna for thirty seconds before every session, and watching all the way till the presenter said, ‘Jai Hind’.
When the first LPG cylinder arrived in kitchens, I know people who performed pujas. A refrigerator, when we eventually got one for ourselves, was considered a common property where the neighbours could store their milk and not have to ask.
Email, when I first encountered it, seemed both bewildering and surely expensive. I drove an automatic car for the first time in the United States around 2002, convinced I was forgetting something, looking for a clutch that was not there.
Today: I am in a multi-storey building with automatic sprinklers embedded in the ceiling and on the lawns I walk on, CCTVs watching my every move. None of the parts in my clothes have grown on a plant. My shoes are padded (you’d be surprised how recent padded sports shoes are in India!). I am in a complex with several multi-storeyed parking levels full of vehicles that would be unimaginable to my teen self. I am wearing a plastic watch that somehow knows my heart rate and tells me if I have a message from someone half a planet away.
And I am not even getting into the usual suspects of the mobile phone, internet, social media, and so on. Just everyday things that would have seemed to me, a middle-aged man (not even very old…though that can be subjective!), complete and total magic during my teenage years, let alone childhood.
You see, it is not the inability to understand the mechanics of the science and the technology behind it. I understand the broad strokes. I simply do not notice any of it anymore. I can’t shake the feeling off that I’m living in a magical world. I am literally living in a magical kingdom.
And yet, yet the world is on fire.
As I dictate notes into my phone at the speed of thought, three nations are repositioning warships over oil corridors that have mattered since before my great great great great grandmother was born. Trade routes that powered the Roman Empire are being contested again, by different flags, using the same logic. Young men are being handed weapons and transported to geography they cannot find on a map, for interests they will never benefit from. Imperial instincts do not retire; they rebrand. Alliances shift and re-form around energy, rare earth, and the oldest of all calculations: who controls what the other cannot afford to lose.
Within one lifetime, I have watched material civilisation make several extraordinary leaps. The political behaviour of our species has made none. Both of these things are true, simultaneously, without resolution.
And so, from Pune, India, a very good morning. How is your world looking today?
