It was sometime in July 2005 that I purchased my first laptop. And, 2005 is not very long ago. Until then, how did I manage? Simple: I used the computer in my office.
If I had a piece to write, I would compose it longhand at home in the night, and the next morning type it out in the office, tightening the sentences in the process. I still can’t think of a better way of revising your own copy.
As for emails, I would refresh my inbox one last time before leaving office, and open it the first thing on reaching office the next morning. If I received emails, no matter how important, during the intervening 16 or so hours, I would remain oblivious to it. Imagine, not knowing for 16 hours what’s in your inbox. But back then, the mind was tuned to the ignorance-is-bliss setting. Today, ignorance means restlessness.
Also back then, there was no social media. After work, people met in person, over drinks or coffee, and remained attentive to one another and alive to surroundings, without constantly looking at their phones and pretending to listen. There was hardly an evening which I did not spend in the company of a friend or friends.
And whenever a thought struck — such as how rare it has become for us to stand on the terrace and watch the moon — I would expand it into a piece for the paper I worked for back then. How rewarding it felt, to grab a stray thought and flesh it out into 600 words of presentable prose — a thought that would have otherwise vaporised into thin air, never to return again.
By the time I bought the laptop, blogging was the hottest activity happening online, and star bloggers were being born. I too became a blogger, and began to capture stray thoughts with greater frequency. As a result, I began to meet friends less frequently because I looked forward to writing on my blog. In the meantime, I changed my email ID from Yahoo to Gmail. Soon after, there was Google Talk, and I began meeting people even less frequently, even though my friends circle expanded, with new as well as long-lost friends joining my Gtalk list.
Subsequently, I wrote a book, and to know what reviews are saying about it, I would Google-search my name. I did this for about a couple of months before I discovered Google Alerts. I created an alert for my name, and one Sunday morning, I woke up to find a link sitting in my inbox: it was a (positive) review of the book carried in the Literary Review supplement of The Hindu (back then I didn’t work for the paper). What a fascinating creation, this Google Alerts!
But one thing: the moment you shut down your computer, you shut yourself from the rest of the world. You slept well.
Then the smartphone came along. There is an old Hindi proverb: it is the thirsty who walk to the well, and not the other way round. Smartphones made the well walk to the thirsty. Today, our existence is defined by precisely two words — notifications and alerts.
But why am I going on and on stating the obvious? Just introspecting.
The other day, while reading various articles about WhatsApp deciding to encrypt chats, I came across a name I had never heard of before: Naga Kataru. He grew up in Andhra Pradesh and studied in a village school before joining IIT and subsequently getting hired by Google in the year 2000. There, he created Google Alerts.
Today, Naga is an almond farmer. He owns a 320-acre farm near California, which also grows apricots and, according to reports, generates 2.5 million dollars annually. And so, while millions of people — confined to their homes or cubicles — continue to rely on Google Alerts to scan the Internet for specific content, its creator has long since logged out, breathing fresh air as a self-taught farmer. To me, he is the real hero: been there, done that, moved on.
