Indians and the PDA hangover

This is a satirical article I wrote for a friend. The article is supposed to be written by someone in 2020, telling us how life has changed with technology in the past ten yrs. But it turned out into something else.

  

 

The young generation in our year of the lord 2020 probably cannot relate to the good old days of ten years ago, when a man still needed a bulky 16" laptop and a dongle to be mobile and connected. Nowadays everywhere you look there is a young punk with a sling around his neck with a two inch cube. Now, readers my age would probably be able to fully appreciate the beauty of fitting a camera, a transmitter, a high powered microchip and what not into that little beauty, we'd have needed a van to drive around that much equipment in my day. I'm sure no one back in 2010 would have even imagined Facebook would be obsolete just a couple of years after Zuckerberg became the Time man of the year. And to know, that all this was made possible by a nerdy Indian post-grad at MIT who open sourced his "sixth sense technology" gives me a warm feeling inside. Despite all this, I am not a happy man in India, in fact I do not think any single man could be happy in India,ever. The reason? The country that spread revolutionary technology to the entire world, killed off corporations by the sheer ingenuity and brilliance of its cheap technology is still hung up on a pre-historic concept like PDA.

No no, I am not referring to the dinosaur era handheld device, I am talking about public display of affection. Last night I was out at 2 am with my regular squeeze, taking a walk in the park. I always like to walk the park after its empty, other wise the feel of the institution is lost. Its a small park, in the middle of the residential complex I live in. The only kind you get to see these days. When people are around, all you see is fluorescent squares of light all over the trees and shrubs , every one is blogging live, kind of makes you wonder why the came to park in the first place. At night, the park is empty, and one can enjoy the beauty of nature unmarred by 3-D screens hanging in mid air all over the place.  Anyways, not to drift astray, me and my girl are out, minding our own business doing what healthy couples on the wrong side of twenties do. Things are looking good when some self appointed insomniac guardian of the great Indian tradition of modesty and abstinence starts shouting  in righteous indignation "what are you two doing out there? don't you know yeh shareefon ka muhalla hai?" By god, you cretin, what kind of a "shareef" stares out of his apartment window at 2 in the morning, waiting to ruin the mood for the first couple that crosses his line of sight?

I mean seriously people, you'd think that fundamentalists and hypocrites like these wouldn't exist in a country that made the internet obsolete, revolutionarized the way people bank and live. The way these hardcore traditionalists are spawning and behaving, you'd think the two and a half billion Indians that outnumber the Chinese 2 to one popped out via immaculate conception. In my opinion, the reason the west dominated and still dominates the world in every aspect (except proliferation of technology and ultra low cost innovation of course) is because they do not waste time and law enforcement money making sure people don't kiss and make out in the street. They found free love keeps the people happy and creative back in the sixties and we still haven't come around. People here are creative, more so than the west (we have to do more with less) but they're not happy. Some times I think this whole charade is just resentment, (I didn't get to do that in my day, and I'll be damned if some young punk rubs it in now) but that's just me. All I know is I am not happy, till I get my PDA.