CrystallizingViews

    A large wooden box of around a kilo and a half, with several big glass cylinders inside, and a six-volt battery to power is more valued than a treasure box. A black plate on its front-face has the name of the company ‘Labele’ imprinted on it in golden font, along with details of frequencies and the names of radio stations in undivided India. This is ‘ radio-la’ (Singh). That is what the radio my great grandfather got in his wedding was lovingly called in our village. This radio is the subject of my enquiry. Seeing the names of cities in pre-Partition India – Bombay, Calcutta, Karachi, Peshawar – embossed on its body, I feel a sense of nostalgia, even a spurt of nationalistic fervour. I turn to my grandmother, Ms Krishna Kumari Singh, and Mrs Nirmala Singh, my grand aunt, both witnesses to the successful political career of Thakur Parwan Singh, her father-in-law and the owner of radiola, to get an insight into his life.  As a young man in his mid-twenties, Thakur ...

"Send me your work by tonight.”, said my teacher. The opening thought that struck my mind was, I have to WhatsApp him. WhatsApp has become a common word with ‘Signal’ indicating to dethrone it soon. With Elon Musk and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey endorsing Signal and recommending people to use it instead of Facebook escorted by a noticeable surge of over 30 per cent users since then, the rise of Signal is certain. As lots of reality on the new updates is buzzing along with a tone of rumours there is a wave against the latest version of the popular and most used instant messaging app, WhatsApp. I myself am hooked on this platform for most of my chats, be it personal or other stuff, I have a reason to worry and beware myself. The company website does accept that it stores our data in its data centres located across the continents and shares the data of its users internally and externally, within the Facebook group of companies and with their partners and service providers. The rapidly ...

Photo credit - www.shutterstock.com   D ear Self@2020,  What’s up? I hope you are keeping up well. It is indeed great to tell you that I have completed my post-graduation and am presently working in a firm dealing in Automated Vehicles. Yes, you read it right, automated vehicles. Nobody controls them and they think and operate on their own. Here I am going to share my experiences of 2030. That’s really fantastic, just wait and work.  When I look back, I find you there, standing with a smartphone all the time to do very general activities. Today, I don’t find any smartphones here rather all have a piece of smart glass and that is a master device for everything. I use details stored on Cloud and do everything from that glass as there exist almost three trillion such devices connected in a network called the Internet of Things. A small chip is installed in my body which acts as a transmitter and all my devices are connected to it, including my home. What I think of is d...