AN IMMORAL TECH GEEK

I love my gadgets. Or actually I love the gadgets I understand. That means I love my washing machine and computer, I love the microwave, the TV and the Discman. I almost love my cellphone, digital camera and digital recorder. Currently I am learning to love iPods.
My daughter loves my cellphone with ease as much as she loves to surf the Internet. She would love to have a Playstation. I have yet to find a reason to fault her wants.

But there are times when I wonder if it is immoral to enjoy technology. Like I did a few days back when I read a survey that lamented the use and preference for gizmos among children in their early teens.

Is it worse than say an addiction for tobacco or alcohol for your body, mind and soul? I am not sure. And when I flash back into my own family I can only see an interesting evolutionary process of which she and I are parts.

I recall how my mother’s generation thought washing machines meant the end of clean clothes. They discussed how their sons and daughters-in-law wanted ‘that’ gadget home so that they would be done away with domestic chores. Now doing away with chores to simply put your feet up or party was downright evil. I remember them discuss how it was important to wash clothes personally as it was equally good for the clothes and for the woman washing them. “Good exercise”, they called it.
Though my mother was quickly bullied to turn around, some of her friends continue to think it more Godly to soak clothes personally. As they got older and couldn’t bend down too much, the maid took over to gently rub off the dirt. Not that the family didn’t ever buy a washing machine. But it is usually kept shut, respectfully covered with an elegantly embroidered tablecloth.
I remember being tempted to remind them that my grandmother thought they were evil as much when they cunningly turned to mixers and grinders for short cuts to making “masalas” and “dosa” batter. Yes, batters were better when their noses were literally at the grindstones but they found valid enough reasons to move on. I also, thankfully, stopped short of telling them that their generation had as many overweight women as mine does, good exercise or not.

The fact remains that technology keeps on growing and evolving for one simple reason: it brings joy, peace, happiness, relief, excitement, leisure or meaning in more lives than not.
And every one of us will use it where it makes our lives better. For any adult objecting to kids using calculators to add numbers –the survey says 88 per cent of children need them- must answer when was the last time she didn’t use the remote control to change channels. That’s when she knows that the trip to the TV will do her body a lot good. The fact remains that if a convenience is available, we will use it. So I don’t think that we were more industrious as students. It’s just that calculators were a big thing to have and few families owned them. And I doubt if we made for smarter students just because we did not have calculators. To actually compare we would need similar data on students of a generation that did not have access to these gizmos.


The other fear that is of the potential damage that technology will bring to our world. All these gizmos will ruin our children’s education you think? Well no one can accurately predict what kind of a world my eight year old will have to live in and what skills will be most useful to her. If more technology is running our lives I guess our children need to be comfortable with it around them whether they prefer to use or not later. I mean I prefer to use by black book to make appointments but I would feel rather inadequate is I didn’t know how to use a PDA.

Then of course is the moral stance. I won’t say it doesn’t disconcert me when my daughter heads straight for the computer when she gets back from school because she wants to “paint”. But that may be largely because I am uneasy as I don’t yet know what kind of kids result from exposure to computers and other gadgets to a much larger extent than I was. It may be easy as a parent to create a clone of myself along with all the known weaknesses and strengths.
But every time I have to deal with a new behavioural pattern in my daughter I remind myself of just one thing: I was different from my mother as she was from hers because we all had to deal with our worlds. But some things remain constant, timeless, universal. Those are qualities of the heart and the soul. And those definitely get passed down from generation to generation, by thought, word and action. Radios, TVs, fridges and computers did not harm those values. I doubt if Playstations will.

(Published in Hindustan Times in the op-ed page)