:: Shekhar Bhatia

Hardwired lives

Shekhar Bhatia

Sept.11 : Personally, I like the digital age. But I also like my Filofax.

Every November I place an order for my Filofax refill pages — cream colour sheets, a week over two pages. The packet arrives well before the New Year. Postage from England costs almost as much as the price of the refill, but then there is something sensuous about good stationery.

I’ve used the same Filofax since 1994. I also like my Moleskine notebook with its square pages — the kind children use in school for graphs. I prefer it to ruled pages. It has some random notes made at various moments, but most of the pages are still blank. I keep it in my bag, along with my Filofax.

Ten years ago, I also had a Rolodex — the rotating card holder — on my desk but abandoned it for no apparent reason. I think it slowly went into disuse when I acquired my first electronic organiser, a Palm Pilot.

I bought a Walkman, an original Sony, in the mid-80s around the time I switched from my manual typewriter to an electric one. I loved my Walkman (among the first set of songs I had on it was Lionel Richie’s All Night Long) but the possession I prized the most was my manual typewriter, a portable Olivetti Lettera 32.

I had bought it second-hand and it cost me a good part of my month’s salary. I wouldn’t let anyone else use it; not even my wife. Once every few months I would clean it with a brush and wipe the black smudges caused while reversing the ribbon to stretch its life. I loved its elegant design, and the sound of the moving parts. At work I used to like the rugged rawness of the clunky Underwood. The younger generation will call it steampunk. My son grew up as a keyboard kid using a computer from the age of five.

Life was very different back in the days before the Internet.

We wrote letters with pen or ball-pen on paper. We reserved special stationery for special people and sent birthday and New Year greeting cards. When we were visiting relatives in another city, we sent them a telegram giving details of our train number and time of arrival. We knew the names of the postmen who came to deliver letters. As students, we always tipped the postmen when they came around to deliver that monthly money order from our parents.

We could instantly recall the phone numbers of most of our friends; for others, we looked up the two fat volumes of the phone book. When they updated the phone books, we stood in the long queue to exchange it for the new copy.

When we were researching a story, or helping our children with their school projects, we went to libraries and asked friends if they had books on the subject. My last resort was my friend Shakti Roy in Kolkata, the world’s best librarian. He would always find something from his archives.

At home, we had fat encyclopaedias with names like Family Health Guide for information on ordinary ailments, and DIY books to find out the best way of removing stains from clothes or rust from shower-heads. There were door-to-door salesmen who would sell assorted encyclopaedias in instalments.

We had notebooks with conversion charts that we referred to every time the wife wanted to know the equivalent of a quarter cup of maida in grams, or convert the oven temperature from Fahrenheit to Centigrade.

In college, we also bought second-hand copies of Playboy magazine and when someone raised an eyebrow, we said we read it only for the interviews.

But that was before the Internet and the World Wide Web changed the way we live, work and play. The Net and www are not synonymous: one is hardware, an intricate network of cables linking millions of computers across the globe; the other is software that carries information on the hardware. The first is 40 years old this month; the second came 20 years later.

I’m happy I live in the digital age.

My appointments and my to-do list are on my Mac, which is almost always on, and so are the birthdays with reminders. Whatever writing I do is saved in folders — though I needn’t do that because I can always Google for it.

All my music — some 15,000 numbers — is on my computer, and so are a lot of movies and my photo albums. If I feel like listening to a piece of music that I do not have, I go to a website called Grooveshark. And I have a choice of more stations than did I on my Sony World Band Radio that I used to switch on first thing in the morning for BBC news followed by All India Radio.

These days, as we bake brownies, we click on the Net and we know instantly that one teaspoon is a quarter ounce or 7ml. We also know how to make the base for quiche Lorraine: we saw Rachel Allen do it on YouTube when we missed her TV show.

And the pleasure of catching up with family and friends, face to face, on Skype! For me, this is one of the greatest conveniences of modern technology. As for phone numbers, why would you want to burden your memory when you can get it at the click of a button?

Why would you invest in heavy encyclopaedias when you can access Google, Wikipedia and many more specialised websites? I mean, why would you buy a family health book when you can check the symptoms at "WebMD" for free?

And please do not give me that line that the Net and the Web are making us dumb. On the contrary, with all this information at your fingertips, you are better informed. I buy more books now simply because I have access to more reviews.

There are huge benefits of living in a digital age. But I also like my Filofax. And I do miss receiving a handwritten letter, or a birthday card, something I would keep and not store in the memory of a machine.

Shekhar Bhatia can be contacted at shekhar.bhatia@gmail.com