Now and Then

India has been on the path of growth ever since I became a sentient being. From my early days I remember a lot of insignificant things which considered together bring out a pattern of change which on a personal front is not very welcome, but which according to economy indicates growth. I remember a lot of practices in those days which still bring with them a feeling of nostalgia and a strange sense of missing security today.

Like for instance, I remember we seldom rejected and threw away things. Things like electronics and containers and other non consumable consumer products were not made to be disposed. If a torch didn’t work we fixed it whatever the problem would have been; by changing batteries, the glass, the reflector or the gasket. 

Containers were used and reused. Milk came in bottle which had to be returned and were reused. So were soft drinks. Plastics were used but in places where they were absolutely necessary. Even the plastics were durable and lasted eons.

Bread was packaged in butter paper and not in plastics. Bicycles, consumer electronics, etc. were meant to last. And whenever they broke down they were repaired with minimum part replacement. Things were made taking into consideration the needs and concerns of the consumers and the not for the sake of bulk sales high profit margins.

I remember being happy with the things I had and so were most people. Some of the things which I used then are still somewhere asking to be used or repaired.

Knowledge at Your Fingertips

People think knowledge is available at the click of a mouse. However, they fail to realize that most of the information available on the Internet comes from dubious sources. At some point of time they were lifted from books, mostly, through processes like OCR and simple data entry. In these processes of content transfer, errors and typos creep in. Again, various websites, to avoid legal implications arising from plagiarism, rewrite this content again and again till most of its essence and factual correctness is lost.

Students no longer read books, do primary research or experiment. They blindly believe in whatever is easily available on the Internet and that too for free. All that is needed now is a simple copy-paste. This habit is causing a knowledge gap in the present generation. The new generation no longer possesses problem solving aptitude. At the slightest inkling of doubt or query they run for their Internet enabled tabs, mobiles and computers. Imagine youngsters entering the job market with such limited knowledge and stunted intellect.

I realized this phenomenon bitterly while editing books written by both wannabe and established authors who churn out manuscripts simply by copy-pasting content from various spurious websites, blogs and forums. Without making so much of an effort as writing a single sentence or working out a sum, a book is ready--riddled with errors, misleading information and every mistake and blunder imaginable.