"What's that? I asked one of my tech savvy friends when I once saw him using a thing in his ear. Till then I had seen such gadgets only in movies like Matrix.
"This is call blue tooth technology. Something that allows you to send and receive data without wire in a certain radius!" my kind friend enlightened me.
I was thrilled to see that and glad that we are already in the era of "Goodbye, Mr. Anderson." "But my name is Neo!" (lines from Matrix.)
Gradually my generation had progressed from the before-TV era to such wonderful technology without me realising properly. Till recently I hadn't been in touch with
all these new technology except for this friend of mine who would now and then show me the advances in his subtle ways.
And gradually the mobile had reached the lowest of the society strata and in the suburbs of Delhi even the rickshaw pullers and the vegetable vendors have started
using the gadget. It is no longer a funny scene when your rickshaw driver stops on the way to attend an urgent call and talk incessantly in a Bangla-twisted Hindi.
But I never thought the transition would be that quick as far as this blue tooth technology is concerned. I never thought it would reach to this man whom I was seeing in this PVR complex. After a few years I had gone to see a movie with some touring friends.
And since we were one hour early we had to wait for about an hour and so after shopping for some books we sat down in that winter night on the designer benches around the multiplex. Sitting there I faced this dilemma and suffered this complex that I had been left behind by the advancing technology.
A middle aged man was walking around the complex talking loud. There was a woolen muffler around his ears and so I couldn't possibly see the curved
ear-piece that my friend used to have. The blue tooth was hidden. But the man didn't look like a corporate fellow.
He looked very much like the middle class Dilli wala who would be saving and saving and would hesitate to even buy a cup of tea for a friend.
But I consoled myself, "What do you think, if you don't have a thing, does that mean that no one can have it?"
I kept quiet and turned the book by Dalai Lama I had just bought and tried to read the first few pages.
After we had a cup of hot coffee, we saw the multitude of crowd that throng the multiplex at that odd hour of the night-girls, boys and families. Then as we walked around we met that same old man at one corner of the complex. He was still talking. It must have half an hour now since I first saw him.
Then I sense something uncanny. Then as moved closer I listened to what he was talking and followed the coherence. The coherence shocked me. He was talking of Rabri
Devi in one moment and then about some hidden treasures the next moment and then to Madhuri Dixit and I sensed the hurried nature of his speech.
Then I became familiar with the phenomenon which I had encountered many times in my career.
He turned out to be a man having pressured speech and auditory hallucinations. This means to say the man keeps hearing many things in his ear when nobody is
otherwise talking to him and at times these voices commanding him. And he keeps replying to the voice and walking around to ease the building tension.
He was a man in full blown Psychosis. And for a moment my heart went to that man who was suffering from that mental disease which makes him run around and talk non-stop at that hour of the night.
My heart also went for the family who must have been shattered by the disease which had stolen their dear father or uncle and who had helplessly allowed him to venture out into the night in that mental condition and they themselves staying back at home praying nothing happens to him.
The man was still talking to himself when we entered into the hall to get mesmerized by Alexander.
It turned out to be a Bluish tooth technology....
Dr. Leimapokpam Swasti Charan writes regularly to e-pao.net
You can contact him at [email protected]
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