The following article was posted on the website Kochivibe.com
The rain pelted down against the windshield, almost completely blurring my vision. Damn, those wiper blades had to be changed. I turned to my left and looked at the man sitting in the passenger seat of my dilapidated Maruti 800.
“Binny, any idea how to get there?”
My question was more out of a general lack of a sense of direction than penetrating vision. The rain was only just playing the sidekick to the villain of my ignorance of Cochin city routes.
I could almost see and hear Binny’s brain churning and turning over in an attempt to produce a comprehensible answer to my relatively dumb question. It was natural for me to expect an answer to fall out of his mouth, but a GPS-enabled mobile appeared out of his shirt pocket instead. Apparently, he was no better informed than I was.
Greed is a bad thing, a very bad thing (but more on that later). GPS was now somehow convincing us that not only could we navigate through the rain to our destination without any prior knowledge of the route, but also land there much quicker than by adopting the conventional one.
Which meant, Binny immediately turned into my co-driver; saddled with the task of navigating me through obscure Cochin roads. He had Google Maps and a Nokia smartphone for help, of course. Who was I to doubt names like Google, Nokia and Binny?
GPS told us exactly which road to use. The map revealed the terrain over which we would travel. Everything was going according to plan until we came face to face with a bridge that had to be transcended, when, err, a problem arose. I was now faced with the daunting challenge of driving my car across a two feet wide bridge (meant for pedestrians and the daring bikers). I chickened out (no, I am not proud of it). The map had somehow left out the inconsequential detailof the width of the bridge.
To cut the long story short, we turned the short route long and eventually reached our destination. But not before a great deal of time, energy and petrol had been needlessly spent. That is what the greed to accept technological help to make things simpler got us.
Which got me thinking. How dependent are we on technology now and how desirable is that trend? We cannot write a grammatically correct essay devoid of spelling errors without the help of Microsoft Word Spellcheck. We cannot recollect a single phone number without looking into our mobile contact lists. We cannot remember our old friends without logging onto Facebook. We cannot engage in a discourse of history without researching it on Wikipedia first.
So, the next time you choose to not doubt names like Microsoft, Facebook and Wikipedia, think again!
PS: Just in case you were wondering, I did run a Spellcheck on this article before posting it.
Philosophical Rambling 