We are slowly losing the thrill over certain best experiences in the world, things enjoyed best in real time that too for the first time, without a preview or a trailer preceding them. I am sure most of us have walked by a lake, come down a mountain slope, heard a cuckoo, smelt and listened to the summer rain falling on the dirt of the earth or on tin roof, watched wind swirl dry leaves around our feet in the middle of the road on a hot day, gotten our pants wet by the cars whizzing past spraying stagnant water off the roads. Also we might have been startled by the cry of a baby or even baby wolf from the distance.  For additional activities and experiences I refer to the movie, Sholay scenes (before the villain Gabbar’s men entered to spoil the peace in the village with their horses and guns) to understand what ordinary villagers experience and enjoy life’s smaller blessings. I am talking only of good things that are elementary and commonplace that are very few and far between in one’s life time.

Contrast the above with the images in today’s digital world of cells and chips. Sadly, we have to watch the new images which are merely the electronic ones without the real existential experience. Even in the reality shows on TV we imagine real actors on the show as our surrogates and assume some thrill of reality. In the phone-in programs again on the tube, we have to use an instrument.  

Blame the influx of information (include images) called information explosion and infotainment. In its name we are being swamped with and bamboozled by 2-D images (even 3-D images) and some excellent acoustics round-the-clock. Yet the modern gadgetry is no match to the reality of time, place and persons felt by our senses god has provided us to interpret through our experience.

I have entered a ship before I had a chance to see the inside of a ship in the movies or TV. I enjoyed watching “Titanic” long time after. Sadly people are robbed of the opportunity of that first-time-ever experience.   Also nothing is left to the imagination these days for one to have any first time effect by the public relations and communications world. For everything there is preview, a curtain raiser, a premier, a Puppet show, again a beta version to try on. Does everything need to be tried and rehearsed, simulated and test-driven? Also with the information/technology explosion we are losing sense of time, place and people. That means there is a revolution happening in our orientation of time and intelligence in a negative sense.

Funnily enough, the new age shows them all even to the toddlers without giving them a chance to go through any of them. Recently I watched on TV, a hi-tech science fiction movie where the hero goes to a planet which is far ahead in the future time. The heroine happened to be a hi-tech resident of that strange planet who surprisingly gets ready for sex with the hero and the latter was overjoyed. When the time came, the heroine looked into a gadget, at the same time passed on one to the hero asking him to look into the same.  The heroine got satisfied sufficiently, and our hero from Hollywood who is bent on action only like James Bond 007, was puzzled as to what to do next.