July 10, 2021: Some things are the same everywhere

July 10, 2021: Some things are the same everywhere. Today I had set myself a specific task to get the Internet working at Mahavir Vikas. In my time, I have ordered cable and Internet installations in Winston Salem and Calcutta. The story is remarkably similar. The “cable guy,” immortalized by Jim Carey in the movie of the same name, keeps you waiting. This is a task where time and space must line up. The wires must enter the home and wiring must be done right inside the home. This is not a matter of throwing a switch somewhere and something happens in the other side of the World. That too exists. I recently heard of an interesting thing that had happened. Some weeks ago, right before going to bed, my phone had just popped a set of warnings that my entire system of monitor and control of a space, nearly 10,000 miles away, had just shut down. Such a catastrophic failure of all systems could mean only a complete loss of electricity. I called my family immediately, and they said, they had not realized power had gone off until I called and alerted them. They had not had time to notice the power failure within the few minutes before I had called. I knew of the failure before they knew. The rest of the story was a complicated set of repairs by the power company because of a “cable fault.” But in these instances one recognizes the strange coming together of the real and the virtual. Today, however, I was very much in the realm of the real because the cable guys needed to come and do the connection. The waits for these events seem longer than they really are. A few phone calls, a few exchanges of frustrations, and they soon showed up and they were smart people. The house poses a significant challenge when optical fiber cable is concerned because the cable will have to make several turns before reaching its destination. Elbow grease and quick thinking solved the problem, and the real house is now connected to the virtual. Would never considered this to be urgent or important even a few months ago but as the pandemic has offered a new path forward, I am feeling the need to be constantly connected. My bondhus are strung across spaces, but never more than a WhatsApp away. Always there. Always ready to answer the call. I have said this before – never lonely if you are connected – without the pandemic some relationships would not have progressed. Things that we believed needed the “touch” now are possible with the codes of the emojis, and the hurried responses to messages with an “OK” which can speak volumes and convey more than any touch ever did in the “real” World. Connected all the time. Anxious all the time. Why is the person’s status showing “last seen” 24 hours ago? The bondhu has disappeared. Or blocked me. Or simply choosing to ignore me. Rejection. These things have now moved to what I had characterized, back in the 1990s, in an academic article to the “cybernetic” space. Man machine. I am the machine in the quickly post-pandemic world. As I was explaining to a friend, over a real drink, with real kebabs, how the new world allows a person to teach from Salt Lake, with a TA in Miami, to students one amongst who was driving in Beijing. If we fail to leverage these opportunities, at least those whose work permits it, then we have not paid our dues to those who perished – perhaps fewer would next time because we learnt from this one. Remember the anthem from Who, hopefully, “We wont be fooled again.”