The Show-off Toyz of Next Decade

Saw an advt on tv with tag line what was cool yesterday isn’t cool today. True, what was rich man’s prerogative is common man’s mat today. So, in 80s when most of people had black&white television richer ones had VCR and telephone. Then in 90s when most of the people owned VCRs richer people had LD players. So what gonna be rich person’s toys in this decade. I have some of my guesses.

As technology is changing fast there are less chances that any consumer durable product will be top such list as we everyone has seen that how three different products like telephone, music player and camera, all of which were not owned by common man, has now combined into one and is owned by almost everyone. So a phone or mobile equipment is less likely to make it to showoff list.

But, some thing like electric sports car will definitely make it despite any advancement in technology or even with existence of conventional fuel based models if they survive the government onslaught on fuel efficiency.

Air travel has become less expensive compared to what is used to be two decades ago. Not much fad remains in air travel especially in India. I guess the outer space travel tour will be the fad in this decade. It’s cool and it’s expensive, chances of its cost becoming affordable wouldn’t be arising in a decade or so.

Robots, yeah its not a new stuff to this world but it isn’t not much popular either (Japan being sole exception). A good advancement in robotics has led to increased interactivity, mobility and their ability to multi-task, I bet more people will have robots in this decade.

Holographic projection tv, I thought it was fringe of my imagination till I googled it for good. Amused but not surprised that as a concept it already existed. Though, it will take time to come out may be by end of this decade. I would love three dimensional hi-definition holographic images, i would be real surreal everything.

My favorite concept is of smart phone with all the applications - universal remote, air conditioner control, lighting control and all electrical controls. But, then it would still be commonman's handytool (not my problem) than show-off piece.

District 9

This is one of few movies that comes once in a while and when you sit down to watch it you really don't expect too much out it. District 9 is pathbreaking in all sense for a sci-fi movie especially those dealing with extraterrestrial lives. The beginning bugs you off with its docu-type depiction of events and that keeps on going throughout the movie. Even the climax fades out in similar fashion, then you think what the f**k!!

By the time credits starts rolling you realise that you have never seen movie like before, not because it has news documentary feature-film kind of treatment ( which nowadays lot of movies have) but its paradigm shift in a depiction of handling of an issue- what happens when aliens visit our planet? Normally most of the movies depict such scenario with a resultant clash of species (which i don’t deny is the possibility) but they have never tried to look into other aspects.

District9 brings to light different such scenarios.
What if aliens lands to take asylum? How do we deal with them? How we going to live with them?
What happens when aliens visit a developing/poor country instead of new york/london, how do people deal with it?
How a poor/developing country is going to manage this mess?
What if aliens are not strong enough despite being technologically advanced? Are we going to rule over them just like we do over other animals? Do we gonna give them any fundamental rights? Will we give our piece of land to aliens?

The movie tries to explore many such issues. The news commentary/documentary style does help keeping the flow of the movie in check (though it could have been avoided to some extent as you continuously feel like watching news documentary). It is fast movie which sticks to its plot. The cacophonic in-charge of alien handling unit does his job, as it has been played by a lesser known international actor we aren’t too bothered by him though he turns out to be a pivotal character and you may even end up sympathizing and sobbing for him in the end.

Portrayal and the setup of movie is very realistic (and that’s the reason it remains in your head). I was amazed by the scale of production design, the whole district 9, the sci-fi setup, army and the weapons, didn’t much look like indie film. It was only in the end I realized the culprit- peter Jackson, when his name rolled up. Finally, this guy well spent his money on something. He will be very happy because I’m sure this movie will become a cult classic, sooner or later.

Lost in Version

Just a few days back one of the leading photography technology company launched a new breakthrough product – 3D(dimension) digital camera. I banged my head, with joy and frustration. 3D sounded cool but I’m dead sure that this would make all simple cameras obsolete in two years and our lives will be lost in managing the changing compatible formats and version. I remembered, many months back when my friend and I were talking about vanishing physical form their personal memoirs (letters, cards and photograhs).

It was quite evident that post new millennium my personal history had taken a beating as everyone switched to emails. I still look at with amusement on those old letters I was so stupid, funny and freak (just like my friends who wrote me). But, time and technology later wiped all that as most of such emails got lost or erased by the providers (when I didn’t use to log-in for months) till few years back and before the advent of unlimited email account stuff. This unlimited email account has not helped much as you can’t bring all your friends to same account and thus limits the possibility of chatting with them and that too for long duration. Plus, you may search whoever you had conversation with but you don’t store that with yourself, neither you look up to your email account when you get nostalgic or trying to remember a good conversation which was neither ‘tagged’ nor ‘starred’.

Now, I hallucinate of this free email account as more of trackback on personal lives proxy funded by governments with intention of keeping tab into the lives of everyone (its one of the cheapest means afterall). I know there will be no addition to my collection of letters which actually stopped almost a decade back. May be everyone is loosing some of their memoirs and their history in making. This thought really freaked me out because nature has always been though on civilizations, all ancient civilizations have been wiped without trace (ours survived but not completely, though the knowledge link went missing). We were able to regain some knowledge about them because they were not in digital format!!!

Well, my suspicion gained ground on last Sunday when i watched “Megatron” and “Opitmus Prime” fighting over their knowledge cube, which too was in physical form. Even so called fictitious advanced civilization on silverscreen were keeping thing in physical form. All we are doing is digtalising everything, The future looks kind of creepy to me, as just in few decades kids might not need to learn to write the alphabets because of computers so we may stop inscribing every message. Though, in India it may not be entirely affected (some 100 years down the line you still may see “Mayawati” written on Taj Mahal thinking that it was built by Mayawati). I know the strong argument is about advance civilization would have elctro-magnetic technology but we still forget that we ourselves have not been able to decipher languages from our past.

Anyway, looking into future is not going to help me when I find it hard to collate all the digital photographs, which now scattered over different electronic forms and formats in comparison with hard-copies of old photographs (I know this is not environment friendly argument). As looser to this world of technology now I have to prepare for the life with three dimensional photographs and for sure it will freak out all men who don’t have flat stomach (hahaha).

Conspiracy Theory: Pakistan’s Takeover by Taliban & Alqaeda

The aftermath of Mumbai terror attack has already begun; it has succeeded in widening the rift between India and Pakistan. Indian government is already talking of increasing the number of troops (which won’t stop terror attacks anyway) to put pressure on Pakistan. The janta like us, which is already fed up of government’s inaction, wants hot-pursuit of terrorist as payback. This is more or less likely to create war like situation. The fight to finish is all what Junta wants, but is this what ISI & its bed fellows Taliban-Alqeada wants too? What’s the larger conspiracy?

Taliban & Alqaeda want to open two fronts for Pakistani army by just fighting on only one of them. Taliban & Alqaeda are already engaged in low intensity war with Pakistan over control on tribal lands in western Pakistan, they also have intention to bring whole of Pakistan under shariah rule. Their main objective is escalation of hostilities or even war between India and Pakistan. With escalation, Pakistan would match up India’s military build-up in its eastern border; Taliban as it has been hoping to gain control of large chunk of western Pakistan would intensify its fight with Pakistani forces. If Taliban & Alqaeda’s dream of indo-pak conflict comes true, then it would give them unprecedented chance of overthrowing civilian & military establishment of Pakistan.

For Indians it is sticky situation whether to set their guns blazing or think of protecting Pakistan from turning into state of anarchy. I never thought that in my life we would have to think of protecting the “state of Pakistan”. If we escalate the situation probably Pakistan would crumble in a few weeks time (Pakistan is already on IMF loan to avoid bankruptcy), which would please our Janta. But, it will also bring Jihad and alqaeda to our doorsteps atleast five years earlier than anticipated (CIA has estimated that Pakistan would be a failed state by 2015).

Taliban & Alqaeda wants to divert US attention by targeting its citizens in third countries so as to keep them engaged, though this alqaeda strategy mostly likely is not going to work, but any American imitative of bombing terrorist hideouts is less likely to benefit India, as most of them are in Pak-Occupied-Kashmir. Probably random assaults on terrorist camp would work but we will have to look at our old gyan “saap bhi mar jaaye aur lathi bhi na tute”(in this case jihadis being saap and Pakistani government being lathi). Otherwise India would have to be prepared to fight Taliban & Alqaeda, which will have “ready-to-die” foot soldiers from Afghanistan and Pakistan under it.

SecondLife: New Wave, My Predictions

More than three years back, someone started a virtual life community, SecondLife, where anyone can create his/her virtual persona/character and it develops a community. Soon I forgot about it, but it didn’t end there. A few months back, one of my friend came and told me how much he loved Secondlife and how it had evolved - you can buy a piece of virtual land, so many companies had opened virtual stores and virtual shoes, cloths could be bought for your virtual life; they even started their own currency. He loved it so much and had become addicted to it. This was frustrating to me, why the hell people were spending so much time to make themselves up in virtual life? What gratification they got doing by wasting time in creating virtual characters and dressing them up.

It was freaky to find so many young people indulging in it and mostly Americans; I lost no time in terming them as childish and the ones who were more hooked to the virtual life than the real one. Anyways, even that didn’t put the issue to the rest. Few days earlier I saw a report - some hotshot from IBM was telling that they had developed a system wherein people can send sms to virtual characters and users could also transmit the sms to people using their virtual life characters, and added that this would set stage for next level evolution of communication in virtual and real world.

Well, when I thought this fad would die its natural death, it came back and probably it may grow even bigger this time. Then I started thinking what else it could evolve to? So, here is my take on what this virtual world can evolve to! People would surely enjoy reading and sending sms for time being through Secondlife though such effort may not last but who knows it may evolve to mms video massages of SecondLife characters speaking to you. If something like that happens I bet it would be a big hit, people would love watching animated videos of their characters. I guess most of people would be sending weird and freaky massages, specially the times when people are angry with someone.

But what if SecondLife also becomes an alternative to e-cards and people start wishing each other through their characters (specially those valentine ones, guys would get a better tool to purpose- really hidden virtually visible), I think that will nail e-cards business out of business. If something like that ever happens it won’t be limited to a few such offerings. If people become so hooked to sms on SecondLife then they might also like reading their massages on SecondLife with each character reading out the massage, what if you open your mail and your boss says “you are promoted”, I believe such stuff would be a real rage and it would pose serious challenges to e-mail providers like yahoo or hotmail.

Such developments may lead to a lot of such companies starting up their own virtual life portals to protect their market. I know most of you people now will not believe if I say all the social network sites may start using virtual life characters to make it more exciting or SecondLife itself may become social network site like Orkut where every user would have animated character and can talk to other, I know its kind of weird but it may have a future prospect. Then the real and virtual life would get immersed(or, shall I say, messed up) in each and there would be a thin line to differentiate.

But this is not all, my biggest out of the world idea is, if companies start verifying virtual characters just like the online signature and then you can shop online in real life using your virtual life character, man that would be massive, it will blow everyone’s mind. I know most of you reading this may feel like banging their head on wall but what if it really happens, I know most of it wont happen any soon but probably some will in next few years.