I have this thing for gadgets. I simply live between gadget purchases; I think I was one of the first in India to have bought an iPOD off ebay. I do not want furniture for my drawing room, I want a 7.1 Channel Home theatre system and a 42 inch LCD TV J. I want to be the first to know about a new Canon DSLR, or the latest avatar of Pulsar that Bajaj is planning to launch in India.
The strange thing is, most of my peers are like me. We like to be seen carrying the latest in mobile phones and mp3 players. If we are in a party together, we will usually talk about the latest mobiles, cars or digital cameras, which has just hit the markets and we would be at loss of words while describing their ultra sexy super cool zing factor.
Why do we do this? Fifteen years back, nobody thought like this, most of us did not have access to Internet, let alone broadband. We did not know our mp3 from jpegs, and telephone meant something for which there was a waiting list. A thing of luxury, that government will provide you with once you apply and then be a really good boy for six months. I don’t remember being very unhappy then.
I think we are being sold a dream, a dream where women have perfect bodies, and they flash you with their mobiles and ride with you in your uber cool mo-bike, where the walls of a rooms are many colored and they tell you a story- Story of a happy couple and two sweet little kids.
The hard but sad truth is the happy couple is a utopia we are all chasing. We try to live up to impossible ideals formed from a collage of sound and video bytes from the media which surrounds us like an all encompassing wall. In the meantime, we sell the most productive years of our lives to somebody else for a fistful of money. At the end of the day that’s all we are left with – some money.
Deep down we all know this, and get desperate as the days flash by in the home-office, office-home rigmarole. So all of us try to buy us some happiness with that money, and if you believe the television, the gadgets are the nirvana we are looking for, the magic manna that will deliver us our salvation in a platter. So we go out and buy and buy and buy like there is no tomorrow.
May be we need to stop the money train just a little and listen once to the bards from yesteryears when they sing “Money Can’t buy me love”. If we really stop and listen, we may learn a lesson or two from that song.
I am just a guy getting bored with the everyday life of going to office and slogging 14 hrs for telecom products which i never use.To keep things a bit more interesting, I do some other stuff as well like reading a lot,long drives, a little bit of amateur photography,the last one is slowly eating into me , and takes up most of the time I can spare, so this blog although started out as random jottings has turned into a phot blog :)
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3 comments:
Even melody doesnot seem so melodious in empty pocket dear.So enjoy the weekend,spend as much as you can then come back home recalculate your finances and rush for the rat-race on Monday morning.
That's what life is all about for the time being :)
he he , right as always,sukanto's philosophy ...
my problem is, with our money oriented approach we have started valueing everything with money , people , emotions , everything :(
and imagine what would have happened if you had so much money that you never needed to work :)
If only ...
cant agree with u more . thts why i liked the movie matrix(part1 ) so much . in a way we are all being forced to live in an eternal dream. wht the computers did in matrix , the advertisers are doing to us everyday .
but then , its a sad irony tht u can afford to get pholosophical about this topic only when u have enough to eat and dont have to think abt a roof over ur head .
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