COVER STORY
40 OUTLOOK 22 July 2019
ago, maps and travel guides were a must-have.
But Swati confesses she herself has switched to
Google Maps; Eicher’s map division was closed
around seven years ago.IFE before Google? Well, it’s not just those in
their teens and early ’20s who are hooked to
Google—for the older ones, it affords a kind of
creative luxury, replacing what used to be
donkey work back in 1970s-80s. For an IPS
officer with the CBI, who aptly prefers to stay
undercover, life before Google recalls the days of
the fictional Byomkesh Bakshi, Karamchand et al.
All that crackling genius and logical riddle-solv-
ing needed a lot of grunt work alongside...“dial-
ling over 100 numbers from the printed BSNL
directory, poring over paper cuttings in libraries,
tracking down khabris (informers). Today,
Google has become our khabri,” he laughs. He
doesn’t remember when exactly he started using
Google—he recalls those old dial-up connections,
where “two telephone symbols got connected
through a dotted line, with a weird sound”, and
transiting through Hotmail, Yahoo, AoL, MSN,
before settling down with Gmail. But the paper
trails, the FIRs, filthy rooms filled with dust, rats...
how nostalgic can you be about real spider webs!
Sebi Joseph, CEO, Otis India, recalls when
“newspaper ads, word of mouth and the employ-Just a few days ago, I was
interacting with some sixseven
yearold kids. I asked them, “Can
one of you tell me how to convert
this dirty water in this glass in my
hand into nice clear water that I
can drink?” I thought I would get
dozens of answers. The first child
I selected said, “Aap google kar
lijiye (Just google it!)” and they all
started laughing.
I was surprised. In my early years
as a teacher, several hands would
have gone up, and there would
have been many answers. Now
Google has become the new Guru
for the young generation and rather
than applying their mind, Google is
their first step of inquiry.
Frankly speaking, we scientists
were outperformed simply due to
the fact that we had to depend
on outdated information, which
reached us so late. I remember
spending hours browsing hundreds
of pages of journals, just to find
one answer!
We did the hard work of actually
reading, absorbing and writing,
while today in Googleage thevast library and
repository is in
your pocket. In the
past two decades especially, the
newer generation has forgotten
that the human brain is a big
repository with a great capacity to
store information and more.
Google has converted the brain
from a storage repository to a
processor. That’s the big revolution
it has brought. You pick up the
specific piece of knowledge by
searching it on Google and then
process it the way you want.
It may be an easy solution, but
what is lost is the power to read
and learn from thousands of words
and just depend on a couple of
keywords. This means the joy of
wandering and observing before
discovering is lost.
The important things in life
are observation, analysis and
synthesis. So you and I observe
something, then we do analysis
and synthesise the new from it.
Google has changed all that. It is
life’s yin and yang today! O
(As told to Jyotika Sood)For the older
ones, Google
affords a kind
of creative
luxury,
replacing
what used to
be donkey
work in the
1970s-80s.Raghunath Mashelkar, Teacher