Adventures in gadgetland

In the 70s, when we first bought a tape recorder, those little boxes with a few buttons, one of them red, their role was largely to record the sound of our own voices. The idea that music could be played back on it never really occurred to us, at least not in the beginning. The wonder of listening to our own voices, trapped in a little box for eternity, was by itself enough. The earliest recordings were of our performances — a poem, a joke, some funny shayaris, a song punctuated with large gulps of air between the words and some very laboured and self-conscious conversation. Hearing ourselves revealed something hitherto hidden to us — the pitch, the timbre, the sound of the laugh, the squeals of delight — all felt like an outof-body experience. We could listen to, and inflict on others, what in retrospect were thoroughly unentertaining snippets of silliness over and over again. It was the experience of capturing a sense of our living selves, as against photographs that immortalised us by freezing our existence, that was exhilarating. To a generation that associated recorded voices only with the famous or the truly talented, the idea of hearing one’s own voice coming out of a gadget felt a little miraculous. It is strange how that specific need of self-recognition seems to have disappeared or more likely dissolved into video recordings of the self.

The first impression that a new gadget made in those constrained times often had nothing to do with its eventual function. In the case of the tape recorder, it had also to do with the fact that in its earliest days, there were no pre-corded cassettes that were easily available, so the act of recording music was a painful song-by-song effort, which involved connecting a tinny tape-recorder to an even tinnier transistor. However, in the case of the refrigerator, it was because the wonder lay elsewhere.

When the first refrigerator came, ice was magic. Cold water was great too, but ice cubes, the unlikely junction of winter and geometry, were mesmerising. The first few days were spent crunching ice loudly, for where else did one access an unlimited supply of this delightful but occasional form of water? The fridge’s main function — that of preserving food — was of little interest. In fact, even today, in many parts of India, the preference for fresh food is so strong that the fridge is little more than a cupboard that makes ice and keeps water cold. But the 70s and 80s were times when gadgets were monuments. Imposing, sacred, to be approached with the greatest reverence and not a little fear. They were installations that exuded mystery and needed to be dealt with only by Important People, namely the men of the house.

We never had a record player and had access to it only when we went to an uncle’s house. No religious rite has been carried out with greater ceremony; the Japanese tea ritual is a quick act compared with the fastidious and highly elaborate regimen for playing music on the gramophone, as it was then called. It involved first removing the ornate cover from the stereo system, carefully selecting a disc from a neatly stacked pile of options, wiping the cover of the album, slowly, really slowly extracting the record from the sleeve, caressing it clean with the merest whisper of a cloth, placing it with adoring care in its slot, lifting the needle as gingerly as if were a vial of toxic plutonium, waiting purposefully just for the heck of it before finally uniting the needle with its destined groove, and letting the music flow.

Small increments in functionality could lead to big changes in the way we lived. When the radio became the transistor, many other things changed. The gadget became less of a monument and more a personal accessory. Thetransistor attached itself into the entrails of our lives, as it went where we went, in our bedrooms, bathrooms and even in the basket of our bicycles. As a consequence, film songs entered the crevices of our lives, acting as a moving map of our moods, the articulator of the unsaid, the extrapolator of the mundane into the sublime. Songs became personal documents, secret friends that saw a part of us that no one else ever did. The act of humming a song to oneself had always rendered a public good private, but the transistor made this personal ownership official. The device of the farmaishcreated some sort of common currency of the popular without surrendering entirely to it. The gadget was part of the act of establishing one’s world.

Bit by bit, we crystallised our existence by filling out our homes. Ghar basana, the gradual setting up of the home, was nothing but the act of populating it with facilities and meaning. Prosperity rippled around us, forming a protective moat. The function these gadgets served was important, but even more important was their value as objects to be owned. They expanded our sense of self, stretching the boundaries of our empires bit by bit. They represented what we were capable of by their presence more than by their use. The gadget, if anything, is even more central to our lives today. While we may own our share of blenders, hairdryers, air fryers, home theatres and the like, there is really only one gadget at the heart of everything we do. The mobile phone today is a master-key of all devices. It packs so much functionality in its petite form that we have exhausted any concept of wonder usually associated with the gadget. We take the magic of the phone for granted as we await the next upgrade. The gadget still changes our lives in small and important ways, but perhaps it does not excite the emotions it once did.

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