In this 21st century, the word technology evokes visions of screens. Digital devices — mobile phones, laptops, televisions, and more — surround us and dominate our attention. We spend most of our waking hours inhabiting an online world made available by these gadgets. So pervasive is their influence that we now need laws that allow workers to “disconnect”. Earlier this year, Australia — following the example of some European countries — codified the right of employees to “refuse to respond to work calls and texts” outside office hours.
While the debate triggered by the “right to disconnect” can feel surreal, in truth, we do lead hyper-connected lives. We offer nighttime hours and entire weekends as a tribute to our screens — streaming shows and scrolling social media timelines. Information technology has colonised our minds and become synonymous with innovation. But its main-character energy often blinds us to the many analogue technologies that seemed magical when we were children but have now become mundane.
Have you, for instance, ever paused to consider the marvel that is the shower?
I have nothing against folks who prefer company when they’re bathing — in fact, I congratulate them and wish them a good time — but to me, the shower cubicle is a space for solitude and reflection. As you stand under the faucet, letting the jets of water sting your face, you can stare at the patterned tiles on the wall and let your mind wander. It is a meditative experience that can offer flashes of insight, as long as the shampoo doesn’t enter your eyes. And all the rinsing and ruminating is made possible by just the turn of a valve. During my childhood, in the 1990s, bathing wasn’t quite so simple.
First, there was the business of heating water on the gas stove and lugging the steaming bucket to the bathroom. (I could have taken cold water baths but I’ve never been much of a masochist.) Step two was the delicate art of mixing — controlling the tap’s cool flow until the hot water in the bucket entered the Goldilocks zone, temperature-wise. This activity required vigilance and precision, with frequent dips of the hand to monitor progress. You paid the price for the perfect bathwater with scalded fingers.
Once the water was ready, you commenced a CrossFit workout routine: Squat, scoop water into the mug, stand, lift the mug above your head, empty its contents, repeat. Throughout these exertions, you also had to calculate the amount of water you used and the appropriate moment to deploy soap, to ensure you were not left wistfully gazing at an empty bucket as soapsuds frolicked on your person.
Naturally, all this work left little time for idle contemplation.
I followed this elaborate bathing ritual for many years. But once the shower became a bathroom fixture, I embraced the convenience it offered without a second thought to its transformative impact. A novelty quickly became a humdrum detail in my life — much like the Western Commode.
Growing up, I only ever had access to the Indian-style toilet. In the interests of propriety and decency, I will avoid vivid descriptions of its use, except to say it was fantastic for strengthening one’s glutes. It took me some time to warm up to the Western Commode — with its always-chilly seat — but over time, its promise of comfort made me switch allegiance.
Now, whenever I am confronted with the cyclopean visage of the indigenous loo, I can hear my knees shriek in panic. I am ashamed to admit that after a recent week-long trek in the Himalayas, the emotions roused by my reunion with the pot were far more fervent than when I was reunited with my wife.
In the mid-1990s, momentous developments were happening outside the bathroom, too. I mean that quite literally because the narrow passageway to our bathroom was made narrower by the presence of a brand-new washing machine. We did not mind ceding space to it and having to shuffle crab-like through the passage, because it rewarded us with a dry balcony.
Earlier, laundered clothes — no matter how much you wrung them – would drip water and feed slick rivulets all over the balcony floor. The place would become a health hazard — and the only comfort you had when you slipped and fell was in knowing that the hours spent squatting over the Indian lavatory had fortified your posterior to withstand the blow.
When the washing machine joined our household, clothes were no longer assaulted with a small wooden bat. More remarkably, you could dump a soaking wet load into the dryer, turn some knobs and, a short while later, peel slightly-damp clothes off the sides of the tub. To the eyes of a 10-year-old, that semi-automatic, twin-tub washing machine was every bit as miraculous as our first frost-free fridge.
During my primary school years, we owned a Godrej refrigerator, with a beige door and a large metal grid at the back. The fridge was not a plaything, of course, but every few weeks the thin aluminium walls of its freezer would be lined with frost, and my mother and I would make a game out of defrosting the ice box. Armed with forks and butter knives, I would hack at the cold, white mass as if it were an iceberg impeding my expedition into the polar depths of the freezer. When we eventually upgraded to a double-door refrigerator, I was amazed by the sleek plastic walls of the freezer — and a little disappointed to learn that no frost would ever form on them.
It has been decades since I last saw frost in a fridge or even noted its absence when retrieving ice cubes. Years have passed without me pausing to reflect on the wonder of Western Commodes and showers, and of water filters and escalators. These items, which once invoked awe, have been relegated to the fringes of my consciousness. I am dimly aware of their existence but rarely pay them much mind.
It is undeniable that the digital revolution has transformed our lives and will continue to shape our future in fascinating ways. Our imagination has been captured by robots, driverless cars, and AI assistants — and understandably so. After all, they are the stuff of science fiction.
But there may be value still in tearing our eyes away from the screens — to “disconnect” not just in our professional lives but in our personal lives as well. There may be something to be gained by considering the quotidian things around us and recollecting the thrill we felt when we first encountered them.
Banerjee is a Mumbai-based lawyer and writer
