In A Hurry

Things are getting shorter by the day… when did you last see a serial story in a magazine? I haven’t seen any for years now. Tamil magazines used to tout many serial stories written by writers, who were nothing short of superstars. Many housewives would remove (tear) those pages and collect them week after week and at the end of the story (which sometimes ran for years together), would bind those pages and add to their library of such collections. Today there is not one such story. The max you will get is a story of one page (oru pakka kathai – one page story, they are called).

Long letters are replaced by shorter emails, which are in turn replaced by the shorter SMSes, which are made shorter still by a vocabulary of its own (C U @ 4). Blogs are losing out to twitters and scraps. Even magazines like India Today have become slimmer (they have become weeklies, to be fair) - have you compared the Reader’s Digest of yesteryears to the recent ones? Marriages, these days, are short lived -I am told. Movies are getting shorter and what used to be a 3+ hr affair are usually around 2hrs today and a few under 2hrs too (which is not such a bad thing). The increasing popularity of Twenty20 cricket and the empty stands of a test match stand testimony to my words. Hair, dress – you name it and you got it – only shorter.

The only thing that seems to be getting longer and longer is my daily office telecon (short for telephone conference!) and yes; the other thing that never seems to end is the serial that my mother watches on TV.

Sometimes it looks like we have developed a societal attention deficiency disorder. We are all in a hurry and everything is in a state of blurr. We are pummeled by so many deviations today that we can hardy focus on one single thing long enough without our thoughts getting deflected by something else – mostly electronic. We are so impatient today that I routinely see people punching the lift close button >< again and again, not wanting to even wait for a few seconds, before the door auto closes. For once, you continue your halt at the traffic signal for a couple of seconds more after the light turns green, and you will know what I mean.

“Slowdown” I want to say; but I have to rush to attend a call and have to keep this blog short :-)