Technology - Wow Factor!

In the movie Steve Jobs (2015), the protagonist played by the super talented Michael Fassbender says to his marketing head "If I want to tell you there is a spot on the shirt, I point to the spot, I don't say there is a spot 14cm down from the collar, 3cm to the right of the second button while I try to remember what the command is for club soda. That's not how a person's mind works".

As I watched that scene, I remarked that the Operating System experience from DOS to Windows (Steve Jobs was referring to the Mac obviously) was indeed a great Wow moment for me back in 1996 when I was only a kid.

My first job was in the IT industry and I have been affiliated to it for more than a decade now. However, I always kept technology at least a few feet away to not embrace it. I only thought of it as a means for me to earn my living.

My true yearning was always in art, history and the like. To give a few examples, when a historian like William Darlymple releases a new book, I had to buy and read it and then explore the same places explained in the book in the cities of Delhi and Hyderabad - on foot. When Amit Trivedi comes up with a new set of soulful music numbers, I had to listen and get lost in them for days. When a trailer of Dennis Villeneuve's latest film is out, I had to watch it several hundred times and get into the mood before eventually watching the film and then spend days critically analyzing it. These are only but a few examples where I splendor-ed and experienced art right into my DNA.

In the same spirit, I never did ponder over my experiences of technology. Beyond the office environment, the friends I made, the ups on downs in the life, I realized I always had this constant companion but I had a rather detached - indifferent feeling about it. So, without waiting further I start inking down some of my Wow! moments in using technology.

1. When using a personal computer for the first time - 1994
2. When using the first Windows machine - 1996
3. When using Yahoo Messenger to voice chat with my cousins in the US - 2000
4. When writing a C program to arrange a set of numbers in the shape of a triangle - In 2002
5. When I analyzed the forces on all the load bearing elements of one of the buildings in our college using STAAD.Pro software - 2004
6. When listening to music on an IPod - 2007
7. Using Pandora to help me with music recommendations - 2009
8. When I used to continuously bother my friends to Shazam any interesting music that we hear to know the track name, artist, album etc. Then go back home and download the same - 2010
9. When using Bluetooth to transfer a music track from one device to another - 2010. I vividly remember one of my friends saying "Is the file moving in thin air?"
10. When I ordered a taxi on Uber on my first smart phone in 2017 (Yes, I purposely stayed away from smart phones until that long!!)
11. When creating a new Virtual Machine on the Google Cloud - I created a new virtual machine with 2CPUs, 75 GB RAM and a 64 TB persistent disk, installed NGINX web server in less than 5 minutes!! - 2019

None of the above are out of the world, yet they are simple, sweet and innocent.  As I started analyzing the list further, I came to understand that the real reason for my affinity towards them were

• Finesse
• Simplicity
• Empathy

Finesse by means of brining in great skill and expertise, Simplicity to be able to convey the meaning and purpose in an easy to understand way; Empathy in a way to establish a deep connection with the human element.

Now the funny thing here is, all these are the same reasons I love any piece of art as well!​