What’s the point of a talking device if it can’t tell you what you need to know?
There are a lot of dumb ideas out there. Most of them thought out by technical experts. One of them is that you can make new friends by sitting alone in your room and staring at the screen. Another (really big in India): convert people to unique numbers, forget that those numbers are actually people, and then tell people who aren’t numbers that they weren’t treated as people until then until they become numbers.
But the dumbest one is the one who woke up one day and said, “Hey, wouldn’t it be nice if we could interact with inanimate objects?” No, it will not happen. I’ve been told that tech wizards are idiots with zero social skills. But that’s no excuse for still inventing talking gadgets. Even I don’t have great social skills – ask any of my colleagues, they’ll tell you. But I never felt like talking to my refrigerator. Maybe, some people feel less lonely when they have a toaster to talk to. But most of these devices do not understand when to open their mouth and when to close it. And yet, these days ‘voices’ appear in everything you buy.
Let me give you an example from my own indescribable existence. I am not fond of music but wife is. We have an old music system which was bought around 2011 AD (Acche din era). It’s not bad. It only fails that it looks bigger than it sounds. The wife never liked it, and she seemed to like it even less when she saw one of those little Bluetooth speakers that punch above their size. She wanted me to buy something that was lightweight (which could also be worn as a necklace), small (fitted in her baguette bag), and powerful (if even the neighbors could hear, thru daily performances). You will get a chance to become cultured (Rabindra Sangeet). But with all the Omicron crap going on, I forgot all about it.
little black thing
And then, one afternoon, to my utter dismay, an Amazon package landed on my desk. If it was a well-known brand like Marshall, Bose or Lala Lajpat Rai, I wouldn’t mind. Instead, it was a local brand I had never heard of, but which, according to him, was as good as any of these ‘Bose-Ghosh variants’, while being 100 times cheaper.
I am not an expert in sound equipment. But I was skeptical of this little black thing the size of a coffee mug. I kept rolling it in my palm looking for buttons, until I finally found one, pressed it, and almost jumped out of my skull.
“Power on,” said the speaker in a deep male voice. “Bluetooth Mode”.
When the wife checked her mobile phone’s list of ‘discoverable’ Bluetooth devices, the speaker’s ‘name’, for some reason, appeared as Tiwari.
“Who is Tiwary?” I said.
“how should I know?” The wife said.
“Bluetooth connected,” Tewari said, and the wife debuted on her Spotify playlist. I was pleasantly surprised by the sound quality.
The next day I had a Zoom meeting. My laptop was down with a sore throat (though it tested negative for COVID) and its speaker was not working properly. So I tried to pair it with Ti. But my efforts went in vain. Whenever I tried, Tiwari would announce, “Bluetooth connected.” Two seconds later, it would say, “Bluetooth disconnected” and that was it.
strange cough
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you keep disconnecting from my laptop?” Tiwari would say no. What’s the point of a talking device if it can’t tell you what you need to know? Idiot.
That evening, the wife brought the speaker to our bedroom. She wanted to listen to a bong band called Chandrabindu-Chandmama. I wanted to play my own playlist but Tiwari, who had earlier boycotted my laptop, no longer paid attention to my mobile. I thought that if I changed the name from Ti to Omicron then bluetooth might connect – which connects with everyone so easily. But the wife, who is a bit superstitious, protested. I finally gave up and at some point we fell asleep.
The wife woke me up in the middle of the night. “Did you hear that? There’s someone in the room.”
Our building has strange acoustics. If someone bangs the door three floors down, it sounds like the sound is coming from under your own bed – enough to set the wife’s imagination on fire.
“It’s nothing,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
Then I heard someone cough. “Did you hear that?” The wife said.
I was completely awake. All senses are on alert. I fumbled around for the light switch and almost dropped the water bottle.
“Is your cricket bat still under the bed?” Wife whispered.
“Not at all,” I whispered. “You gave it to Reddywala 13 years ago.”
Then we heard that strange cough again, and the wife screamed like a voice from somewhere under the blanket said, “Bluetooth mode. Pair.”
“Calm down,” I said. “It’s only Tiwari.” I was too disoriented to record that he finally befriended my phone.
The author of this satire, G. Sampath is the editor of Social Affairs, Hindu,
sampath.g@thehindu.co.in
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