"Ah! what a gloomy day? Cesar (My 3 year old German Shepherd) did you have to wake me up to torrential rains? Come, lets go for a walk before it pours". Cesar and I took a long walk enjoying the clean fresh air with moisture hinting a great downpour. Once back, it was time for my daily coffee. I settled in my recliner and I was feeling particularly nostalgic about the years gone by.
Rover, my pet robot - named after the brat of my second dog, served me my coffee. Yes, we have robots in our homes these days. A stark difference from the days where I used to wake up and make my own coffee. Rover takes care of the daily chores around the house and recharges itself at the end of the day. That is one thing which hasn't changed from the years that has gone by. Batteries still holds charge and helps in powering many devices. Rover remembers the temperature of the milk I prefer, the amount of sugar and coffee. Rover also comes with a 20ZB (1 Zeta Byte = 1,000,000 TB) and doubles up as a media player whenever I need entertainment. Life without Rover is unimaginable these days just as how internet was in the 1990s and early 20th century.
'Beep Beep' goes the alert in my ear. The alerts reminds me to call my friend Sriram. How things have changed since we met in BITS, Pilani. Those were the days when we didn't have the mobile phones of the next generation. I vividly remember how we used to run along the corridors to attend phone calls and how un-attached we were to technology. "Ah good times", I thought. Thereafter I went into a vortex of how things changed from the time I was growing up.
In 1996, I remember India touring England for a test series. Being a virile 14 year old interested in sports, I was crazy about cricket. I wanted to be like my idol Sachin Ramesh Tendulkar. Watching the test match was of utmost importance to me. Unfortunately, I had to go to a wedding reception which took away most of the second and third sessions of play. I sat desolately in the wedding thinking of watching cricket. A brilliant idea struck me that night. I thought, "Why not equip our wrist watches with an antenna receiver and decode the signal into picture?". I did not bother about it too much because I was ready to open the sports page of 'The Hindu' in the morning next day. I was hoping for a good day for the Indians but it was just plain hope. We had a pathetic team with Vikram Rathour opening the innings.
With the advancement in technology and smaller gate lengths on the transistors, everything could be miniaturized and eventually arrived the watch-tv and what I had just hoped for became a reality. This was in the first decade of 2000s. During this time came the Apple iPhone. They were an innovation and showed the world a smartphone like never before. They opened up the eyes of other cell-phone manufacturers and we had a flood of iPhone look alikes in the market.
What happened in the span of 2 years after 2010 was unprecedented. With earthquakes, volcanoes, floods and droughts in abundance, the Apocalypse predicted by the Mayan calendar seemed to be a distinct possibility. Then came about the brilliance that mankind exhibited after a long time. With earth-mapping from space, it was determined that the axis tilt of the earth had increased a little bit to 23.9 degrees. Hence started the building of a giant magnet in the ISS - International Space Station. The direction of the magnetic field was placed in such a way that it would attract the earth back to its original axis tilt of 23.44 degrees. It was determined that the change in the climatic conditions was caused due to the change in the axis tilt of the earth. Once the re-tilt was completed, the earth had it climatic seasons back to normal and there was no melting of the ice-caps.
Then on, it opened a plethora of innovations which has made robots like Rover a necessity in every household. But a major stepping stone was the decline in dependence on fossil fuels. In the 2010s, electric cars were very popular. People could drive 100 miles before running out of charge in the batteries. Sometime in 2020s a new type of fuel, leptro, was discovered. It required no refineries and gave 100% combustion without leaving any residues. The engines needed a slight modification but it made the best alternative to the fossil fuels with a higher efficiency rate. Leptro, could be manufactured cleanly in everybody's homes. This caused a huge economic downturn because there were no wars for oil and the middle-east themselves lost a lot of money because the petro-cash became redundant. Slowly, but surely, the middle-east came to grips with such a turn in events and became a manufacturing hub.
'Beep Beep' went the alarm again. Time to call Sriram. Before I go to call him, I need to tell you about the other major innovation in the field of communication. We started of with memorizing a few important phone numbers and writing down not-so-important phone numbers. As years rolled by, we started storing phone numbers on our phones and cell-phones. With the advent of iPhone everything was on the phone. Calendar, maps, calories eaten, address book - anything you can think of. Then someone came up with an outrageous idea of inserting a memory chip in the human-body. The electrical pulses sent by the brain to other parts of the body was also used to power-up an SRAM (Static Random Access Memory) chip inside the brain. Then we, humans, came up with another idea of integrating the chip with a full-duplex transceiver module complete with a microphone and magnets to decode the signal into noise (in simple terms speakers) so that it can be interpreted by the brain. All this in the human body!! We even made our eyes into projectors. With a great brain-mapping software, the images thought out in the human brain are decoded and projected through the eyes. As an illustration, I want to call Sriram. I do not remember his phone number. So what my brain does is send a signal to access the SRAM cell to retrieve Sriram's phone number. Then I imagine a keypad in my brain. My eyes projects the keypad on to anything and I dial the number or simply touch on Sriram's entry in my phone book. The transceiver module establishes the connection with a similar chip inside Sriram and we talk with our hands free.
'Beep Beep' went the alert again. Oh wait, it isn't an alert it is the damn alarm going off on my iPhone 4 asking me to wake up to go to work. Finally I wake up and there is no Cesar and no Rover. I still have my Honda Accord and Suzuki motorcycle and it is 13th August 2010. Ah! Now I know the reason for the dream - Trying to decode what could be the storyline of Rajnikanth's new film Endhiran!!!
கருவில் பிறந்த எல்லாம் மரிக்கும் அறிவில் பிறந்தது மரிப்பதே இல்லை (All that is from a womb shall perish, but not that from Intelligence) - Endhiran
PS: All characters and the story-line are fictional. Any resemblance to the living or the dead is purely intentional.
PS1: The idea which came to me - 'tv in a watch' in 1996 was real. Necessity is the mother of all inventions!!
