The day I was born

I read through every wiki “May 1984 India” entry, looked up pretty much every online resource pertaining to technology in the same time and even went to the PCL to flip a few pages. But I didn’t get much information on the day I was born. And I thought it was just me who was boring! Apparently not. Nothing groundbreaking happened on Wednesday, May 23 1984. For people in America, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released and elsewhere, in India, my mother went into labor.

I’ve been told that my mother went through hell and back when she delivered me after 40 hours of labor. So I picked up my touch screen PDA and decided to call her on her personal cell phone to ask her more about it. Apparently, there were only two telephones on the street we lived on. And thankfully, one of them was in my house.

But I digress.

Once my mother went into labor, she quickly called for an ambulance and went straight to the hospital. After she checked in, one of the staff nurses announced for my father to come to the maternity wing as his wife was in labor! You see, pagers were still not common in India – even among doctors! So while my mother labored on for another 30-odd hours, let me tell you more about India’s nascent technology days.

There wasn’t much technology in India back in 1984. Maintaining a telephone was expensive, so not every household had one. So it was not uncommon for my mother to take messages and let others in the locality to use it. The same year, the Centre for Development of Telematics (C-DOT), a government owned organization was established that was dedicated to technology development. Its motive was to help spread the wonders of the telephone to the common man and design and develop digital exchanges for the government. Three years later, India joined the digital domain with its first Internet connection. But it would be at least 10 more years before dial-up Internet was brought to households.

Earlier, people relied on snail mails, phone calls and telegraph for communication between each other and theater, radio and television for entertainment. In the mid-80s, there was a rapid increase in the number of TV transmitters, and a corresponding commercialization of Indian television. It was not only used for government propaganda, but also socially relevant plays and soap operas. There were several channels for every language; with advertisements bringing in the revenue. Cable television came to India only in the mid 90s, so apart from the state-sponsored, free cable, film was the universal poison. This increased the sale of VCRs, as people taped movies shown on the national network. To control them, the government introduced measures to curb the use of VCRs.

By 1986, India had begun to realize the importance of computers. The National Council of Education Research and Training made computers a vital part of school curricula, giving rise to India’s substantial contribution towards software development, that was heightened during the dotcom boom. This speaks volumes about the country’s political and social policies, in its dedication to modern technology.

Today, C-DOT works on next generation technology, developing several intelligent software applications and some people like my parents, have five telephones between the two of them. VCRs, like the telegraph no longer exist and the Internet is now more than just technology – it is a way of life.