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Past Relics

Reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Earlier in the week, I was recounting my childhood experiences to a friend who has been to India only once for a couple of weeks. H knows it would take a couple of years to explore India satisfactorily. My accounts of growing up in semi-rural India many decades ago is like time travel to a place no one can visit anymore. 

That afternoon, I was telling H about the two common fixtures of autumn. One was the guy who came around to refurbish the balding shil-nora that my mother could no longer use to grind wet spices. He will chisel the pattern of indentations on both the shil and nora until they had the required friction to do the job. He would hawk his services in the quiet afternoons as "Shil Katao" and the ladies in need of his help could come out the door. 

The other guy was in the business of fluffing the cotton inside the razais (lep in Bangla) we would start needing the colder months to follow. He would usually come with a helper and they would agitate the cotton with a device that looked like a one-stringed harp. The "Tulo dhona" when done would give the blankets fluff and warmth. These were the ordinary trades-people of the time. I am pretty sure kids growing up in India these days have no idea what these words mean or why these jobs are even needed. In my day, they were essential. Opening up the Indian economy was the start of a certain homogenization of culture with the Western world and such crazy relics of the past became irrelevant.

These thoughts were strangely enough triggered by reading these lines from the book:

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED Talks, government think tanks, and high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning—and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms?


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