In north India, the honorific ‘ji’ is tagged on to anything addressed to one of equal, or higher, social standing.
An inquiry after someone’s health, “How are you, ji?”, is met with the response, “I am well, thank you, ji. How are you, ji?”
All those ‘jis’ buzzing around sound like a swarm of bees going about their business, and doing so overtime, not excluding weekends. And a while ago I noticed that the ‘ji’ bees had multiplied, both in numbers as well as excited volubility, buzzing away like all get out.
What seemed to have got everyone agog was someone called Fauji. A fauji is a person from the defence forces. So who was this Fauji, with an implied capital F, who was the cause of all the excitement? A redoubtable, much-bemedalled warrior defending our borders?
But it turned out that I’d got it wrong. What was creating the buzz was not a Fauji, or even a lower case fauji, but 4G, which represents a bandwidth used in mobile technology.
4G was an improvement over 3G, which in turn presumably had been a step up from 2G, which itself must have evolved from 1G.
It seems that the more Gs we have we can do more with our smartphones, and do it faster and better, than when we had fewer Gs.
We can send more, and speedier text messages, watch more live streaming Bollywood blockbusters and IPL matches, shoot and circulate more selfies and YouTube videos, and generally pull more metaphoric rabbits out of the cyberspace hat.
And before we can say ‘G whiz!’ to that, with a flourish of telephonic trumpets, 5G is about to make its debut in India.
Customers are eagerly lining up to buy the 5G-compatible devices that’ll enable them to make the most of this milestone of progress: more text messages, more live streaming, more selfies and YouTube, more moreness.
And after 5G what? 6G? 7G? With all those Gs demanding more and more of our time and energy will we have any time, or energy, left to do something as retro as make contact with each other without use of an electronic gadget?
Silly question, ji. Or, silly question, G.
Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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