Only thing constant they say is change. Change is a good thing say others. I don’t know. Being a 30 year old, I have seen 2 kinds of changes. The first 15 years of my life, the change was slow. Buying a car meant which of the Marutis. The change though present was much slower, allowing much more time for the mind to accept and adapt. Change was not thrust upon, it was slow. Post ’95, it accelerated. The computers came, followed quickly by the internet, then the IT age. Today, it has reached a frantic pace. It’s taken the form that borders hostility. Come aboard it or be left behind. It’s overwhelming. Just when people got hang of the internet, there came the social sites. Keeping in touch with people on the cloud, sharing location. Tell that to you dad, see his reaction.

Change used to be moving from a horse cart to a steam engine. Going from a black &white TV to a color TV. Going from a regular car to an air-conditioned one. It just was obvious, and actually the benefits were to see upfront.

Today the fuel economy of cars is almost double, but the petrol prices have almost tripled. The cars are faster, but it still takes more time to reach office. State transport use Volvos, yet there is hardly a seat empty.

Think about it, we had vcrs for more than a decade. Cassette players were still they ways to listen to music. The only innovation was the walkman. Then post 1995, we have had vcds followed closely by dvds and then Blu Rays and the latest thing is streaming content from the clouds. All along, if one was the enterprising type, there are torrents for all the movies. Similar is the case for televisons, we had Plasmas, LCDs, LEDs, and now 3D, but just ask yourself, were the movies that you saw on the old tele any less enjoyable then the ones you see today in HD 1080p. I definitely say NO.

So the saying that change is a good thing was probably coined by someone who went from horse cart to steam engine or from letters to telephones, definitely not by someone who went from LCD to LED.

You might say, well if there was no change, we would still be stuck in the stone ages. But isn’t that confusing change with other things. Humans, by design are explorers, inventors. We want to understand what we don’t. We want to create things. My issue here is the pressure put on people to accept ‘change’. I doubt if I will be able to convince my dad that the world we live in today is better than when he was, say, my age. How many of us aren’t anxious about the future. Can you imagine how things are going to be in the 2020’s and the 2030’s. Worse still, how many of us are not worried about the world our kids will live in.

The point is, in the times we live in, it’s OK to be averse to change. Really, most of it is sheer clutter.

Anyways, these are just my thoughts…