Its a Ctrl+C+V World, Baby!!!!

If I were asked to name one thing that the newly mobile, effluent, globally sensitive Indian can’t do without, my answer wont be the mobile, satellite TV or even internet per se but three buttons on the computer keyboard….the innocuous looking Ctrl, C and V which combine to give us Ctrl+C (copy) and Ctrl+V (paste), the lifeblood of any IT professional in India and otherwise, unless you are of course a total geek whose hobby is coding. And the fact is that the copy+paste of the keyboard is a symbol of our society today, not only literally but also figuratively…..


If we look at the literal part, copy+paste is something that we simply can’t do without….for us IT guys, a perfect nightmare is the loss of these 3 keys, which means that we actually have to learn to code in most cases!!! (of course the second greatest nightmare scenario is a Google shutdown)….if am not exaggerating much, the much vaunted Indian IT powerhouse would more or less grind to a stop if the manufacture of these 3 keys are stopped for once!!!.....


And why only IT guys, any student worth his salt knows the name of Wikipedia, perhaps the most popular encyclopedia on the net….when we used to do our home projects back in school, we used to rummage through books (usually a set of Encyclopedia Britannica’s) to get the information we needed and in past issue of magazines to get pictures to paste on our charts (not the Powerpoints and Excels silly, the good ol' paper ones)…nowadays the little guys are so tech-savvy, they just go to Wikipedia and copy the information, paste it, arrange it and print or write the info down….getting any picture is a breeze, as we all know(Google again!!!)….I sometimes wonder if the internet is brought down for a day; I think most of us would suddenly feel greatly orphaned and absolutely directionless, even lost!!!!....


And if we look at the figurative part, its becoming a largely cut-copy-paste world….we are a time and place where geographical identities are increasingly becoming blurred, unique regional attributes are being smelted and remolded into one master model…..so many regional languages are in danger of becoming obsolete or being wiped out altogether (we lose a couple of languages a year now, I am told – by Wikipedia!!!), so many of our unique traditions and customs and regional quirks are slowly being forced to bow to a more mass-manufactured culture and are either being assimilated (and losing its uniqueness) or are lost….even the internet, the much vaunted champion of diversity is largely the domain of the English speaking people…..

I don’t have to look far; I see it in my native culture – Bengali. So many Bengalis have not heard of our great novelists let alone read them (unless of course they are suddenly hoisted up by the mass culture – like Sarat Chandra Chatterjee of the ‘Devdas’ and ‘Parineeta’ fame)….

Everyday we are bombarded with images of an economically powerful culture and we are forced to make choices, either on the basis of career growth or the more subconscious peer pressure. Sometimes we blend the two and make a synthesis but as time goes on, visibility starts winning and that’s why we are becoming more homogenous than our parents ever were, in thought and in action.

Not that this hasn’t happened before. Exposure and intermingling of cultures have been going on as long as man has been here but in the past, the uniqueness was preserved albeit in a different form (which was usually a better one), not so in a much smaller world with satellites copying and pasting everything and presenting to us on a platter….there we did copy and paste (architecture, art, sculpture, mythology of India is ample proof) but over time, it became us, Greek art did not take long to become an unique Indian school of art….

The danger is, I feel, somewhere else….the ease with which we can copy and paste has resulted in us being fed with the silver spoon….we don’t need to think much on our own do, we, if somebody has already done it well (and posted it on the net or shown it on TV)….the drive to do it better is slowly dried off because of the ease with which we can use the same (sometimes we literally use the same, with no changes – the sheer amount of information and images out there make sometimes makes it difficult to tell)…..everyone does it…..movie makers, music directors, photographers, authors, apparel makers….the list goes on…..imagine what films we would have lost if Satyajit Ray or Ritwik Ghatak or Guru Dutt had decided to copy+paste to make his company’s shareholder’s happy…..

The other danger is the loss of patience…in the age of Google, if we don’t get what we want in a few clicks, we start to get frustrated (tell me, how many of us have gone beyond the first five search results of Google more than half a dozen times in our entire life?), time for us is suddenly shrinking and we are in a tearing hurry to get somewhere (we don’t usually know where, we usually follow the bigger crowd)….maybe it shows in today’s marriages as well, if our copy+paste is not working properly, we press Del and try again without twiddling as much as a thumb!!!!

When uniqueness is not given a premium, when all that is required is usually conformity and to do it like the other guy with some cosmetic changes, the great engine of the human civilization – our creativity and our patience, is given another small step towards extinction…..

The culprit?? Ctrl+C+V?? U betcha ….take that for symbolism Langdon:)