Killjoy

Never mind the fact that I am making use of it to put this article up for all to see - when it comes to technology and in particular the internet, I am all for Mulayam Singh and his Samajwadi Party. And while I do have serious issues that bother me, what I am presently concerned about is how the World Wide Web has consigned most of my fond childhood memories to the distant past.

Chandralok Building. Janpath, nr. CP (Connaught Place for the uninitiated). Almost every summer vacations when an outstation trip was considered, the very first journey was in bus route no. 620 (or, in the later years, 604) from Malai Mandir to Regal followed by a walk to that building which was (and still is, I hope) home to the tourist departments of almost each and every state of India, right in the heart of New Delhi. So we would walk into the tourist offices of the probable destination states, pick up a bunch of tourist brochures (I have always loved collecting those and have a proud collection stashed away somewhere in my cupboard) and head back home. After about a week of deliberating, we would go back to make the bookings. Those guys would do something on their "system" and hand us some pieces of paper after the successful completion of the transaction.

Of course, such touristy trips were not as regular as the mandatory visit to the maternal grandparents' which happened, without fail, annually - either during the session break in March or the longer summer vacations in May-June (people not from the North might not get this but we used to get TWO breaks - one, a short 15-day one between standards, and two, a long one after less than one month of the commencement of the new session). Being the train maniac that I still am (won't get started here on that otherwise there is no end to this post), the excitement began with a trip to the booking office. Even though the Sarojini Nagar one was closer, I personally preferred IRCA on Chelmsford Rd, the CP radial road that led to the Pahar Ganj side of the New Delhi Rly Stn. The two major bonuses - a glimpse of trains entering the station after having just crossed the Minto (now, Shivaji) Bridge, and the HPMC outlet that sold awesome apple juice.

But it is not just about travelling. Earlier, there was a certain amount of respect accorded to a person who was a known authority on a certain topic. General knowledge, trivia, facts and figures - call 'em what you will, I have always been in love with 'em. Other than the Britannica, World Book and the Manorama Yearbook to an extent, there were no standard sources of information that one could rely on, so people like me spent hours in front of the TV watching all types of quiz shows right from BQC to Brand Equity and Mastermind to University Challenge, actually read the newspaper and magazines and cut out interesting snippets to be filed at a later date (that later date never came) and rely upon other random, unverifiable sources such as single-volume encyclopedias and GK handbooks released by local publishers. Another proud item in my collection is a bunch of HT "factoid" cuttings that my mother religiously cut out and collected for me over the years.

Knowing stuff helped boost one's ego when one could answer questions asked on those TV quiz shows, and occasionally win quiz contests that appeared in the papers. But all that seemingly useless information found its best outlet in a classroom quiz-based game show that I used to organize whenever some teacher was absent and the substitute either didn't show up or weren't interested in teaching. It was called Hit The Jackpot - you were required to score a minimum number of points in order to be declared the imaginary winner of a bunch of items that me and many others thought were desirable back then. It started off as a "knee-jerk reaction" (how I love using those terms that the media plants in our brains every time there's a tragedy) to KBC, but it, I can proudly say, matured enough to have a life of its own. Someone please remind me to dedicate a separate full-length post to this sometime later.

That was then. The Internet may have existed but it found its way into my life only recently. Now, every time I have to write something, I create a new post here on Blogger - I have grown so used to this that I just can't write anywhere else, let alone using pen and paper, and I just need to verify even the smallest fact using the Net. Knowledge-based contests are no longer fun to take part in - as it is, there are hardly any of those left. Their organizers know that no answer cannot be found, so now it is all about speed (early birds catch the worm), luck (winners shall be randomly selected using a draw of lots) and creativity (express an idea in less than 20 words). And every second person is an expert - more so because our conversations are more through chats than in person, so there's ample time for the ignorant to feign smartness using the other tab. After all, information is just a smart search string away.

But I still refuse to use IRCTC or any of those private travel websites (MMT, Cleartrip, etc) to book my tickets esp. railway ones. I do use those sites to check my options (jotting down addresses, phone numbers and other details of every possible accommodation option when you are travelling sort of helps offset the risk you are taking by not making advance bookings) but when it comes to the actual booking bit, I find myself going over to the nearest booking counter, sweating it out in the queues which remain serpentine even after all these years, filling out multiple reservation forms while I am advancing at less than a snail's pace in those queues and finally laying my hands on the much-coveted printed train ticket.

PS. Thanks Purba Ray for this post which motivated me to write this.