Was talking to my mum yesterday. We had an interesting conversation. Then she reminded me of the time when she was still a kid (meaning not very long ago, ok! :) ).

When she was still a kid, she used to live in, what was considered as, a town, in my home country. That was a town, coz it was very much developed compared to other villages in the country. During those times, going abroad, taking the plane was a BIG thing. Believe it or not, if someone would take the plane to go to, say, UK, there would be a whole bus which will accompany that guy to the airport. That was like an excursion, and almost everybody, who knows the person – friends, neighbours, relatives,...- would go to the airport to bid the guy farewell. In fact, going to the airport itself was a major event.

Now, when the guy is abroad, he would communicate with his parents/friends/relatives back at home only thru letters. You could expect 1 letter a month. (Forget about phone call. That was way too expensive.) Now, when the letter would reach the hometown, that letter would become the highlight of the week. The letter would circulate among parents, friends, relatives, neighbours. Everybody would fight for their timeslot to get hold of the letter, coz everybody wants to know what’s happening in the other world.

Well, that was back then.
Then came the modern times. In the modern times, phone became more affordable. I am a child of the modern times. So, for this one, I’ve got direct experience. I remember the days when my cousin would make a long distance call all the way from sweden to the hometown. My cousin calling back home was a big event. So whenever he’ll call home, everybody will be very excited about it, and during the short time that he calls back everybod, who happens to be around, will get notified about it, and you’ll soon get a group of people lining up for their chance to talk over the phone. I still remember myself, waiting impatiently for my turn to talk over the phone. And when my turn did come, a typical conversation would go like this:

[Cousin] how r u doing?
[Me] I’m doing good. howz life down there?
[Cousin] things are pretty good down here? hope u’re being a good boy.
[Me] Yes I am!
[Cousin] Are you studying well?
[Me] Yes I am!
[XXX] Hi there, how r u?!

XXX here could be anyone who was on the queue just after me, and who could wait anymore for his/her turn to come, and so just snatched the phone from me.

Besides being a bit angry at XXX, I would be satisfied with the conversation. Coz after all, I spoke to my cousin from overseas! Man! that’s great, isn’t it!

So, after the modern times, came the … well… modern times. The times when I went overseas to study. This time around, whenever I had to communicate with my parents, I would do so thru something even more ingenious than phone – Email!

Email is indeed a damn revolution. You send an email now, the other party recieves it now itself! No need to wait for a letter once a month anymore! Then about the same time came chatting thru IRC, MSN, yahoo, etc…

Then came voice chat over internet! That saved me over costly phone bills.

Then almost immediately after that, SMS became popular!
And so now, whenever my mum feels like talking to me, she’ll drop me an SMS, which I’ll get in no time, and to which I could be replying in no time (in reality, sometimes I take up to 24h to reply). Then after the SMS we’ll setup a phone conversation over Skype. And that’s it!

Well, all of this was just the narration of what went on during the past 20-30 years.
Now, think about it.
Over thirty years, communication across borders (in the lifestyle of the common people of my hometown) changed from letters, to phone, to email, to chat, to calls over internet, to SMS, to … whatever is to come.
30 years…
30 years it took, for such drastic changes to come about in my mum’s life.
30 years in the life of my grandma’s life, didn’t bring about such drastic changes. Of course, things evolved during her lifetime. But the rate of growth was nowhere comparred to what’s going on now.
Just consider this tremendous growth we’re going thru….

Now let’s step back and let’s look at the bigger picture:

The earth is estimated to be 4.55 billion years old. Our earliest relatives, the Australopithecines, came on earth some 3.5 million years ago. Now more recently, man (ie, the kind of people we see everyday), started asking questions about the world some 6 thousand years ago. Man started to look at the stars and started asking questions about the world. Answers came. The Greek philosophers answered some of those questions some 2 thousand years ago. One of the great Greek philosophers, Aristotle, in his theory On the Heavens, showed that the earth was round.
Some 500 hundred years ago, other people like Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler gave more accurate physical description of our world. More advances were made around 300 years ago by people like Newton.
Less than 50 years back, the first man walked on the moon.
Internet became popular less than 10 years ago. Today you are shopping online. 10 years ago were you?
Today, my sister watches TV back in my country and calls me up, all worried, to ask me whether I’m fine. Yes, I’m fine, I say. Wassup, I ask. Oh I just heard about the tsunami hitting the region near you, so that’s why I was worried, she says. Oh what Tsunami?, I ask.
Today, we watch TV and know what going on on the other side of the world.
The world is growing tremendously. The pace has accelerated vastly during the past few hundred years.
Within 20-30 years, of her lifetime, my mum saw the change from postal mail, to e-mail…

To give you a pictorial view of what I’m talking about:

Just notice how the lines squeezes to the end…
This makes me wonder:
what’s next?