Short lives and long leaps

 

Antony always ready for new leaps

My cat, Antony, fell on my TV while trying to catch a lizard from the wall. The TV which couldn’t hold Antony’s weight fell with an explosive sound to the floor before Maggie or I could save it. Antony was stunned by the sound. He realised he had done something rather terrible and so he lay down with his forelimbs stretched ahead as if seeking pardon. His gesture extracted a smile from me. “You’re smiling?” Maggie was scandalised. “Give him a slap,” she said. “Will he understand?” I asked. “Moreover, our TV is nearly 15 years old. Maybe, it’s time to replace it.”

I picked up the TV from the floor. Its stand was irreparably broken. But the set could stand by itself. I replaced the detached cables in their appropriate places and switched the set on. It worked as if nothing had happened. “This is old technology,” I said. “A traitor to the TV industry,” I almost added sotto voce.

That traitor concept came from an American contractor of last century. “The man who builds a skyscraper to last for more than 40 years is a traitor to the building trade,” the contractor had said. Aldous Huxley quoted that contractor in his essay ‘Selected snobberies’ written a century ago.

My childhood which goes back by half a century witnessed things enduring for ever. Our furniture at home was made of teak or other durable wood and some of them can still be found in the ancestral house. Things were made to last in those days. A carpenter would take weeks if not months to complete a piece of furniture and would be proud of his creation in the end. Such carpenters would be deemed traitors today, I’m sure.

I constructed a house in my village in Kerala five years ago and some of its doors and windows need a few redemptive touches from a carpenter now. The carpenter who worked on my house belonged to the new gen and he certainly didn’t betray his industry.

A laptop that I was using in Delhi travelled with me to Kerala and it served me full seven years. When I had to replace it with a new one, the dealer told me, “Today’s laptops won’t last 7 years. They are created to go wrong after a couple of years.” The whole world has now learnt the lesson of loyalty to one’s trade that America taught its industrialists a century ago. We have all learnt to create cheap things that can be used and thrown without guilt.

My ‘new’ laptop lasted three years. In those three years, I had to replace its keyboard twice and finally I discarded the entire thing. My present laptop is just over a year old. But most of my electronic equipment brought from Delhi are over a decade old and still running though with occasional grunts and huffs. A scary awareness descends slowly into my consciousness: all these things will sooner or later be replaced by their new gen successors which won’t even give me time to establish a relationship with them, a relationship that will accept their eventual grunts and huffs without complaints.

Grunts and huffs have no place in use-and-throw civilisation. Maybe, Antony can leap more boldly over them.