#15 The Internet has been here for a while. But when has it become genuinely accessible? I would say this happened at the start of a decade back in India. Around this time, 4G came to India, and through that, fast, reliable Internet started reaching our hands. I started using 4G in December 2013. The sharp contrast to 3G was something one could distinctly experience. One of the first benefits of 4G was not streaming or downloading for me, but tatkal booking. With 4G, a Tatkal ticket was guaranteed in IRCTC. Data rates were still on the roof for streaming. At that time, data was priced at around Rs 250/1 GB/month. Now, it is roughly Rs 200/60GB/month. I remember tracking 1 GB over a month; the entire music library had to be downloaded and kept, and streaming was non-existent. Streaming was a costly affair till Reliance disrupted the telecom sector.
One of the craziest stories I first heard online was about Brother Orange. You must google this—a story of a stolen iPhone and its journey from the US to China. I wondered if such a thing could ever happen before the Internet. I felt like writing about the Internet because of a short film series I saw a decade ago. I saw Naatukaar.com on YouTube and thoroughly loved it. But later, I could not find it. I forgot the title and no matter what keyword I tried, it did not work. The short film bloom meant searching was difficult. Much like MH370 in the deep sea, I searched for a short film on YouTube. To my surprise, a few months ago, the YouTube algorithm brought this back into my feed, and I was delighted. I watched it again, and many of the actors in that series are now in mainstream Malayalam cinema.
With the launch of Hotstar and Jio, streaming became accessible. Cricket, Formula One, Federer, and everything else were available anywhere. Any movie you imagine is available on demand. However, it still cannot replace the theatrical feel. Last year, I was fortunate to see Titanic, Dark Knight, Inception, and Interstellar in the theatre. Nothing can deliver the theatrical experience of movies like Interstellar; in that way, it is good that certain things remain old school. I remember waiting for school to end, reaching home to check if Sachin was batting and what his score was. These surprises are not possible today.
A few months back, 5G came to India, and there was not much of a change from 4G except for downloads. Mostly because systems are yet to exploit the power of 5G. How 5G will unfold is something for us to wait and watch. What is more intriguing is to think about how the Internet works when we go beyond Earth. Today, a video call to anyone on Earth is a cakewalk for most of us. But imagine a video call to someone on the moon from Earth. Now, it is not as easy as it seems to be. Firstly, Earth and the moon are separated by a time gap of 1.6 seconds. That means a “hello” would take 1.6 seconds to reach the moon and another 1.6 seconds to get the reply. On top of this, a clock on the moon would run faster (56 microseconds per day) than Earth’s. Now consider Mars; a video call to someone on Mars would take at least 4 minutes to get a hello. No technology whatsoever can solve this time delay. The reality of the vast cosmos. In another way, everything we experience is something of the past, and this past is separated by time and space. On Earth, the time factor doesn’t play a significant role in day-to-day life. However, though minuscule, the truth is that we are constantly experiencing things of the past through our senses. It is a subtle reality one need not know, but it is there.